The Travesty of Jane Austen’s Fight Club
Recently a movie trailer for Jane Austen’s Fight Club exploded on the internet. If you haven’t seen it, look below.
I shudder every time I see this. It’s just wrong. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it for a while, but finally it hit me.
It’s not disrespectful to Jane Austen, but it’s terribly disrespectful to the spirit of Flight Club.
In the afterword to his novel Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk writes of how he came up with the idea. Originally Fight Club was a short story, little more than the scene were Tyler Durden lists the rules of Fight Club. At the time, movies and books were writing about the modern rules of female society, such as How to Make an American Quilt, and Palahniuk wanted to explore the idea of a men’s society’s rules. It could have been just about any kind of club, but he ultimately decided on a fighting club.
Jane Austen’s Fight Club then takes it full circle: Fight Club started as a reaction to feminine rules of society, then was spoofed in a mashup with one of the classic treatises on the rules feminine society.
Make no mistake: Jane Austen was a critic of her modern society, as Palahniuk is today. Elizabeth Bennett is rather appropriate match to the insomniac main character in Fight Club, though I’m not sure if she’s quite the Tyler Durden this trailer makes her out to be. Each work was shocking in its own time, but something about the style is so anachronistic it’s jarring. The idea of such a masculine, anti-feminine (if you’ve read or watched Fight Club you know what I mean) work being done by one of the shining examples of women in literature – both as author and characters – just doesn’t work for me.
Or maybe XKCD is right about the King’s English version of Fight Club quotes. It just doesn’t sound enough alike – yet.
About author:
Wayne is a writer with Eternal Revolution. He can be found on Twitter at twitter.com/NapoleonofHill and can be reached by email at [email protected] You can find Smith & Wayne on Facebook as well.
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Wow, Wayne – you really have no sense of humor at all.
I think I like the trailer better now, after reading why you didn’t like it!
LOL, I have to wonder what you think of Medieval Fight Club: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vNSNOc8DuQ
I’m with Wayne on this one. A significant part of Fight Club is the search for manhood by “a generation of men raised by women”.
There is that issue too. But if I had mentioned that no one would regard the rest of the post, just like “How Women Wrecked the World”