Episode 114: Fight Club and Shock Induction with Chuck Palahnik
On Election Day in America, with the nation at the polls, Al spoke with a man uniquely placed to comment on the fractures underpinning the battle for the nation. Chuck Palahniuk, you see, is the author of twenty-one novels, but probably best known for his first - 1996’s Fight Club, later adapted by David Fincher into one of the defining films of its era. Since then, the story has had this unexpected cultural half life, going on to become an unlikely part of the rhetoric of modern politics. The term "snowflake," popular with young men within the right-wing MAGA movement, is derived from Chuck's novel. But the connections don’t end there between Chuck’s work and an America ablaze with male rage, as cultural commentators frequently put it. Across his career since that culture-shifting story, the author’s work has continued to contemplate the "real" America – not what the country wants to be, but the sometimes uncomfortable reality of what it could become. In books like his 2018 novel Adjustment Day – about a version of America splintered off into different enclaves sorted by political ideology – hints lie at perhaps how we got here. His latest novel, Shock Induction, released earlier this year, feels just as loaded with insights about our time.
On this today's show – a conversation to mark the 20th anniversary of Fincher’s Fight Club, with the man from whose imagination Tyler Durden first sprung. Chuck didn't write the movie adaptation of Fight Club – that honour fell to screenwriter Jim Uhls. Instead, Chuck was able to witness from afar the oddity of this story he’d written – about a white-collared insomniac who forms an underground bare knuckle fighting ring with an enigmatic soap salesman – becoming itself commodified and turned into merchandise, despite its warnings against consumerism. He got to witness the film intersect in a strange way with 9/11 and an immediate shift in the culture afterwards, away from subversion. And he was left with the question, what will Chuck Palahniuk do next? The answer was a bibliography full of more grime, dirt, depravity and yes, mayhem.
This show is typically an interview series reserved for screenwriters, but when Al was reading Chuck's brilliant latest novel, Shock Induction, released earlier this year, he was overrun with questions for the Portland-based author. Questions like: what is it that's so necessary about the grotesquery of his stories, in an increasingly sanitised culture of storytelling? Where exactly did the anti-corporatism of his work come from? How did he devise that twist in Fight Club that continues to reverberate to this day? And of course, what's the latest on rumours of a Fight Club rock opera that he was once said to be devising with Fincher?
Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.
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