They first meet one night at a scuzzy bar. In the movie, Durden and the narrator are opposites the narrator is an office drone who wears forgettable suits, whose scenes are cast in somnolent shades of blue, while Durden is flashy, marked by the color red, and as tan and swaggering as the narrator is sallow and thin. While I’m not sure anyone actually comes away from it laughing, what Fincher did do is manage to capture the disaffected Gen X essence of the novel, the iconoclastic ethos that has been enthralling die-hard fans like me for 20 years. In interviews, Fincher was on the same page as Norton: he said he was making a satire. When David Fincher handed Brad Pitt the script for Fight Club that night, Pitt read it and related to it-not to the chaos or destruction, but to the existential dread of having everything you’ve been told to want and still feeling empty. “The book was so sardonic and hilarious in observing the vicissitudes of Gen-X/Gen-Y’s nervous anticipation of what the world was becoming-and what we were expected to buy into,” Norton said, according to Best.

Unlike Pitt, Norton zeroed in on the story’s black humor. Meanwhile, Edward Norton, who would go on to play the book’s nameless narrator (who fans sometimes call Jack), devoured the book in one night. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: It doesn’t help you sleep any better, and you don’t wake up any better because of it.” “But I’m telling you, once you get everything, then you’re just left with yourself. “I’m the guy who’s got everything,” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1999, the year the movie was released in theaters. He was dating Jennifer Anniston, America’s girl next door, and it seemed like his whole life was coming together. He had a reputation for being a pretty boy, an empty-headed heartthrob.

But it’s like fans glossed over the content of his movies. Pitt had already played some peculiar roles, including a cop in Fincher’s deadly-sins-inspired Seven. When Fincher handed him the script for Fight Club that night, he read it and related to it-not to the chaos or destruction, but to the existential dread of having everything you’ve been told to want and still feeling empty.

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