When David Fincher‘s Fight Club hit movie theaters in 1999, Baby Boomer critics such as Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times deemed the film “fascist macho porn”, while the Observer’s Rex Reed wrote that Fight Club was a film with no redeeming value. Yet, ten years later, The New York Times dubbed Fight Club “the defining cult movie of our time”, followed by Rolling Stone counting Fincher’s picture among the 25 best cult movies ever made.
As for Ebert, Reed, and others of their ilk, Fight Club wasn’t for them, obviously. On that note, consider the scene at Fight Club‘s halfway mark where Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden, pacing the concrete floor in the dank basement of Lou’s Tavern, offers a speech to the bloodied and bruised faces encircling him, addressing fellow members of Fight Club as “the middle children of history”, a clear reference to Generation-X.