Hi there. So as you might've noticed, I've recently fell in-love with Mr. Chuck Palahniuk, best known for his masterpiece of a novel, Fight Club. Remember how I told you the more insomniac I became, the more obsessed with Fight Club I got? So I recently ordered off of Amazon You Do Not Talk About Fight Club: I Am Jack's Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection; which, as you've already guessed, is a collection of essays regarding the novel and the movie, and several others of Palahniuk's best works.
I realized I cannot read and understand You Do Not Talk About Fight Club without reading at least 80% of his novels. And so this is my current mission. I've already read, aside from Fight Club: Choke, Survivor, and am currently in the middle of Diary.

Anyway, this is translated from an original short post I wrote in Hebrew, and turned [inside my head, at least] into a short essay about Palahniuk vs. Burton:


"Rant" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

Due to conversations with several people - I bring before you the difference and reasons that make Tim Burton not-so-awesome, and Chuck Palahniuk... better [and no, I do not care they come from two completely different worlds]:

Tim Butron, every time I watch once of his movies, I get this deja vu feeling. All his movies are the same. I'm not talking about the visual similarities between Ghost Bride and The Nightmare Before Christmas [we'll come back to this later], but about Burton's repetitive stubbornness to turn all his movies' heroes into versions of the young him [and maybe also the present him, I wouldn't know]: poor, lonely people with no social skills whatsoever, who just want to be loved and find an alternative society they can be a part of. All his movies work by the same recipe, he just does this in a pathetic way [at least for my taste] that gets on my nerves. All these movies, about the socially exiled - especially the newer ones [some of his older stuff is sometimes good], visually and plot-wise, try to get their audience to sympathize with them based on its most basic/general common denominator. I couldn't stand it when he ruined Batman/changed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's ending to fit them to this shallow pattern.

Chuck Palahniuk, in this case, is no different.
All his novels deal, eventually, with the same thing. Under all the smut and gore and violence and post-modernism and nihilism, under the fact all his main characters come from the margins of the American society, Chuck Palahniuk is just another softened, old-fashioned romantic. Underneath his post-modern veil, he just wants to show us that the world is still full of love, even for the socially exiled [whether they like it or not]. In each of his novels, the main character will gradually deteriorate itself to its lowest point in life, before, in the last pages, it will be able to pull its head out of the water, take a deep breath, and see the better experience awaiting it in the future [perhaps not when it comes to Survivor, though what I understood from You Do Not Talk About Fight Club was that Tender actually stays alive in the end]. But, unlike Burton, Palahniuk doesn't try to make us sympathize with his characters: on the contrary, he deliberately creates anti-heroes, characters we won't be able to sympathize with.
In Fight Club, we're not supposed to like Tyler Durden.

Sure, you can be all gentle-souled and say Tim Burton tries to create anti-heroes as well, because his characters are lonely, socially exiled and come from "evil" or "dark" places - but you cannot crown a character who's basic, sole goal is to create sympathy and empathy within the watcher as an "anti-hero". It may not be the typical, mainstream hero [though now that the emo culture ceases to be a subculture and becomes part of the mainstream, saying Tim Burton isn't mainstream is a load of bull crap], but you definitely cannot say that Burton's characters are anti-heroic. When I say anti-hero, I'm talking about Fight Club's Jack, a masochist schizo [what immediately makes him even weaker than we originally thought he was in the beginning of the novel]; I'm talking about Tyler Durden, who, in the novel, is presented in a way less appealing way than in the movie [and anyone who thinks he's a character you should sympathize with because he's an anarchist, nihilist and just generally amusing is a complete and total idiot]; I'm talking about Choke's Victor Mancini, who's long, detailed descriptions of sex [won't make you horny for even one minute] don't make you sympathize with him, but gross you out [i.e., when he decides to masturbate while listening to the microphones implanted in his mother's parents' home, I mean, come on]; surely when, in the novel's final pages, he bothers describing the horrible stench that follows him everywhere after he shits himself [let's no go into why he does this]; I'm talking about Diary's Misty, a poor, drunk, sweaty fat lady who complains to the readers' ears [or shall we say eyes] 24/7 [though in her case perhaps a little sympathy occurs, since her husband tried to kill himself, went into a vegetated state, and left her with a big pile of debts, a car smelling from piss etc].

I sort of lost my point.
Anyway. What I'm trying to say is: even though the both of them are pretty similar - all of Burton's movies and all of Palahniuk's novels work by the same recipe, the both of them talk about the same thing and always reach the same point [and both their recipes parallel in several points, but we won't go into that], there is a way and a manner to perform these type of things, so that they'll end up being more of an artistic masterpiece and less of a summertime fun movie.




Fuck stop talking about Chuck Palahniuk all the time.