High School Fight Club

It’s interesting to me that, despite the fact that Fight Club failed to find its audience in theaters, it’s become a foundational part of the cinematic universe in the years since its release. Although the movie was a Box Office bomb, making only $101.2 Mil against its upwards of $65 Mil budget (and even back then films needed to make at least twice their production budget to break even), it quickly went on to find a cult audience on home video and in second-run theaters. I know I saw it once in a main theater, and again in the second run in the college town I was in the year it was released. I thought it was great fun but, yeah, I can see why it didn’t find a receptive audience initially.

Still, there’s no one around at this point who can’t tell you the first two rules of Fight Club. Even if you haven’t seen the film, you likely know all about it, including its big twist (which I won’t spoil, even though you already know it). It’s up there at this point with the likes of Star WarsThe modern blockbuster: it's a concept so commonplace now we don't even think about the fact that before the end of the 1970s, this kind of movie -- huge spectacles, big action, massive budgets -- wasn't really made. That all changed, though, with Star Wars, a series of films that were big on spectacle (and even bigger on profits). A hero's journey set against a sci-fi backdrop, nothing like this series had ever really been done before, and then Hollywood was never the same. or E.T. It’s more shocking to find someone that hasn’t heard of it, or doesn’t know anything about it, than to find someone that does. I’m sure Fox didn’t expect that when the film bombed, but that is the way of this weird little movie.

In the years since, the legacy of Fight Club has only grown. It gained a video game (which is terrible). It gained a sequel comic book written by the author of the original Fight Club novel, Chuck Palahniuk. It was parodied in Jane Austen’s Fight Club. It has become one of those oft-referenced materials that shows up in other movies. Supposedly Old School is a comedy remake of the 1999 film. The cult of the movie grew. And then along came Bottoms which said “what if Fight Club, but even more satirical, with ladies, and in high school.” Surprisingly (or, really, unsurprisingly when you think about it), it works.

The film focuses on two high school losers (their words), lesbians PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri). These two are hated. At their school not because they’re gay but because, as they put it, they’re “talentless and gay.” No one likes them, outside of one janitor who repaints their lockers every day after someone scrawls something nasty on the doors, and they don’t seem to have any way to achieve social stardom within the confines of their school, Rockbridge Falls High School.

Two incidents, back to back, seem to change that, though. The first is that one of their acquaintances, Hazel (Ruby Cruz), takes an offhand, sarcastic comment they make as confirmation that the two, PJ and Josie, spent time during the summer in Juvie. And then, when the two are trying to leave the “start of school fair”, they get accosted by the star football player, Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine), and they end up lightly bumping him with their car. He goes down, playing up the injury, but the girls get sudden respect from others at their school. They’re now the badasses and PJ realizes they can parlay this into high school fame and, just maybe, a way to score with chicks. So they start their own fight club at Hazel’s suggestion and, well, adventures go from there.

It’s pretty clear that writer/director Emma Seligman and writer/star Sennott had seen Fight Club and understood its various beats. They follow the girls as they go from losers who hate their lives, through the inciting incident, their first fight, and the sudden influx of girls to their club who weren’t invited and shouldn’t have been there. There’s even a nod to the growing escalation that happens in the original film, with the fight club shifting over the Project Mayhem. This film isn’t exactly beat-for-beat, but it does know the broad strokes that are worth following.

More importantly, though, is that the creators understand that Fight Club is a satirical film that shouldn’t be taken seriously. As such, Bottoms goes all in ramping up the strangeness and unreality of this high school world. The high school of Bottoms wouldn’t feel out of place in, say, Glee or High School Musical, except instead of singing and dancing and family friendly messages there’s bloodsport and lots of foul language and girls hooking up with other girls. It’s about as far, content wise, from High School Musical as you can get (unless my understanding of that franchise is very different, considering I haven’t ever watched any of those movies).

The high school in Bottoms couldn’t exist for real. The people in charge, at all levels, are caricatures. They are self-obsessed, prone to ignoring the damage the popular do to the unpopular, and only really care about whether or not the football team wins their next big game. Okay, you know, when I say it like that it sounds all too real, but all you have to do is watch Bottoms to see that everything in the movie is presented to a heightened sense of reality so far above normal that it can only work in a fictional movie.

But then, really, can’t the same be said about Fight Club. Bottoms tells its story about girls finding themselves, especially among a group of their peers who all feel like society puts them down, through biting wit and over-the-top comedy. Fight Club was dirtier and slicker, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t also satirizing the world while looking at the emotions of its characters. It found a group of people who felt put-upon, like the world didn’t care about them, and then it gave them an outlet (through violence) to bond and grow and become something more.

Of course, with Fight Club there’s also the biting satire that the men that feel put-upon, like the world hates them, are (by and large) buff, handsome, white dudes from the upper middle class who actually have everything going for them. The movie knows this and makes fun of you, indirectly, if you buy into their worldview. All the MRA guys that hold Fight Club up as a manifesto are missing the point, but Bottoms understood it which is why the movie is packed with heroines, not heroes. Its protagonists really are put-upon members of society (lesbians and other women) forced into roles they don’t want until an underground fight club lets them find out who they truly are.

I enjoy Bottoms quite a bit. I did like the parallels it set with Fight Club and the way it used those parallels to have a discussion with that movie. It also had a strong message of its own that works well. Above all, though, the movie is bitingly funny and just a fun time in general. I laughed all through the film and I could easily see myself going back to watch and laugh again down the road. A good comedy is one that you laugh through, but a great comedy is one that drags you back again and again. By that metric, Bottoms is one of the greats. Now we just have to hope it finds the same kind of cult legacy as its male-driven counterpart.