The Coolidge Corner Theatre

$9.75 regular admission
$7.75 seniors/students/Museum of Science members
FREE to Coolidge members

FIGHT CLUB with Dr. Richard Wrangham, professor of biological anthropology, Harvard University and co-author, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence.

“Fight Club pulls you in, challenges your prejudices, rocks your world and leaves you laughing.” - Rolling Stone 

“(Fincher) finds subject matter audacious enough to suit his lightening-fast visual sophistications, and puts that style to stunningly effective use.” - The New York Times 

David Fincher’s Fight Club, adapted from the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, was one of the most talked about and controversial films of the 1990s.  Edward Norton co-stars as the unnamed narrator, an alienated insomniac stuck in a dull white-collar job who finds temporary emotional release by attending disease support groups.  A chance encounter with Tyler Durden, a subversive soap salesman, frees him from the banality of his existence.  The two become friends and roommates, bonding over their mutual disgust for consumer culture and their unusual weekly ritual:  they fight each other for fun. Soon they form Fight Club, an underground group where disaffected young men channel primal aggression into brutal, bare-knuckled brawls that leave them feeling exhilarated and alive.  The concept catches on, with secret fight clubs forming in other cities until a sensuous eccentric (Helena Bonham Carter) gets in the way and ignites an out-control spiral toward oblivion.   

Although Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, fine physical specimens that they are, do not resemble apes, the DNA of humans is 99 percent identical to that of chimpanzees, and both species share a suite of behaviors.  Guest speaker Richard Wrangham, the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University and co-author of Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, has spent years studying chimpanzee cultures in the wild and comparing those cultures to human ones. It turns out that violent social behavior is common among our closest male primate relatives and deeply rooted in male human genes (which isn’t to say that male violence is inevitable).  Join us Dr. Wrangham discusses why men like to fight, what makes human violence unique compared to other primates, why we are wired to relish certain kinds of aggression more than others.   

dir. David Fincher, w/ Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, 2h19m