Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk says China’s censored version of the film is actually truer to its original ending.
Last week you probably saw the news that Fight Club is streaming in China, but with a very different ending. The 1999 cult classic has been adapted to ensure that law enforcement prevents Project Mayhem‘s bomb from exploding.
But Chuck Palahniuk, author of the 1996 novel that inspired the film, says that the alternate ending is actually closer to the novel’s ending than the film’s original finale.
Yes, we’re going to talk about the ending of Fight Club so here’s a spoiler alert for the 23-year-old movie.
The author tweeted, “Have You Seen This Sh*t? This is SUPER wonderful! Everyone gets a happy ending in China!” with a link to his Substack newsletter discussing the matter.
“The irony is that the way the Chinese have changed it is they’ve aligned the ending almost exactly with the ending of the book, as opposed to Fincher’s ending, which was the more spectacular visual ending,” Palahniuk told TMZ. “So in a way, the Chinese brought the movie back to the book a little bit.”
Fincher’s film adaptation of Fight Club ends with Edward Norton’s character killing his alter-ego, then standing alongside his partner (Helena Bonham Carter) and watching buildings collapse around them.
However, the novel’s conclusion sees the bomb malfunctioning, and the narrator waking up in a psychiatric hospital, which he assumes is heaven.
But the biggest irony was made clear while America laughed at China for its censored ending, despite various locations across the USA banning Palahniuk’s books.
“What I find really interesting is that my books are heavily banned throughout the U.S.,” he said. “The Texas prison system refuses to carry my books in their libraries. A lot of public schools and most private schools refuse to carry my books. But it’s only an issue once China changes the end of a movie? I’ve been putting up with book banning for a long time.”
Just another instance of western countries that are too busy judging the eastern world for pretty much the same thing they’ve been doing for years.
