![]() ![]() “Before the shirt comes off, you’re not really noticing very much,” he said. Shepard agreed and even fanboyed out over the now GIF-able basement scene. WHEN Mc ELHENNEY and Nanjiani appeared on Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast in March 2020, McElhenney shared that the Fight Club Body is still “the primo, number-one all-time body” that his own celebrity trainer has told him guys want to achieve. It turns out there are really three main components to the allure, and like the movie itself, each affects our view of a healthy male body image in more complicated ways than you may think. Once we tracked them down, they confirmed just how enduring and problematic the illusory standard has become. (He did not respond to our request for an interview.) But plenty of others affected by the movie still fixate on it. Pitt’s first rule of the Fight Club Body may be that he’s no longer interested in talking about the Fight Club Body. It was more around Brad Pitt.” Thousands of people still Google some variation of “Brad Pitt Fight Club” every month, with thousands also searching for his workout, according to Semrush, an analytics company that tracks the popularity of online search terms. ![]() “When that movie came out, there was absolutely a shift,” says Roberto Olivardia, Ph.D., a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School and a coauthor of The Adonis Complex: The Secret Crisis of Male Body Obsession, who helped coin the term “muscle dysmorphia.” “I started hearing with my patients that the goal wasn’t to look like Muscle & Fitness. Still, the Durden obsession continues in Hollywood, with stars like Kumail Nanjiani, Dax Shepard, and Rob McElhenney all holding up Pitt’s Fight Club body as their own inspiration or ideal. It was one part of one character in one movie in a career that contains multitudes. 20th Century Studiosīut Pitt wasn’t trying to create a fitness ideal like the Hemsworths and Wahlbergs of today, who market themselves as walking wellness brands. Sometimes that meant brawling with random guys in a bar basement, although eventually it led to a darker scheme to free others from our cultural fixation on money as a measure of self-worth.īrad Pitt as Tyler Durden during the now classic Fight Club basement scene. Unlike the Terminator or Rambo, Durden was a soap salesman who fought against normal stuff-or, rather, our resignation to complacency and (in his eyes at least) emasculating social norms. Granted, part of Pitt’s ultra-shredded appeal may have been that he was appearing on the heels of two decades of muscle-bound beefcakes like Arnold and Sly, who presented their own unattainable caricatures of masculinity. (I’ll admit, I had one.) A decade later, the movie had become a cult classic and cultural flash point, selling enough DVDs that the special edition was reissued, while in 2013 actor Charlie Hunnam became the first of many leading men to publicly point out how nearly impossible it would be to match Pitt’s physical standard in that role. In the early aughts, Pitt’s lean and chiseled look appeared on posters that plenty of guys hung up in their dorm rooms. And yet the Brad Pitt Fight Club Body has attained near mythological status among men of all stripes. The film flopped-at least initially-returning just over half of its $67 million budget domestically. He was a hard-drinking, chain-smoking antihero with jagged abs shaped like sharks’ teeth and a crazy-low level of body fat. Perhaps that’s because while the statue of David is all about perfectly proportional muscles and rippling abs, Durden looked both powerful and degenerate. After pummeling his opponent into the floor, Durden rises, shirtless and bloody, exposing his full physique to the audience. For the uninitiated, the moment comes about 45 minutes into his 1999 movie Fight Club, when Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, takes a turn in the underground fighting ring he helped create. EDDIE GUY "Self-improvement is masturbation.” -Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden, Fight ClubįOR NEARLY 500 YEARS, Michelangelo’s David stood in tribute to the ideal male form, and it took Brad Pitt less than 20 seconds to destroy it. ![]()
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