Not Quite Fight Club, But You'll Get Choked

Here’s a fun fact to make you feel old—it’s been nearly a decade since Fight Club first hit theaters. Considering that film’s success, as well as the near deification of author Chuck Palahniuk by the highly important movie-going demographic of teenage boys, it may seem surprising that Choke, which comes out Friday, is only cinema’s second attempt at adapting Palahniuk. However, if you’ve ever read Palahniuk, it may seem even more surprising that Hollywood is pushing its luck again.
At the surface level, it seems like Palahniuk’s stories should easily translate to the big screen. They usually revolve around simple, but resonant, universal themes—struggles with duality, dissonance of the physical and mental self, the divide between generations. On top of that, he adds in enough blood, shit, and tits to make hesitant audiences think reading books is cool. He’s like J.K. Rowling, but for slightly sociopathic young adults instead of kids. So why has it taken the film industry nine years to try to replicate Fight Club’s success?
Palahniuk’s disjointed, nonchronological style certainly doesn’t help. While the technique can be effective in the books, people tend to like to know what’s happening in their mainstream movies. But presenting the subject matter in a cohesive form also takes a lot out of the original.
Choke also suffers from the politics of the movie rating system, in that there is only so much humping and anal beads you can show before getting slapped with an unmarketable X. And while what the movie is able to show is certainly enough to convey its lead character’s status as an irreverent sex addict, the scenes are far from anything shocking to today’s viewer. In fact, even with an X rating, it’s likely that nothing on screen could ever be as horrible as a reader’s imagination, mulling over the possible uses for microwaved watermelons and vibrating lawn mower handles.
That being said, though, Choke does work on a certain level as a film, if not as a faithful adaptation. It’s another work entirely—a black romantic comedy, if such a thing exists—somehow almost unrecognizable from its source material, though it shares the same plot and characters, and even farther away from its predecessor, Fight Club. They may have similar origins, but the two films prove that the books can be interpreted in any number of ways, which certainly spurs the imagination on what will happen to the upcoming Invisible Monsters.
Enjoying Choke may have more to do with expectations than anything else. And, actually, the best-case scenario would be to enter with none. Not expecting to see a Palahniuk, or another Fight Club, but just a movie—a movie whose major cathartic moment happens to be represented metaphorically by massive and explosive defecation. It’s a special sort of movie.