“Fight Club” is offered on the Chinese streaming platform Tencent Video, which has at least 900 million active users, and it’s a first. But surprise, the end of David Fincher’s film is entirely different from the one we know.
fight club : Yes but no…
The audience of the original version of fight club and its creators, chief among them director David Fincher, are in danger of getting annoyed. In question, the broadcast on the Chinese streaming platform of Tencent Video of a version of the 1999 cult film significantly altered at its end. Without it having been determined whether the modification is the result of self-censorship by the distributor or an order of the government. An original ending apparently too nuanced in its moral conclusion for those who have thus decided to transform the curtain fall of the film.
A high-level psychological thriller and a fascinating and unprecedented visual spectacle at the time, served by a devious script with pamphleteer accents and by a formidable cast, fight club is the cult film, adored – and very controversial when it was released – of an entire generation. But in China, where freedom of expression is not really one, the authorities do not look favorably on the views that imported works can offer on political and social themes.
An expeditious and radical transformation
At the end of Fight Club, the Narrator (Edward Norton) “kills” Tyler (Brad Pitt) and watches with Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) as several buildings explode, suggesting that Tyler’s plan is well underway. Problem, in the Chinese version it is better than the heroes – aka the police- win, and without a hero then the anti-heroes must lose. Thus, all this sequence has been deleted, and a cardboard takes its place to explain the new ending.
Thanks to the clue provided by Tyler, the police quickly understood the plan and arrested all the criminals, thus managing to prevent the bomb from exploding. After the trial, Tyler was sent to a psychiatric hospital where he received psychological care. He came out in 2012.
An end which unfortunately empties all the subtlety of the speeches of the characters of the film and purely cancels the poetry of its end. A beautiful mess of which China is customary, where the authorities carry out an authoritarian control of the production, import and distribution of cultural works. The situation was ridiculed on Chinese social networks by the large public who know the film in its original version thanks to pirated versions.
