Cinema Studies scholars will increasingly need to consider if melodrama film can drift away from Modernist literature and Freudian psychoanalysis, and still remain identifiable as 'melodrama'. Fight Club throws down the gauntlet for a critical theory re-write.

[1] Naomi Klein. No Logo: Taking Aim At The Brand Bullies. London: Flamingo, 2000. Kalle Lasn. Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America™. New York: Eagle Brook, 1999.

[2] These sites also parody the breathless 'New Economy' espoused by publications such as Business 2.0 and Fast Company, and management thinkers such as Tom Peters and Robert '80/20' Koch.

[3] Broadcast.com has archived a free online stream of the Fight Club soundtrack.

[4] Like David Cronenberg's Crash (1995) and Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan (1998), Fight Club deploys Modernist imagery, but then critiques the Enlightenment ideal of 'eternal progress' through revealing character flaws and misdirecting attention to the plot's purported moral voice'. If Cinema Studies' framing of melodrama relies upon Modernist and Freudian interpretative frameworks (which dominate the writings of Peter Brooks and Robert Heilman), then these films exist at the dissipative edge of melodrama. They may possibly be considered examples of the High Modernism proposed by sociologist Anthony Giddens.

[5] A dissenting view which argues that Fight Club is 'externalised psychodrama' is Uri Dowbenko’s article "'Fight Club' Secrets of JANUS Programming". Dowbenko interprets Fight Club within Monarch Programming, a post-Reagan strand of American conspiracy subculture.

[6] John Shirley. 'Fight Club'. *Spark-Online (December 1999). Shirley 'discovered' William Gibson, and wrote the original script for The Crow (1994). He comments: "If you make a movie like Fight Club and distribute it through a major studio, and then in video at Blockbuster, and on HBO, oh yes even if it's not a hit, it's subversive. And it's not alone. This is what I want to say here today: SOMETHING IS IN THE AIR." Comparison with Uri Dowbenko's review shows that viewers can have 180 degree different reactions to a film text. Both Shirley and Peter Brook have studied the writings of Graeco-Armenian magus George Gurdjieff, hence Brook's 'moral occult' template can be traced to Zoroasterian, Egyptian, and Judaic spiritual sources. The best general overview is: Jacob Needleman & George Baker (ed.). Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections on the Man & His Teaching (New York: Continuum Press, 1996).

[7] According to reader comments on e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com, the film is enjoying cult status through its video and DVD release. The comments from individual film viewers are generally positive in tone.