Beijing changes Fight Club ending to let baddies win

In China, the first rule of Fight Club is censors can change the ending of Fight Club.

Actor Brad Pitt in a scene from the cult film ''Fight Club'' Picture: Supplied

In an oft-repeated line from the 1999 film Fight Club, a gorgeous anarchist named Tyler Durden bellows that “the first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club”.

No one seems to have taken this quite as seriously as the censors who prepared David Fincher’s classic for streaming in China.

At the climax of the original, the film’s unnamed narrator, played by Edward Norton, realises that Tyler, the character played by Brad Pitt, is a projection of his own troubled mind. After vanquishing him, he stands hand-in-hand with his girlfriend, Marla, at the top of a tower block watching as the plot his alter ego set in motion — to destroy consumerism — comes to fruition and neighbouring skyscrapers explode and fall.

In the Chinese version, distributed by the streaming service Tencent Video, viewers are greeted instead with a message informing them that police successfully foiled the plot.

They “arrested all the criminals” and Tyler, who is a distinct person in the new ending, was put on trial and “sent to a lunatic asylum, receiving psychological treatment. He was discharged from the hospital in 2012.”

Screenshots of this ending circulated on Chinese social media, where they were met with ridicule, and suggestions of how other American films might end. “Probably Ocean’s Eleven would have all been arrested,” said one commentator, according to Vice magazine. “The Godfather’s entire family would end up in jail.”

Henry Gao, an associate professor of law at Singapore Management University, said Chinese censorship had long targeted anything seen “to propagate violence, to overthrow the government”.

He added: “Tyler was just a fantasy. In China you don’t even have the freedom to fantasise. Even in your fantasy you have to comply with government law.”

A source close to the distributor said that the edits were not made by Tencent. A spokesman for the company declined to comment.

Adam Nayman, author of David Fincher: Mind Games, pointed out that the Tyler alter ego worked part-time as a cinema projectionist and spliced single frames of hardcore pornography into family films. Now another censor had intervened, with a different intent. “The second I read this I thought: ‘The Chinese government is Tyler Durden’,” Nayman said.

Fight Club joins a long list of Hollywood films to fall foul of Chinese censorship. The original ending to Lord of War, 2005, has the protagonist, an arms dealer called Yuri Orlov played by Nicolas Cage, evading jail.

In the Tencent version, which is about 30 minutes shorter, a caption reads that Orlov “confessed all the crimes officially charged against him in court, and was sentenced to life imprisonment in the end”.

The Times