chase for material goods that replaces the more essential pursuit of spiritual happiness. The film references consumer products such as Gucci, Calvin Klein, and the Volkswagen New Beetle. Norton said of the Beetle, "We smash it ... because it seemed like the classic example of a Baby Boomer generation marketing plan that sold culture back to us." Pitt explained the dissonance: "I think there's a self-defense mechanism that keeps my generation from having any real honest connection or commitment with our true feelings. We're rooting for ball teams, but we're not getting in there to play. We're so concerned with failure and success—like these two things are all that's going to sum you up at the end." The violence of the fight clubs serves not to promote or glorify combat, but for participants to experience feeling in a society where they are otherwise numb. The fights represent a resistance to the impulse to be "cocooned" in society. Norton believed the fighting strips away the "fear of pain" and "the reliance on material signifiers of their self-worth", leaving them to experience something valuable. When the fights evolve into revolutionary violence, the film only half-accepts the revolutionary dialectic by Tyler Durden; the Narrator pulls back and rejects Durden's ideas. Fight Club purposely shapes an ambiguous message whose interpretation is left to the audience. Fincher said: "I love this idea that you can have fascism without offering any direction or solution. Isn't the point of fascism to say, 'This is the way we should be going'? But this movie couldn't be further from offering any kind of solution." Production Development The novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk was published in 1996. Before its publication, a Fox Searchlight Pictures book scout sent a galley proof of the novel to creative executive Kevin McCormick. The executive assigned a studio reader to review the proof as a candidate for a film adaptation, but the reader discouraged it. McCormick then forwarded the proof to producers Lawrence Bender and Art Linson, who also rejected it. Producers Josh Donen and Ross Bell saw potential and expressed interest. They arranged unpaid screen readings with actors to determine the script's length, and an initial reading lasted six hours. The producers cut out sections to reduce the running time, and they used the shorter script to record its dialogue. Bell sent the recording to Laura Ziskin, head of the division Fox 2000,