Fight Club the musical: Bollywood, Hollywood and the rules of engagement

Chuck Palahniuk's dystopian vision of America in his novel Fight Club (1996) saw male bonding reach new heights as man-on-man action transmogrified into the prospect of an end-of-millennium moment. In its still darker cinematic adaptation, David Fincher's 1999 Fight Club starkly demonstrated the head-on collision of masculinity with the need to experience basic human emotion. In a prescient (pre-9-11) act of naked aggression, Fincher takes Palahniuk's novel one step further with the fabric of American society literally crashing down to the ground as skyscrapers implode into a mass of rubble that marked the end to what was indeed a wholly successful 'Project Mayhem'. Given the rawness of this raw material, how can Bollywood, with its predilection for feelgood romance and carefully choreographed big dance numbers, deal with its own adaptation of these Fight Club texts? This paper explores the relationship between Hollywood and its Bollywood remakes through the somewhat unlikely adaptation that is Vikram Chopra's Fight Club: Members Only (2006) and seeks to offer a view of adaptations through an understanding of how gender and sexuality are adapted across continents, cultures and ideologies.