Delaware and Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (1996)

Wilmington, the largest city in the state of Delaware, and the setting for Chuck Palahniuk's 1996 novel Fight Club, has a longstanding reputation as an attractive hub to businesses and corporations due to its efficient judicial system and pro-business finance laws, including laws protecting Delaware chartered corporations from hostile takeovers and The Financial Center Development Act of 1981 which removed the cap on interest rates that banks may legally charge customers. As a result Wilmington has become a national financial center for the credit card industry. Many major credit card issuers, including Bank of America, Chase Card Services, and Barclays Bank of Delaware are headquartered in Wilmington, as are the American operations of the United Kingdom's HSBC. All this goes some way to explaining why Chuck Palahniuk had Wilmington in mind when he wrote Fight Club, with its anti-consumer culture themes and scenes of organised "mischief" directed against large corporations. Although the book never explicitly states where it is set, there are clues peppered throughout, though much more prominently so in the 1999 David Fincher film adaptation (the narrator's business card includes the suburban Wilmington zip code 19808 and the Delaware area code 302, his apartment building Pierson Towers has as its motto "A Place to Be Somebody" - the city motto for Wilmington, Delaware state flags, Delaware license plates, and the other cities mentioned as starting up new fight clubs include New Castle, Delaware City, and Penns Grove, NJ, which are all very close to Wilmington).

00:27:48 "We also had the Delaware state flag in the backgrounds, so the property department kept bringing the Delaware state flag and we would put it on the flagpole. In this scene, you don’t see it, because the camera never tilts up high enough to see it; but of course, all the Fox representatives were down there on the set looking, watching the monitors, making sure you couldn’t see the Delaware state flag because then you’d have to go and re-clear everybody’s names. “There might be a Lou’s Tavern in Wilmington, Delaware!”" David Fincher's DVD commentary

I enjoyed Fight Club as a fast-paced, blackly-comic entertaining read. The film, which I have seen on numerous ocassions, is incredibly faithful to the source material (whole sections of dialogue are lifted from the page), albeit more streamlined and linear, and at times the book even reads like a treatment for the film, with its concise prose effectively satirising the bite-size slogans of large corporations. Despite all this though I don't feel the book is as significant as the film which, released in 1999, came at a point when independent cinema in American had grown stagnant with lazy Tarantino imitations and helped, along with a number of other independent films released the same year (most notably Being John Malkovich), breathe new life into American cinema. Although the film was not a success on its original cinema run (due to a studio who didn't know how to market it), its reputation on DVD grew to the cult classic it now stands as. Chuck Palahniuk is a thoughtful and witty writer but it is debatable whether he would have achieved the subsequent success he has were it not for the boost the film gave him (all susequent attempts to adapt his work for the screen have stalled at the development stage, with the exception of the box office failure Choke).

Next: Maryland

Week 10: State - Delaware

Delaware, known as The First State for being on December 7, 1787 the first state to ratify the Constitution of the United States, is the second smallest of the fifty states (and the 45th most populous), ahead only of Rhode Island in size. Today Delaware is primarily known as the most corporate business-friendly state in the country. Its Court of Chancery (one of the few remaining in the nation, which has jurisdiction over equity cases and corporate disputes) and the Delaware General Corporation Law have formed a worldwide reputation for granting broad discretion to corporate boards of directors and giving great flexibility to corporations to manage their affairs. For these reasons, a great number of companies are incorporated in Delaware (over 50% of US publicly traded corporations and 60% of the Fortune 500 companies), including 60% of the companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Aside from its beaches and tax-free shopping Delaware does not thrive on tourism (the Visit Delaware website boasts "Delaware, We're not far from where you are!"), and in addition to being the only state without a commercial air service, it has no places designated as national parks, national seashores, national battlefields, national memorials, or national monuments. There are also no network broadcast-television stations operating solely in Delaware. Wilmington is the state's largest city and its economic hub, and the state capital is Dover.

I was worried early on that there were no good books set in Delaware. In fact in terms of films set in the state I have yet to find any I have heard of either: Trigger Man (2007) or Wrestling (2008) anyone? I consulted some other forums undergoing similar endeavors and most of them had skipped the state altogether. Not wanting to be beaten so easily I did a little bit more research and eventually found a book that, although it never states directly where it is set, I have on good authority is set in the city of Wilmington.

Fight Club was published in 1996 and was Chuck Palahniuk's first novel. It was later turned into a 1999 film by David Fincher, and to prove it's set in Delaware here's a direct quote from Fincher's DVD audio commentary:

00:25:35: "The book takes place in Wilmington, Delaware, because that’s like a headquarters for a lot of credit card companies. We wanted to make the film take place in Wilmington, Delaware, but there’s some kind of clearance issues if it’s a specific town then you have to get clearances for specific names, streets, you know, apartment buildings."

Review to follow this week...