Chuck Palahniuk didn’t want to be an author. In fact, as a child he had his sights set on the priesthood.
“I thought, ‘Wait, you just sit there, and people come in and tell you these horrific things?” he says. “You just sit there, and they entertain you all day long.’”
These days, however, the cult-favorite writer of Lullaby and Fight Club is the one doing the entertaining. Palahniuk is promoting Choke, the film version of his 2001 book that premieres Sept. 26, and the first screen adaptation of his work since David Fincher’s 1999 landmark adaptation of Fight Club. It’s fortunate that writing paid off for him. Palahniuk lost interest in the clergy when he found out that priests had to keep their parishioners’ sins secret. Where’s the fun in hearing great stories if you can’t tell them to anyone?
“God bless ‘em,” Palahniuk remarks twice about his rabid fan base. An offbeat writer, his novels are renowned for their shock tactics and critiques of consumerist society, making him a different kind of priest—one who sanctifies his readers with hilariously profane stories and, more often than not, expresses concern over the social malaise at the heart of his characters.
One might call his novels moral stories, but only so far as Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale” was moral. Choke, for example, is about Vincent Mancini (played in the film by a roughed-up Sam Rockwell), a sex addict and product of a broken home whose lack of intimacy with his conspiracy theory–spouting mother (Anjelica Huston) leads him to fake choking, effectively tricking people into cradling him and later supporting him financially.
And Palahniuk didn’t just write Choke—to a degree, he lived it. In 1999, just before Fincher’s Fight Club became a box office hit, Palahniuk’s father Fred was found dead with his girlfriend Donna Fontaine. After being shot, both of their bodies were left in the Kendrick, Idaho, cabin home of Dale Shackleford, Fontaine’s ex-boyfriend, shortly after he set it on fire to hide the evidence.
Shackleford had just been sprung from prison and had vowed to kill Fontaine as soon as he was released. Shackleford was later convicted of two counts of murder in the first degree and sentenced to death, a sentence that Fred Palahniuk’s son had a hand in deciding.
Riding back from the morgue, having just identified his father’s remains and dental records, Palahniuk thought of a story. It was the story of a man who lies down by the side of the road and waits for “someone with a gun and a badge” to pick him up and “sort of lift him back into his life.”
“I pulled over, and I almost did it,” Palahniuk says. “Then I looked down and saw how dirty the ground was and how these were my very best clothes, I decided, ‘No, I’m not going to lay down in the Idaho dirt in my best tie and everything.’” So he wrote about it instead.
Though transforming personal tragedy into fiction is not Palahniuk’s usual method, the anecdote is a reversal of his writing, which normally leads from the shocking to the poignant. (It’s normally vice versa, right?) The key to enjoying his texts is to view him as a kind of crass magician, someone who disguises his sleight of hand by telling dirty stories—like the one about Choke’s Mancini, the nymphomaniac that vents his sexual frustration with horny members of his sex addicts’ group.
As these anecdotes build, however, we find out that, like Mancini, whose moral questions will lead him from thinking that he’s Jesus’ son to accepting the complex—and the good—side of his personality, all of Palahniuk’s characters learn to accept the consequences of their actions. Mancini’s relationship with Nurse Paige (Kelly Macdonald) allows him to comfortably believe in himself—even after she finds out that she’s not really a nurse.
Still, to his critics, Palahniuk’s so-called transgressive fiction appears to be nothing more than artfully titillating sex scenes and shallow social critiques. Salon’s Laura Miller famously said in a review of Diary that his writing, “traffic[s] in the half-baked nihilism of a stoned high school student who has just discovered Nietzsche and Nine-Inch Nails.” However, as a writer, he takes those shock tactics very seriously.
“Books have so few advantages over other forms of mass media, which have continued to develop over the last century,” Palahniuk says. “They’ve gotten so good and have trained their audience to be so smart. The audience gets smarter, the technology gets smarter, the movies get smarter, but books still hold onto this 19th-century model, which is comforting but can’t compete with the immediacy of movies or television.”
Palahniuk’s shocks strive to capitalize on the uniquely intimate connection to the reader’s imagination that fiction enjoys. “I think the advantage that books still have is the intimate nature of consumption,” Palahniuk says. “You make an ongoing consent and effort to read a book so a book can depict things that are so extreme and so challenging that movies could never get away with. I want to play to that strength. I want to tell the stories that really only books can tell.”
Through these low visceral jolts—like in Haunted, which features the cannibalization of a still-alive protagonist’s ass or the graphic disembowelment of a chronic masturbator among other memorable gross-out moments—Palahniuk aspires to tackle social issues in a popular form like Ira Levin did in Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives.
These social “monsters” are transformed into “horror metaphors” in Palahniuk’s self-described horror trilogy of Lullaby, Diary and Haunted. “With Lullaby, I wanted to talk about the power of things that, once exposed to them, change our lives for the better. Things being pulled out of the public domain presented to people without any responsibility,” Palahniuk says. “Haunted was a lack of credibility and the Internet fracturing the nature of reality. Diary was very much what I see happening in small towns all over the West: There’s sort of a power hierarchy that’s being destroyed as very wealthy people move in and colonize them and change their entire civic identities and force the long-term residents into a kind of servitude or peasantry. Each of those three have a metaphorical monster in them.”
To this end, Palahniuk has experimented with the form of the framing structures of his stories several times: In Survivor, the entire story is told from the black box of a plane; in Snuff, a fading porn star attempts the world’s biggest gangbang for her last bid at stardom. Palahniuk sets this story up as a series of extended monologues where four of the historic 601 participants tell their story.
“There was an experiment with Snuff to always tell a story in the first-person where each person telling the story would be talking more about the people around them than about themselves,” Palahniuk explains. “Each person would function as a kind of camera to keep the perspective focused on other people and I could hopefully have the credibility and the authenticity of the first-person but avoid using ‘I’ and pushing the reader away.”
That duality and mystery that surrounds Palahniuk is no doubt what keeps his fans coming back for more, and this is something he actively propagates. Though he may just have a faulty memory, Palahniuk has lately had a hard time sticking strictly to the facts when asked about who’s contributing to upcoming adaptations of his work. Recently he told BBC 6 that Radiohead had provided the entire soundtrack for Choke, a statement that spokespeople for Radiohead quickly shot down. When I asked him about it, he dodged the question by mumbling something about Thom Yorke having done ambient music and how “Reckoner,” the one previously recorded track Radiohead contributed to the soundtrack, would be to Choke what Pixies’ “Where is My Mind?” was to Fight Club.
That kind of storytelling is a deceptive, albeit harmless, bit of misdirection—the not-so-subtle hook to Palahniuk’s particular kind of unholy, testosterone-driven prestidigitation. “It may just be a me thing, but I happen to think that guys just don’t know how to ask for what they need,” Palahniuk says. “They don’t know how to express their emotions so they’re always looking for a context or a scam in which they can express their emotions so they can get what they need emotionally because they just can’t be up front about it. I think women are much better at that. I think guys…guys need a scam.”
“I thought, ‘Wait, you just sit there, and people come in and tell you these horrific things?” he says. “You just sit there, and they entertain you all day long.’”
These days, however, the cult-favorite writer of Lullaby and Fight Club is the one doing the entertaining. Palahniuk is promoting Choke, the film version of his 2001 book that premieres Sept. 26, and the first screen adaptation of his work since David Fincher’s 1999 landmark adaptation of Fight Club. It’s fortunate that writing paid off for him. Palahniuk lost interest in the clergy when he found out that priests had to keep their parishioners’ sins secret. Where’s the fun in hearing great stories if you can’t tell them to anyone?
“God bless ‘em,” Palahniuk remarks twice about his rabid fan base. An offbeat writer, his novels are renowned for their shock tactics and critiques of consumerist society, making him a different kind of priest—one who sanctifies his readers with hilariously profane stories and, more often than not, expresses concern over the social malaise at the heart of his characters.
One might call his novels moral stories, but only so far as Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale” was moral. Choke, for example, is about Vincent Mancini (played in the film by a roughed-up Sam Rockwell), a sex addict and product of a broken home whose lack of intimacy with his conspiracy theory–spouting mother (Anjelica Huston) leads him to fake choking, effectively tricking people into cradling him and later supporting him financially.
And Palahniuk didn’t just write Choke—to a degree, he lived it. In 1999, just before Fincher’s Fight Club became a box office hit, Palahniuk’s father Fred was found dead with his girlfriend Donna Fontaine. After being shot, both of their bodies were left in the Kendrick, Idaho, cabin home of Dale Shackleford, Fontaine’s ex-boyfriend, shortly after he set it on fire to hide the evidence.
Shackleford had just been sprung from prison and had vowed to kill Fontaine as soon as he was released. Shackleford was later convicted of two counts of murder in the first degree and sentenced to death, a sentence that Fred Palahniuk’s son had a hand in deciding.
Riding back from the morgue, having just identified his father’s remains and dental records, Palahniuk thought of a story. It was the story of a man who lies down by the side of the road and waits for “someone with a gun and a badge” to pick him up and “sort of lift him back into his life.”
“I pulled over, and I almost did it,” Palahniuk says. “Then I looked down and saw how dirty the ground was and how these were my very best clothes, I decided, ‘No, I’m not going to lay down in the Idaho dirt in my best tie and everything.’” So he wrote about it instead.
Though transforming personal tragedy into fiction is not Palahniuk’s usual method, the anecdote is a reversal of his writing, which normally leads from the shocking to the poignant. (It’s normally vice versa, right?) The key to enjoying his texts is to view him as a kind of crass magician, someone who disguises his sleight of hand by telling dirty stories—like the one about Choke’s Mancini, the nymphomaniac that vents his sexual frustration with horny members of his sex addicts’ group.
As these anecdotes build, however, we find out that, like Mancini, whose moral questions will lead him from thinking that he’s Jesus’ son to accepting the complex—and the good—side of his personality, all of Palahniuk’s characters learn to accept the consequences of their actions. Mancini’s relationship with Nurse Paige (Kelly Macdonald) allows him to comfortably believe in himself—even after she finds out that she’s not really a nurse.
Still, to his critics, Palahniuk’s so-called transgressive fiction appears to be nothing more than artfully titillating sex scenes and shallow social critiques. Salon’s Laura Miller famously said in a review of Diary that his writing, “traffic[s] in the half-baked nihilism of a stoned high school student who has just discovered Nietzsche and Nine-Inch Nails.” However, as a writer, he takes those shock tactics very seriously.
“Books have so few advantages over other forms of mass media, which have continued to develop over the last century,” Palahniuk says. “They’ve gotten so good and have trained their audience to be so smart. The audience gets smarter, the technology gets smarter, the movies get smarter, but books still hold onto this 19th-century model, which is comforting but can’t compete with the immediacy of movies or television.”
Palahniuk’s shocks strive to capitalize on the uniquely intimate connection to the reader’s imagination that fiction enjoys. “I think the advantage that books still have is the intimate nature of consumption,” Palahniuk says. “You make an ongoing consent and effort to read a book so a book can depict things that are so extreme and so challenging that movies could never get away with. I want to play to that strength. I want to tell the stories that really only books can tell.”
Through these low visceral jolts—like in Haunted, which features the cannibalization of a still-alive protagonist’s ass or the graphic disembowelment of a chronic masturbator among other memorable gross-out moments—Palahniuk aspires to tackle social issues in a popular form like Ira Levin did in Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives.
These social “monsters” are transformed into “horror metaphors” in Palahniuk’s self-described horror trilogy of Lullaby, Diary and Haunted. “With Lullaby, I wanted to talk about the power of things that, once exposed to them, change our lives for the better. Things being pulled out of the public domain presented to people without any responsibility,” Palahniuk says. “Haunted was a lack of credibility and the Internet fracturing the nature of reality. Diary was very much what I see happening in small towns all over the West: There’s sort of a power hierarchy that’s being destroyed as very wealthy people move in and colonize them and change their entire civic identities and force the long-term residents into a kind of servitude or peasantry. Each of those three have a metaphorical monster in them.”
To this end, Palahniuk has experimented with the form of the framing structures of his stories several times: In Survivor, the entire story is told from the black box of a plane; in Snuff, a fading porn star attempts the world’s biggest gangbang for her last bid at stardom. Palahniuk sets this story up as a series of extended monologues where four of the historic 601 participants tell their story.
“There was an experiment with Snuff to always tell a story in the first-person where each person telling the story would be talking more about the people around them than about themselves,” Palahniuk explains. “Each person would function as a kind of camera to keep the perspective focused on other people and I could hopefully have the credibility and the authenticity of the first-person but avoid using ‘I’ and pushing the reader away.”
That duality and mystery that surrounds Palahniuk is no doubt what keeps his fans coming back for more, and this is something he actively propagates. Though he may just have a faulty memory, Palahniuk has lately had a hard time sticking strictly to the facts when asked about who’s contributing to upcoming adaptations of his work. Recently he told BBC 6 that Radiohead had provided the entire soundtrack for Choke, a statement that spokespeople for Radiohead quickly shot down. When I asked him about it, he dodged the question by mumbling something about Thom Yorke having done ambient music and how “Reckoner,” the one previously recorded track Radiohead contributed to the soundtrack, would be to Choke what Pixies’ “Where is My Mind?” was to Fight Club.
That kind of storytelling is a deceptive, albeit harmless, bit of misdirection—the not-so-subtle hook to Palahniuk’s particular kind of unholy, testosterone-driven prestidigitation. “It may just be a me thing, but I happen to think that guys just don’t know how to ask for what they need,” Palahniuk says. “They don’t know how to express their emotions so they’re always looking for a context or a scam in which they can express their emotions so they can get what they need emotionally because they just can’t be up front about it. I think women are much better at that. I think guys…guys need a scam.”
Jerry Portwood
