Helena Bonham Carter defies type-casting as the chain-smoking Marla, with whom both Tyler and Jack fall in love.

Jack is comforted by ‘Bob’ - played by rock star Meat Loaf - in a support group.

But Brown has a point: the movie isn’t going to get an easy ride from the self-appointed guardians of social propriety. “It’ll get caught in the morality net,” says Brad Pitt, who co-stars with Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter (in this film, emphatically not the submissive, sweet young English girl of Room With a View). “We’re gonna get hammered. The week that Seven came out, Kathie Lee Gifford said on her [TV] show, ‘It is your moral imperative to avoid this movie’. If we don’t get that on this one, then we’ve done something wrong.”

Fight Club is based on a first novel by Chuck Palahniuk (pronounced, according to Premiere magazine, ‘paula-nick’), a 37-year-old (exactly the same age as Fincher) truck mechanic from Portland, Oregon, who got so fed up with fixing transmissions that didn’t need fixing (his job was to write the repair manual) that he joined a writers’ group.

That proved a turning point: bye-bye Freightliner Inc, hello literature. It took Palahniuk three months to finish Fight Club (“It sort of wrote itself,” he claims, using the phrase that strikes terror into anyone who has ever experienced writer’s block). Since then, he has written two more: Survivor, which has also been optioned by Fox, the producer of Fight Club; and Invisible Monsters, a novel about a woman disfigured in a drive-by shooting which is due out this month (September). Like Fincher, Palahniuk doesn’t exactly view the world through rose-tinted spectacles.

The Village Voice’s Hillary Johnson described Fight Club, the novel, as a classic text about “the emasculation of Western civilisation”, which she characterises thus: “Men are failing at work, at school and in families, in theory because the modern knowledge and skill-oriented world is basically testosterone intolerant. While men’s strength and aggression were useful in establishing the modern world, they’re an impediment to its smooth day-to-day operation, a task better suited to the instincts and behaviours of females.”

In other words, Johnson sees Fight Club as belonging right in the middle of the same debate which drove feminist Susan Faludi to write a book like Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man: the recognition that, patriarchy or no patriarchy, sometimes it’s hard to be a man. Now especially.