“Self-improvement is masturbation.”
—Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden, Fight Club
FOR NEARLY 500 YEARS, Michelangelo’s David stood in tribute to the ideal male form, and it took Brad Pitt less than 20 seconds to destroy it. For the uninitiated, the moment comes about 45 minutes into his 1999 movie Fight Club, when Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, takes a turn in the underground fighting ring he helped create. After pummeling his opponent into the floor, Durden rises, shirtless and bloody, exposing his full physique to the audience. And we haven’t looked away since.
Perhaps that’s because while the statue of David is all about perfectly proportional muscles and rippling abs, Durden looked both powerful and degenerate. He was a hard-drinking, chain-smoking antihero with jagged abs shaped like sharks’ teeth and a crazy-low level of body fat.
The film flopped—at least initially—returning just over half of its $67 million budget domestically. And yet the Brad Pitt Body has attained near mythological status among men of all stripes. In the early aughts, Pitt’s lean and chiseled look appeared on posters that plenty of guys hung up in their dorm rooms. (I’ll admit, I had one.) A decade later, the movie had become a cult classic and cultural flash point, selling enough DVDs that the special edition was reissued, while in 2013 actor Charlie Hunnam became the first of many leading men to publicly point out