Believe It Or Not, I Am Still Talking About Fight Club

Joshua Rothman has an essay in The New Yorker about the real meaning of Gone Girl.  It's not much of a piece so I wouldn't worry about it. But there was one bit that got my attention. He compares Gone Girl to another David Fincher film, Fight Club.  Then he starts a paragraph with this:

There’s a reason, of course, why the first rule of Fight Club is not to talk about Fight Club.

This got me excited.  The way he puts it, I figured it's not just a "a" reason, but "the" reason.  Here it is:

It’s that the lurid core of our imaginative lives is best kept secret.

Oh.  This is the kind of aesthetic/psychological cliché that makes his piece weak to begin with. Sure, if you want to write a term paper on the movie, and force symbolism and deeper meaning on everything in it, you can conclude this and a thousand other things.

But if you want to know the real reason you do not talk about Fight Club, I'll tell you. It's because Fight Club is extremely illegal, and if word gets around, you and the others participating will be thrown in jail.