Let's Talk About BRAD PITT'S Fight Club Baby

It's been 20 years since Brad Pitt's lean and lethal turn as Tyler Durden dramatically reshaped what we consider the ideal body. Honestly: Why?

- BRETT WILLIAMS, NASM-CPT

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 Fight Club 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 how nearly impossible it would be to match Pitt's physical standard in that role.