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Chuck Palahniuk on Choke
By Fred Topel | Image property of Fox Searchlight
 Choke
Choke on Chuck
"One is sort of support groups for people who are dying and one is twelve step recovery groups," Palahniuk distinguished. "So in a way, one is groups of people who are ending their lives and one is groups of people who are in a way trying to begin their lives, but I've always thought that support groups really have taken over the function that church used to have. Church used to be the safe place where you could go as a sanctuary and present the very worst aspects of yourself… and you would be forgiven and you would be accepted back into your community through communion. Now church is the place where people tend to go to just look good. You go to these groups and you speak your transgressions and your peers hear you and they forgive you. In an odd, spooky, communion-like way, they give you a chit which you don't have to eat but you carry with you as your sort of acceptance back into a community. I just really love these as storytelling forums, but also in a sort of quasi-religious-social function that they serve."
An honest look at sex addicts shows they are not glamorous playboys gettin' their game on. "Most of them, I swear to God, are building contractors. The reason why your kitchen is not done is because these guys, their whole life is operating out of a pickup with a telephone. They can say, 'Oh yeah, yeah, the sheet rock guy's going to be in today' and they can go out and hunt it down in whatever way, shape or form. Whether they're trolling for prostitutes or they're going to public parks or public restrooms, we're not talking picky people. It was just amazing how many of those folks were building people, were general contractors."
Palahniuk also has experience in the mental health care industry, which applies to Choke. His lead character is dealing with a mom in a hospital with dementia.
"I worked for a long time as a volunteer in an Alzheimer's facility and I really couldn't do anything. No skills so they give you a big box of photographs and they called it 'Life in a Box' because all these people had left were all these photographs from their entire life and my job was to sit with them and ask them about each photograph and try to evoke their memories. It was just depressing as f*ck. You looked at these boxes and these people were incredibly, mythically good looking and they were building dams and building atom bombs and doing all these fantastic, historical thing. They had nothing to do with this dried up, shriveled mummy next to me. It was just devastating to see these enormously heroic lives in sepia tone come down to this person who had no memory of who these people were."
The inspiration for Choke came from his observations of the delusions these patients created just to get by. "They'd look at these sort of glamour shots of themselves in these fantastic settings, achieving these fantastic achievements and they'd say, 'I have no idea who that is. I don't know.' Or maybe the next week they'd make something up and they would start to compulsively say, 'I think that was a girl I met in Dallas.' I'd be like, 'No, that was your wife.' 'No, no, she was a whore. Charged me two dollars.' So I just saw that people compulsively had to create a story. They couldn't just say, "I don't know." They had to impose a story on every image. That sort of started Choke."
Choke opens to theaters on September 26th.
For the poster, trailer and more movie info, go to the Choke Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of Fox Searchlight
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