Fight Club – What it has to tell us.
The movie, the book; does it still have relevance? (Did it ever have relevance?)
‘I went to Fight Club last night, but arrived late and missed the introduction. But I just want to say, it was brilliant, and I want everyone to know about it. Spread it around!’
David Fincher’s movie ‘Fight Club’, with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, technically was a box office flop when it was released in 1999. But it has since built up a cult following.
(To put it into the fuller cultural context; ‘Fight Club’, the debut novel by Chuck Palahniuk, was published three years earlier).
For anyone who hasn’t seen it: An unnamed insomniac (Norton) working in what he assumes is a dead-end job in an amoral industry, meets a mysterious stranger called Tyler Durden (Pitt), who is everything he isn’t.
Tyler becomes a guiding light through his carefully thought-out brand of anarchism which begins with the foundation of a network of ‘Fight Clubs’, where disaffected, lost males are encouraged to beat the living daylights out of each other; bare-knuckle style in underground illegal venues.
Tyler’s ambitions go further through the foundation of a more expansive anarchic idea, ‘Project Mayhem’; with plans to ‘take-down’ the corporations; basically, sticking it to the man.
In 1999 it was easy to make the movie as a pre-Internet, pre-mobile phone phenomena. Would it work today? I don’t know.
There are several things to unpack here; first of all, who were ‘the corporations’? It wasn’t really defined, but credit card companies seemed to have been the enemy. The nearest equivalents today might be the tech industry or Big-Pharma.
Commentators have mentioned a parallel with the recent shooting of Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York in December 2024 by Tyler Durden-esque Luigi Mangione. It didn’t help that Mangione has been singled out as either an anti-capitalist arch-villain or a Marxist folk hero, with good looks to match Brad Pitt (shallow, I know).
Another link.
Lines could also be drawn between Project Mayhem and the wordy manifesto of Ted Kaczinski the notorious home-grown American terrorist known as the Unabomber. Both Tyler Durden and Kaczinski had an axe to grind with consumerism and empty, unfulfilled lives.
You could keep making connections all over the place. In fiction; consider Patrick Bateman; the anti-hero and fantasist at the centre of ‘American Psycho’. Consumerism and branding run amok.
Or, Neo in ‘The Matrix’, who lived a life that left him numb, until he was encouraged to take ‘the red pill’, something that has been jumped upon by the Manosphere (and recently, the ‘Femosphere’, yes, there is such a thing 1).
I can see the appeal. Some people I know are deep into conspiracy theories; it must be so comforting to live with an illusion that you are so much smarter than everyone else because you ‘know what others don’t’.
Really?
Tyler Durden is the darker, smarter side of the main character; he turns ideas into action. At the beginning his tiny ‘insights’ and subversions tap into something that is in all of us, the fantasies we all have but don’t enact in the real world; the dark playground in our own heads. There layeth the appeal.
Internet clown Andrew Tate has a clumsy way of tapping into all of this. Fortunately, his appeal to teenage boys seems to have a limited shelf-life, once they realise that there’s no intellect behind it and the whole ‘campness’ of the Tate persona is a hollow shell.
With the actual ‘Fight Club’, I make no bones about it, here is a bid towards somebody’s view of masculinity (certainly not mine).
The book and the movie, from the late 1990’s, were too early to be tapping into today’s Manosphere ‘influencers’, be they; Joe Rogan, Jocko Willink (or the aforementioned Tate, who I can’t take seriously anyway).
Jordan Peterson used to be a voice worth listening to; but he’s gone very patchy recently, especially when he steps outside of his own lane.
He thinks ‘Fight Club’ is a fascist movie; I’m not so sure (Tyler Durden seems to use fascistic methods to achieve a distinctly left-signalling agenda).
For Peterson and others, the overall philosophy of the ‘Club’ taps into the world of sacrifice, burdens and pain. This school of thinking has us consider that suffering is a testament to existence; something that even the Buddhists, despite their pacifistic proclamations, might well appreciate.
Also note how in the Fight Club, the most celebrated members are those who suffer most.
Dysphoric rituals.
There is something here about an urge towards embracing dysphoric rituals. These can be found in many religious cultures, as well as within military units. A kind of bonding through shared pain; it’s a very primitive piece of human hard-wiring, which often has a price tag attached to it; a trade-off of your individuality for the cohesiveness of the group, often with a real or imagined ‘greater good’ at the end of it all.
But it’s a spectrum. At one end you might have the Scouting movement and at the other the Jonestown massacre, with all shades in between.
In conclusion; Fight Club makes a statement that still resonates today. Commentators are still trying to figure what that statement is, and very rarely come out and openly condemn the movie/book. For all its sleazy nihilism there is still some appeal, which is odd for a movie that has no likable characters; except perhaps for Bob (played by a very unlikely Meatloaf, who would ‘do anything for love, but…).
Notice how there has been no ‘Fight Club 2’.
For anyone wanting to listen to the longer podcast discussion that inspired this post, go to:
https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/the-great-political-films%3A-fight-club-w%2F-helen-lewis
For Femosphere, see: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/29/welcome-to-the-femosphere-the-latest-dark-toxic-corner-of-the-internet-for-women