Fight Club: The Doors Are Now Locked

"I don't like your fashion business mister
And I don't like these drugs that keep you thin
I don't like what happened to my [brother]
First, we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin"

Leonard Cohen - First We Take Manhattan

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As vilifying men became the law of the land after 2010, the movie Fight Club, which had enjoyed well-deserved popularity and cultural benchmark status alongside contemporaries like The Matrix and the first (good) superhero movies, instead became a fashionable target to bash as "male" in more or less defined ways. The webcomic Leftover Soup featured a particularly scathing one in the rant below page #859 (mind the spoiler) :

"the real tragedy of this tragedy is that so many fucking people don't realize that Tyler Durden is the fucking bad guy. His transparently misogynist and classist and ableist and nihilist rhetoric resonates with his target demographic, both inside and outside of his fictional world. Dipshits think he's cool. Dipshits think he has a point. Dipshits probably think that Project Mayhem successfully erased debts, making the world a fair and poverty-free place. Dipshits probably think that a panderingly populist, destructively anarchic movement led by a single madman with virtually no democratic feedback or diversity of opinion can make the world a better place."

Given such rants inevitably suggest more than a side-glance at Trumpism, and given America's Republican constituency has called for the lynching of anyone involved in convicting their new Messiah (screw Jesus, this guy has better hair) for the same crime for which that moral paragon Nixon had the decency to willingly abdicate, maybe it's worth making just two no three wait, no, four points about Fight Club.

1) Actually, yes, Tyler Durden is cool, and he does have a point. He is also quite demonstrably and emphatically the villain of the story whose defeat concludes the hero's journey with a return to normalcy but hey, villains get the best lines. In fact his anti-consumerist, direct agency rhetoric was neither new at the time nor faded in importance since, being endlessly reiterated in everything from documentaries to rom-coms. That Tyler co-opts valid social critique as a call for misdirected action diminishes in no way the validity of that critique.

2) It's pretty much come true, in the form of both Trumpism and wokeism's myriad psychotic strains of social activist vandalism, whether anti-white, anti-straight, anti-male, whatever brand you got on hand. Not for nothing did young holier-than-thou deadheads earn the title "snowflakes" directly from the movie's soundtrack; raised in ceaseless narcissism, two generations became easy prey for any rabblerouser who might provide a totalizing framework to validate their existence as part of a unified mob. Desperate to rule the modern world as they've been promised but incapable of understanding it, the space monkeys have resolved to tear it down into something simple enough for their ignorance and stupidity to encompass.

3) Most abuse hurled at the movie has little to do with content and far more with audience. If men like it, it must be evil. (Never mind that feminist rhetoric presents far more casually abusive fantasies while drawing no criticism.) You may also see the original author Palahniuk's coming out of the closet propped up as some apologia, trying to re-frame it all as anti-masculinist gay angst. (I was under the impression gay men like maleness, but hey, I may be wrong.) Let stand the basic truism that men far more than women chafe under modern society's pervasive surveillance, overcrowding, imposed meekness and braggadocio combined, and general control freak tendencies. Standard "man against society" conflict, just more applicable than most. If the movie's plot had any inter-sexual undertone, it was a distinctly female anxiety, that potential mates' weaponizable aggression and more generally male energy may slip out of female control, that men may begin placating instinct on their own terms instead of sublimating it into everything you want to make your girlfriends jealous: concert tickets, evening gowns, 2.5 kid garages, conspicuous consumption, your fucking khakis. I look around my apartment. I don't need Brazilian cherry furniture, don't need curtains 'cause I'm fine with blinds, fine eating off a cheap acrylic plate instead of "the Royal Doulton with the hand-painted periwinkles" - so who was that IKEA furniture really for? Consciously or not, IKEA boy was furnishing a bower for an eventual IKEA girl.

4) Again, flouting or disengagement (to whatever degree) from society's demands or standards is not a novel idea, nor extremist, nor inherently violent unless suppressed. Monks and ascetics, shut-ins and raving eccentrics, clowns and vandals have always existed. Pretending a need doesn't exist does not remove it. It only removes healthy release valves. Tyler only turns truly villainous after he starts recruiting, but his success is less a rebellion against the system than said system's logical conclusion: when you inculcate impossible movie star or corporate boss ideals, you're stoking an irrational drive to be sublimated for exploitation... but you don't actually get to choose who does the exploiting. Along comes Trump - I mean Tyler! Tyler! and shoots your carefully bred monkeys into space. Interestingly though, we skipped right over the Fight Club stage (deliberate, individual participation in symbolic transgression; punching yourself in the face) to Project Mayhem's co-optation. Or at least I'm not seeing it. If individual conflict against new/old social norms yet exists, it must be expressed during, and curtailed to, childhood. By the time they become visible to us in the world at large, youths are incoherent, hermetically sealed superego powderkegs, primed for ignition by the first opportunist.

 

So maybe the real question is what the hell happened to education?