The First Lede of Writing about Fight Club is
You do not write about Fight Club less than every twenty years
The second lede of Fight Club is the collective opinion of Fight Club is always changing and wrong. The third lede of Fight Club is in college I scoured the internet for Tyler Durden’s leather jacket. The fourth lede of Fight Club is I quoted Tyler Durden in my college papers. The fifth lede of Fight Club is Tyler Durden was Ken before Ryan Gosling.
The life cycle of Fight Club is fascinating. It was expected to be blockbuster. It was a huge flop. Almost immediately after it’s DVD release, it became a massive cult hit. It then became trite and overexposed. Then misinterpreted. Then loathed. And now, here exclusively, it has been reclaimed again. Maybe not as good, but as a remarkable and a valuable piece of corporate propaganda.
It’s about time for Fight Club to be cool again. And don’t tell me it never was. Because I was there. I had the DVD. People in college had the posters of Brad Pitt holding soap. The author of the book, Chuck Palahniuk, became the #1 author for anyone who wanted to go public about liking to read. The movie had a hot Brad Pitt in it, it was directed by the guy who directed Se7en and it was about punching men and blowing up corporations. When it got converted to DVD, it was practically included on the list of supplies you’ll need as a college freshman right below extra long sheets. And like extra long sheets, you wouldn’t have a need for it after you moved out of the dorms. It came out in 1999 and was probably on DVD by 2000 so the last of Gen-X and the first of the Millenials were able to own it. This targeted the angsty cynicism of Gen-X and capitalized off Millenials need to be seen as cool to Gen-X by ironically being unique which meant doing whatever the popular unique thing was. In this case, owning Fight Club.
You want to see how much your life has changed? Watch Fight Club again. I don’t think I watched it in theaters, but the first time had to have been before 2002 because by then I had read every Chuck Palahniuk book there was and would continue to do so until Pygmy in 2009. My friend Warren had passed me Choke in English and since he was also the kid who showed me Wet Hot American Summer, I took his recommendation and it made me realize you could write about anything any way you liked. He also got me to wet my beak by telling me to read about scrambling a fetus for a sacrifice on page 123 (I just checked and that is the page number. Stored away in my brain for twenty-five years). So I must have watched it in high school, but probably not again until college. And that’s where I remember it taking hold of my psyche. I wrote about in a Comparative Government class (something about anti-capitalism), and it was the impetus for me creating an eBay account so I could buy a leather jacket like the one Tyler Durden wears. The irony of the those two actions, the paper on anti-capitalism and the need to own a movie jacket was lost on me up until right this very moment. The last time I wore that jacket was in London in 2012 and I haven’t seen the movie since. But I just rewatched it because a lot of podcasts are talking about it because a lot of podcasts are talking about David Fincher because The Killer comes out in October 2023. Most people have soured on Fight Club. I think because it perpetuated a bro mentality and was taken too seriously by idiots. I was one of those idiots. Now the populous sentiment is the movie is bad and the message is stupid. Or the movie is good satire about stupid people. Or it’s the dying breath of Gen-X rallying against selling out before deciding they’d rather be comfortable selling out than be poor. Or it’s lame because it used to be cool and most things that used to be cool end up lame. Think about it. Vin Diesel, smoking, ugly sweaters, CDs. And some things come full circle back to cool. Vinyl. 80s fashion. USA’s Suits. I think Fight Club lies somewhere in the middle of the latter two, emerging as a horror movie for budding anti-capitalists.
I am ashamed I viewed this movie as a straightforward watch for most of my life. The satire missed me. Like I said, I wrote about it in college. It was my first introduction into the idea that I might not be the things I possess. For the record, I forgot that epiphany for most of my thirties adopting the ideology that “Die Hard, David Foster Wallace, and rap music are my identity.” Only recently did I revisit the notion that my personality might not be things. Somewhat shockingly, this wasn’t something I recalled but rather had taught to me again. First by my partner, and shortly after, the toy-centric movie Barbie. In it, Ken learns it’s ok to just be Ken without an identity tied to what he does, owns or loves. Ken is our current zeitgeist’s Edward Norton and Brad Pitt rolled into one. Both Durden and Ken attempted to destroy the world that was built for them, claiming they weren’t given enough.
Tyler Durden and Ken are the projected avatars of incels. Neither one gets laid despite feeling like they absolutely should. In Ken’s case, he feels destined to be with Barbie as part of some intelligent design. In Tyler’s case, he is having sex with Marla, but the narrator who fabricated Tyler is not. So Tyler is, but he’s not real and the narrator isn’t because he created Tyler. Feeling like you’re supposed to get the things you want just because you want them is gross and it’s called entitlement and when it comes from mediocre men, it’s stomach turning. Couple it with the “fuck the man,” mantra and you get the intel attitude of “we’re too cool to be owned and anyone who doesn’t agree with us or want us is just brainwashed.” It’s disgusting and pathetic but too entangled in anti-sellout rhetoric, so most people distanced themselves from the whole mess by going to work for corporate America. Better that than aligning with insecure weirdos who would rather project insecurity on everyone around them and pummel their own faces than than open up emotionally.
Edward Norton’s narrator (never given a name) cooks up this alternate personality who looks like he wants to look and has the confidence to fight, fuck and lead a bunch of sad sacks into becoming “Project Mayhem.” That’s what Norton’s little dweeb claims he wants. He says fighting helped him not care, but he absolutely cared. His alternate persona was a fucking shredded Brad Pitt. He thinks he’s no longer a part of the doomed American dream, but the anti-establishment projection of his ideal form is still ripped, sexy and dating Jennifer Aniston. And yet he doesn’t get to be that person. His mind makes him watch. Peeping Tom is the closest he allows himself to be. Even though it’s his body having sex, his mind won’t let it be him because he sees himself as an insecure little wiener, but he will cuck himself into listening. When Tyler is fucking Marla, the narrator says something like “I could have moved to a different room that was further away, but I didn’t.” Yeah because even in his wildest imagination, he can’t find the self-love to imagine that anyone would be attracted to him enough to sleep with. It’s sad and quite fucked up.
The movie is a damning criticism of everything Gen-X claimed to value. When the narrator gives up his possessions, blows up his apartment, and stops caring about his corporate job, he ends up owning nothing, getting the shit kicked out of him and living in a condemned drippy mold motel. He has to rummage around in dumpsters for human fat which he gets covered in and then has to boil into soap. But not before burning a hole in his hand down to the bone. If only he had just kept his job, he might still be an insomniac, sleeping through life, but at least he’d be tossing and turning on a Casper mattress (I know Casper didn’t exist yet, but they’re the most “hey we’re not a corporation corporation” I could think of to drive my point home).
Now I see the movie for what I think it achieved, even if that means retrofitting it with an intentionality that wasn’t actually there. Fight Club wasn’t made to rally people against being a cog in American consumerism like it claimed to be, and then was later translated to be a satire on. It was made to scare Gen-Xers into getting a job for the man. Like horror movies caution against sex and drugs by having anyone who indulges murdered, Fight Club told a campfire story about living in squalor, hating yourself, watching your best friend fuck your crush, peddling in literal human flesh, all before shooting yourself in the face. Fight Club is corporate America’s antibiotic to Nirvana’s virus. You want to avoid killing yourself? Get a job and don’t make your girlfriend return her Lexus.
Today, not only is selling out not frowned upon, it’s desired, and if you bring up the notion that selling out might come with negative unintended consequences (loss of art, jobs, natural resources), people get more than a little testy. Some going so far as to defend people who’ve sold out that they don’t even personally know. “Hey if Anthony Hopkins wants to bet paid a lot of money to be in Transformers, I support that.” You do? Why? We support Brie Larson advertising for a car commercial and Jason Bateman doing a podcast. For what reason? Those are the artistic jobs and pursuits that non-famous people used to have to make a living. Now they can’t even sell out and peddle Jersey Mike’s because Danny Devito’s rich ass cut you line and asked for extra cash on his meatball sub.
Tyler Durden may suck, but that doesn’t mean we should all just create content for free on social media in hopes that someone will one day pay us to schlock a Better Health subscription or whatever. You want to get paid to make art? Great. Stop doing it for free so corporations can get paid. Do it for free for yourself. Or sell your stuff at a flea market, or burn it onto a CD, or put out content to a subscriber list.
Right now the corporations are getting it all. They get the money from the art that they (under)pay us for, the money from the ads, and they get the money from the art they don’t pay us for that we create for free in hopes that they’ll one day pay us for. I know Tyler Durden spawned an army of dipshit pseudo-radicals (because I was one of them), but a legion of artist assembly lines cannot be the only alternative.
Don’t let 20th Century Fox’s hot-boy-dumb-man movie convince you that the inevitable result of giving up your possessions is putting a gun in your mouth. Tyler Durden insists you are not your fucking khakis. That’s it. Twenty five years later, Mattel is making the same point and we gave them one billion dollars for it. It’s a slippery slope to suggest criticizing corporate structure and commercial art will make you a fucking moron drone who chants “his name is Robert Paulson.” You could simply be Kenough.
Also one other thing. I do think the movie takes at least a moment to posit that men have been, and continue to be bad at opening up and that this inevitably leads to violence. In the scene where they have the first fight outside the bar, Tyler prompts the narrator to punch him. He has to press him on it three or four times before he finally lets loose this weak shake of his fist into Durden’s ear. Just moments before, Tyler has to prompt the narrator three or four times to ask if he can stay with him. And since Tyler and the narrator are the same person, the implication there is asking for help is akin to taking a punch to the ear. From then on, the narrator asks for nothing, and continues to throw punches. He would rather express violence over expressing feelings. That much hasn’t changed. Even if my relationship to the movie has. Or hasn’t.
I regret I so fully embraced this movie because had I not, I might have not been so eager to distance myself from it by rejecting everything the movie “claimed” it was endorsing. Now I see that Fox produced a movie with such pathetic incel avatars that anything they spewed worship over, sensible people would do the opposite of, namely if the movie said to reject consumerism and selling out, then self-identified intellectuals would buy nice things with their good jobs. And you know what? As I type this on my iPad and stare at my collection of redundancies, blu-rays, dozens of shoes, and bookshelves stacked with paperbacks I haven’t read, I can feel the familiarity with the point I’m about to make because I made it in a college paper twenty years ago. That paper I keep referring to; the title was “You Are Not Your Fucking Khakis.” That’s right. I had hair down to my shoulders, majored in Philosophy and Political Science, and I had plans to move to Southern California to work in a non-profit (which I did). So while I hate the idea of who I thought I was, I am realizing I am still that person. I work seven days a week forfeiting my time and my identity for financial security and unrestrained consumerism. I work for myself so I get to be snooty about that little bit of anti-corporate independence, which I need to do because I’m threatened by other people's success. Eery time my lease is up on capitalism, I sign on the dotted line for a new contract, but under worse terms. I’m no better than Fight Club. It reflects who I was, who I am, and who I’d like to be. I think selling out sucks. I also think Fight Club is a dumb movie. I can hold both those ideas because thankfully I am not my fucking Blu-Rays. I only own them, write about them and view the world through them. I am Jack’s inflated sense of self-improvement.