Is That What a Man Looks Like?
Fight Club, Tyler Durden, and the great lie of consumerism
About 20 years ago, I attended a screening of Fight Club at the University of Canterbury where I was a student at the time. It was not the first time I’d seen the film – probably more like the tenth or twentieth time. I brought along a friend of mine who was also a big Fight Club fan, and our interest went only so far as the opportunity to view our nihilistic favourite on a big screen.
David Fincher’s adaption of the seminal Chuck Palahniuk novel was perhaps the quintessential film du jour of the punk-rock, hip-hop-headed late Gen-X and early Millennial generation, and it’s not difficult to pinpoint what drew me and many others to this film, and to subsequently read the book itself.
I’ve written before about my disaffected youth, the angry, directionless period in which I rejected the stodgy teachings of my middleclass upbringing and blindly raged against the system before sheepishly reverting to type a decade later and joining the corporate world – where I have since served The Machine, initially with great vim and adulation, and more recently with bitter resentment.
Fight Club spoke to many well-to-do, white, middleclass young men at the turn of the millennium for the same reason that punk-rock, hip-hop, grunge, skate culture, toyed-up cars, and cannabis did – it represented a wholesale rejection of The System.
Every generation has its rebels, at least since the Boomers, but ours was a different kind of alienation than that which fuelled the Sixties, or even the sneering Sex Pistolesque irony of the Eighties. As Tyler Durden himself said:
We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
This famous piece of dialog can perhaps be underscored as the first shot fired in the great spiritual war that still besets us in 2023, and which shows no sign of abating. I was too young and naïve to know it then, but what drew me to this story was the very same instinct that prompted me to start this Substack endeavour two decades later, and despite having backtracked and come to view Tyler Durden and his army of Space Monkeys with scepticism and disdain during my Patrick Bateman period, and although there are still aspects of Fight Club’s lore that trouble me philosophically, I have come virtually full circle and remain as captivated by this remarkable cultural commentary now as I was in the year 2000 – indeed I re-watched it again for the first time in years just this past week.
One of the interesting things about Fight Club is the different treatments it is given, both between book and movie, and indeed in critical analysis – to say nothing of the ludicrous butchering of the film’s ending by the Chinese Communist Party… are we at all surprised? No, we are not.
Depending on who you ask, the story is either about radical far-right extremists, radical far-left extremists, anarchists, anti-globalists, or any one of a whole plethora of more obscure interpretations including, of course, homosexuality!
This brings me back to the screening I attended at university. At the film’s conclusion my friend and I were ready to get up and leave, probably eager to go to the car and smoke another joint, but when the lights came up, the professor who’d arranged the damned thing naturally opened the floor up to discussion (fucking universities). Feeling that we couldn’t rightly get up and march out, my buddy and I sat there uncomfortably while a series of tiresome young Millennials pontificated on the movie’s meaning.
Sammy and I were silently sardonic – we didn’t much care about the deeper meaning, all we knew was that Fight Club was a fucking cool movie. But it wasn’t long before someone (possibly the professor, who was likely gay himself) posited that the movie was really about homosexuality!
This was perhaps my first encounter with wokeness in its fully-fledged academic form, and I was dumbfounded and somewhat outraged. Fight Club was a guys’ movie, for sure – like The Shawshank Redemption – but a gay movie? No. I had to say something.
I put up my hand and expressed my disagreement with this hypothesis and the collective scoff that rippled through the auditorium alone, not to mention the professor’s patronising smirk, was enough to silence me and send me on my way that evening burning with humiliation – perhaps I had been wrong the whole time… Perhaps my favourite film was actually about a bunch of gay dudes!
I know now of course that this is absurd.
“We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.” This is the line that the smug proponents of Wokeness 1.0 recited on that long ago evening to prove their thesis – as if this singular musing by Brad Pitt’s character somehow encapsulated the whole story, to say nothing of the fact that they conveniently gloss over the actual point: That Tyler is not sitting naked in the bathtub talking to his friend, perched only a metre away on the toilet seat – but to himself.
This snatch of dialog is important, though not for the reasons the Rainbow critics would purport. When viewed correctly, through the lens of Tyler and the narrator as one and the same person, the connotation is quite different – far from a thinly veiled homoerotic proclamation, it is in fact one of the earliest cultural backlashes against the feminisation of our modern world, which I have written about at length – most recently in my essays FIFA Women’s World Cup Hijacked by Fourth Wave Feminism and The Andrew Tate Conundrum.
Tyler is questioning not his sexuality, which – to pour more cold water on the woke hijackers of Fight Club – is repeatedly shown to be rampantly heterosexual; but the conformist, Machine-serving side of himself who is seeking fulfilment and meaning through what modern society expects and demands of him – status, money, material possessions, and, indeed, marriage.
Now, I am all for marriage – and all the more so in 2023, where the institution is effectively jeered at by the mainstay of our cultural and political discourse. But we must remember that this movie is almost 25 years old, and at the time, the trope of the ‘sensitive new-age guy’ had just come into vogue. This piece of dialog can reasonably be seen in the context of its time as a push-back against this neutered ideal of masculinity, and moreover, as a less period-specific literary/cinematic device that endorses manhood in general; the rugged individualism so often lamented as lacking in the 21st Century, and which has been replaced by a zombified servility to the gynocentric globalist Machine.
But Fight Club is more than just a reclamation of manhood and individualism – its core message is and always was stridently anti-consumerist, anti-materialist, and, as such, anti-globalist.
The book ends as good novels should – somewhat anticlimactically: the bombs do not detonate, and the narrator wakes up in a mental asylum but discovers that Project Mayhem is still in action by way of whispered assurances through the peep hole of his cell, from orderlies and guards who are in fact part of his tribe. Such an ending could work in film, but great cinema often tends toward the spectacular grand finale, and as such, Fincher and his screenwriter Jim Uhls elected to blow it all to hell while Tyler and Marla look on and the iconic Pixies song “Where Is My Mind” erupts simultaneously over the top of it all.
In this sense, the film adaptation takes the novel’s somewhat muted message one step further: bringing down the behemoths of global finance; erasing the debt record and setting everything back to zero. As far as brutal critiques go of the colossal Ponzi scheme of fractional reserve banking that is our current global financial system, this scene stands alone in film history, and has yet to be assailed a quarter-century on – all the more poignant and prescient in that it predates both the current post-COVID bubble and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.
I’ve always found the ending of Fight Club (the film) incredibly stirring; in fact I recall watching it on repeat one severely drunken night in my early twenties, rewinding it thirty times or more, and being moved to freely-flowing tears for reasons I could not even hope to comprehend at the time – and while I am not advocating for this type of terroristic destruction, as an artistic symbol of everything that is wrong with our world, it still takes my breath away.
But we needn’t even speak in such grand, macro terms to appreciate the core message of Fight Club. There is a more grassroots aspect to it, that even those who may be sceptical about my disdain for the financial system can appreciate on a simple, day-to-day level.
“Murder, crime, poverty—these things don't concern me,” Tyler says. “What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear.”
This not-so-subtle dig at Calvin Klein appears twice in the film, in the above dialog while Edward Norton’s character and Brad Pitt’s character are having a beer, just before they have their first ‘fight’, and again later on as they ride a bus, and the narrator says “We all started seeing things differently. Everywhere we went, we were sizing things up. I felt sorry for guys who packed into gyms, trying to look like how Calvin Klein or Tommy Hilfiger said they should.”
And it was this reference in particular which actually prompted me to finally sit down and discuss Fight Club – something I promised to do in my inaugural Substack post, before I even had any idea if this thing would ever get any readership.
First off, if you wear Calvin Klein underwear, please do not take this as an attack, I am merely pointing to one of the many millions of aspects of consumerism that irk me – by all means wear your CKs if you like the way they feel, but I personally have found that far cheaper, less trendy undergarments do the job quite sufficiently and as such, with Tyler Durden, I have no time for some guy’s name on my underwear.
I was recalled of this last week during a conversation with my ex-girlfriend. For those remotely interested in my personal trials (and I understand many will not be), she and I have maintained a somewhat tenuous but mutually supportive kind of friendship through the initial two months of our separation – possibly not a good idea, for as many, including myself, have alluded, it is akin to peeling the Band Aid off slowly instead of one sharp rip. It is what it is though and has some benefits.
Anyway, she was complaining to me about her new man, and one of the points she lingered on was his extensive collection of Calvin Klein underwear.
Those who’ve read my essay The Problem with the Middle Class will be familiar with my frustration over my ex’s fixation on material luxury – what I categorised in the essay under the first of three fundamental problems with the middle class: strident entitlement; the other two being rank servility, and lethargic credulity.
For some context, it would appear, from what Elizabeth has told me about this guy, that she has landed herself precisely the heavy-hitting, high-flying go-getter who can provide her with all these possessions and experiences which I evidently never could. This fellow probably outearns me by 400%; he has a $1.8m house; a late model Audi; a holiday house on the Mornington Peninsula; he bought her a pair of Gucci sneakers and some Louis Vuitton earrings in the first two weeks of their romance – and he has a formidable array of Calvin Klein underwear.
But guess what else she told me? None of this has made her happy.
I resisted the urge to tell her “I told you so” but have no compunction sharing this insight with you, dear reader. For what it’s worth, I take no pleasure in Elizabeth’s crisis of meaning and identity. It would appear this guy she’s hooked up with not only has all the outward bells and whistles of the corporate heavyweight, but the stereotypical personality also: the dark triad traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy – a tried-and-true Patrick Bateman – and it pains me to see her in this situation: unhappy, unfulfilled, micro-managed, controlled, and treated as a glittering accessory buy some rich prick who evaluates people solely on their net worth.
For evaluate he does: Apparently when he was helping Elizabeth move her stuff out of our apartment the other week, he spent much of the time sneering at the place and taking personal jabs at me by association.
I was amused when she related this to me – and I’m not just saying that: I’ll stop short at feeling pity for the bastard, but it is deeply ironic and genuinely amusing to bear witness in this situation.
The guy with fifty pairs of Calvin Klein underpants thinks my apartment is a shithole… Oh no, what am I going to do?!
There’s nothing wrong with my apartment by the way – it’s a bit tired, but it’s spacious, quiet, and homey; and moreover, it has character, which is more than I can say for Patrick over here.
My intention is not to get one up on my ex’s new guy – I am largely indifferent. The point is that the very gross materialism which Fight Club derides, and which I once subscribed to is once again knocking at my door, saying “Hey, JJ, look over here. Look how much greener the grass is. Look at your shitty apartment and your cheap underwear, and now look at yourself, you loser. Get a real career and be a real man!”
There are three important things I wish to say in conclusion:
That voice at the door used to terrify me. It used to make me behave in ways that will forever make me cringe. But I am no longer afraid of, or in any way moved, by that voice.
To quote Tyler Durden once more: “Is that what a man looks like?”
To quote Elizabeth, verbatim, from our most recent conversation: “The grass is not greener.”
