In the quarter of a century since its theatrical release, David Fincher’s Fight Club has gone from box office bomb to cult classic to the brightest of red flags whenever it’s featured on someone’s Letterboxd Top Four. It’s tempting for some to dismiss the film solely because of the toxicity of a large portion of its fandom. But its obvious attempt to satirize white male, Gen X macho rage, and the false sense of marginalization that accompanied it amid the rise of global capitalism and changing demographics, not only had a lot to say about wounded masculinity in the late ‘90s but also fully embodies the narcissistic self-victimization that was ultimately central to the rise of the Trump-era alt-right.
Fight Club originally hit theaters just a few months after Woodstock ‘99, an event primarily remembered for the destructive, oft-rapey behavior of thousands of moronic rap rock-loving dudebros and event organizers whose greed was matched only by their incompetence. As absurd as it sounds in retrospect, Y2K panic was also palpable at the time and the paranoia that perhaps the collective “we” were willfully handing over too much of our individual power to technology and the tech companies was far more potent than fear of any foreign government or army. It was, as they say, a more innocent time, with 9/11 still two years away, but American masculinity was nonetheless in a very volatile state. The longstanding promises of Reagan/Bush trickle-down economics had been revealed as a great lie and the new American Dream dwelled no longer in fields and factories but within the ones and zeros of the nation’s new mecca, Silicon Valley. This was ground zero for nerds overtaking jocks both in terms of social cachet and earning power, as respectable blue-collar jobs were systematically replaced with white-collar desk jobs. And, unsurprisingly, there was a growing disillusionment and rising anger among those of the “Men used to build shit” ilk.
This is all to say that it’s no surprise Fight Club struck (and continues to strike) an emotional nerve with so many men within the first year or two of its release, because the cultural shifts and rise of corporate dominance that began under Reagan were now accelerating at such an exponential rate that they threatened to leave behind the notion of American manhood that had been solidified in the national consciousness since the post-war boom of the 1950s. Masculinity was shifting not only spiritually but visibly and this was seen and felt as a threat, and ironically often not by men who embodied what was once the ideal, but those who saw that ideal as something they wanted to (but never would) attain. As the chant goes in the first support group Edward Norton’s unnamed narrator attends: “We’re still men. Men is what we are.” And thus, along comes Tyler Durden, inviting a generation of angry, frustrated young men to worship at his altar, saying “I look like you wanna look; I fuck like you wanna fuck; I am smart, capable and most importantly, I’m free in all the ways that you are not.” It was not merely a promise, but a prophecy made real, burned in celluloid through a satire so seductively rendered that it would be taken by many as an indisputable truth.
The term incel didn’t exist in 1999, but a precursor of that frustration was in the air, which is both why that brand of sad sack, wannabe tough guy posturing was so ripe for satirizing and also why that satire could so easily be embraced by people with the mentality the film is ultimately attacking. This is, of course, the reason that Fight Club is a preeminent example of a work that really tests the theory that depiction is not necessarily endorsement. The biggest reason for this is the pure animal magnetism of Brad Pitt, whose physique, charisma and razor-sharp humor was, and still is, so damn alluring that it wasn’t only believable that he’d inspire and manipulate an army of meathead “space monkeys” in the film, but understandable that he’d help convince an army of incels, disaffected gamers and disillusioned low-level corporate workers that self-empowerment could be found in the fascistic subsuming of the self in service of a greater cause. As Tyler says to our nameless narrator, “Except [that] ‘you’ is meaningless now. We have to forget about you.”
Now, if Fight Club’s diagnosis of male fragility in the age of a rapidly expanding consumer culture was almost frighteningly spot on, its prediction of where that toxic, destructive energy would be channeled was off the mark. This isn’t necessarily a weakness on Fincher’s part, but fascinating to examine 25 years after the fact. In particular, the notion that Tyler’s fascist army would assemble to help destroy both corporate hegemony and the working class’s collective debt is a pipe dream in the 2020s when bootlickers jump at any opportunity to defend billionaires online and anything that might benefit the poor or immigrants is swiftly dismissed as Marxist.
But even if Fight Club got some of the specifics wrong, its portrait of the globalized onslaught of late-stage capitalism and consumer culture gone awry and the subsequent genesis of white male anger at the turn of the millennium remains quite effective. In what is surely Fincher’s most showy work, we see the camera move in ways we’d never seen before, creating a hyper-reality that’s every bit as beguiling as 1999’s other wildly misappropriated film, The Matrix. Only, there are no blue pills or red pills offered in Fight Club, no rabbit hole to choose to follow and no exit from its warped fantasy of male aggression. Fincher’s decision to lean fully into Tyler’s troubling yet provocative perspective is the film’s most audacious move as well as its most potentially glaring fault.
It’s a film that very much wants to eat its cake and have it too, luxuriating in the sweaty male bodies that fill the screen, rendering a fantasy of poverty, violence and rampant antisocial behavior in a way that invites the viewer to cheer for its rise to prominence throughout the film as much as condemn it for the sheer stupidity of its misguided tenets. The fact that, all these years later, it still remains a cultural and sociopolitical Rorschach test certainly says something about the state of American masculinity, but it also shows that Fincher tapped into something primal, perverse and perhaps even eternal lurking within it. Decades before #MeToo, Fincher answered the question “Are men okay?” with a resounding NO.
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