I don’t remember where I was when I first saw Fight Club. But I remember the fuss – had Hollywood made a fascist film? And I remember the soap and the black blood, Project Mayhem and the twist. And I remember thinking, good liberal that I was: yes, a lot of this is horrible, but I’ve never seen anything like it.
Of course I did. The film – directed by David Fincher and based on the 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk – came out towards the end of 1999, when I was 26. My theatre career was a flop. I had no money. My friends were doing better than me. I was in the target market for a film about fighting your way out of frustration.
That was a quarter of a century ago. It was strange, then, one day in New York in 2022, to see the movie’s name stencil-sprayed on the corner of a Lower East Side sidewalk. Fight Club still looms large in the imagination – particularly online. On YouTube there are videos based on it with titles such as “A Warning for Men” (2.6 million views) and “Reject Weakness, Embrace Masculinity” (6.9 million views). Much of this focuses on charismatic soap salesman Tyler Durden – played in the film by an impossibly cool Brad Pitt – who befriends and forms an underground “fight club” with the narrator, Edward Norton’s unnamed corporate drone, until we realise Tyler is his invented alter ego. On incel threads, there are debates about Tyler’s aphorisms (such as, “We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.”) More surprisingly, on TikTok and Instagram, there are edits by young women who relate to these two male characters – though they express this with a degree of irony, aware of how young men see the movie. On 28 July, Elon Musk posted a meme on X: a picture of Tyler in the bar where he first expounds his subversive philosophy. It read: “It’s been three years. Shouldn’t all the unvaccinated be dead by now?” It got 32.6 million views. What did this movie capture from the world of 1999 that somehow makes it current?
It’s not that Tyler’s lines are all particularly original. While some evidently find them inspirational, others find them rather adolescent. One of the most quoted runs: “An entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.” The gay anarchist sage Paul Goodman observed a similar sentiment in 1960 in his book Growing Up Absurd: disaffected young men, he wrote, thought “that a man is a fool to work to pay instalments on a useless refrigerator for this wife”. Tyler complains that his aimless generation has “no Great War, no Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.” This sounds like the anti-hero in the 1956 play Look Back in Anger, who sighs that his generation missed the 1930s and 1940s, and there are “no good, brave causes left”.
Chuck Palahniuk has admitted that, in the novel, Tyler’s ideas don’t really matter per se: what’s important is the sense of belonging he and his ideas foster. And both the book and film landed at one of those moments when some sort of rallying cry seemed necessary. In the 1950s, the Cold War had at least provided a unifying enemy. By the 1990s, it was gone, and Francis Fukuyama announced “the end of history”. Without a “worldwide ideological struggle”, he feared, there’d be no more “daring, courage, imagination, and idealism”. Little remained but “the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”
As globalisation took off and advertising seeped into every part of life, some identified a new enemy: the corporation. As Edward Norton put it, Fight Club grasped the way Generation X – those born from the mid 1960s to 1980 – were not “slackers” but had been rendered cynical by the “onslaught of information and technology”. In her bestselling 2000 book No Logo, Naomi Klein charted the proliferation of branding and public advertising as corporate wealth soared. She argued the tipping point came when ads appeared in university washrooms – an intrusion too far, but also the perfect opportunity to retaliate. No Logo reports on how young activists in Britain and North America started “culture jamming”: subverting ads with anything from aerosols to Photoshop. Such disaffection wasn’t unique to the left. In the 1990s an armed, right-wing militia movement began, driven in part by loathing of the Clinton administration’s mix of heavy-handed law enforcement and attempts at gun control – but also by resentment at distant banks and corporations, and the frustrations of men stuck in unrewarding, non-physical work.
The movie channels and satirises both tendencies. Tyler sets up fight clubs in which men can lamp each other till they’re limp. He gathers their members into black-clad underground cells, which launch “Project Mayhem”: a prankish onslaught on everything from Volkswagens to coffee chains, before degenerating into a fascistic cult. The rebellion against the forces of disempowerment ends up aping its enemy.
While Fight Club was still playing in cinemas, these strands came together in Seattle, Washington. When the World Trade Organisation came to town on 30 November, so did the opponents of globalisation in mass protests that united unions, environmentalists and anarchists. A few were violent, some more playful – and Fight Club appealed to both. In his book about anti-globalisation movements after the so-called “Battle of Seattle”, Black Bloc, White Riot, AK Thompson reports that “many activists… were inspired by it”, pointing to a poster of a hand grenade by a group called the “Ten Millimeter Gang”, bearing Tyler’s line that “it is only after you have lost everything that you are free to do anything”.
Harold Linde was a member of the Ruckus Society, which specialised in non-violent direct actions. The group, he told me, was “a confluence of very precise training” and “a lot of playfulness”. The day before the first protests, he and three other volunteers scaled a crane to unfurl a huge banner – a sign pointing one way, saying “WTO” and a second, pointing the opposite way, that read “DEMOCRACY”. After the protests, he remembers wandering into a Seattle cinema and watching Fight Club – and seeing “so many parallels”. Watching the scene in which Project Mayhem explodes a piece of corporate art and lets it roll into a deserted coffee bar, Linde saw in the fictional group a commitment to “changing the culture by very strategic [non-violent] action”. In a sequence where Project Mayhem uses paint and fire to create a huge smiling face on the side of a corporate building he saw echoes of culture jamming – and of his own action in Seattle.
Fight Club ends with Project Mayhem blowing up the empty headquarters of credit card companies, on the basis that “if you erase the debt record, we all go back to zero – it’ll create total chaos.” As one of the film’s producers, Ross Grayson Bell, told me, he was in debt himself, and as they tried to resolve the movie’s ending, he thought, “What can we do that would destroy the system without hurting anybody on the surface?” He drew on work he’d done at university, applying “a Marxist perspective” to global capitalism, banking and developing-world debt.
When the Twin Towers were attacked, less than two years later, people were struck by the prescience of the closing image of skyscrapers crumpling. It’s certainly eerie that Tyler calls the moment “ground zero”. But this wasn’t the most strikingly prescient aspect of the film’s ending: after all, Islamist terrorists had planted a truck bomb in the basement of the Twin Towers in 1993. The scene prefigures another catastrophe, a few years further into the future. While Fight Club was still in cinemas, on 4 November 1999, Congress approved the removal of the Depression-era barrier between commercial and investment banks. The fuse this lit would detonate in 2008, helping to bring the credit system crashing down for real. It created the wreckage in which a new generation would come of age, for whom Fight Club would become newly resonant.
Flipping through the 25 October 1999 edition of Newsweek, looking for the feminist writer Susan Faludi’s review of Fight Club, I found another article, reporting the buzz around a man who was toying with running for president for the populist Reform Party. Donald Trump soon backed out; his replacement was Pat Buchanan, another self-appointed champion of the beleaguered white working man. Strikingly, Buchanan praised the protestors in Seattle, declaring that “we stand against global government and an undemocratic new world order”. At the time, some on the left were ready to ally with the right against the WTO. After all, Buchanan was not much of a threat – in the 2000 election, he scored 0.4 per cent.
But since the Crash, as economic insecurity has fused with angst about immigration, the right has come to dominate attacks on globalisation. In his 2023 novel Wellness, the American writer Nathan Hill gently sends up Jack, a former culture jammer, who is horrified to discover that, in the Trump era, his conspiracist father claims to be “righteously-anti-corporate, anti-globalisation, suspicious of mass culture and those it indoctrinated” – sounding “distressingly similar to what Jack himself might have said… in the 1990s”. In this context, the film’s subversiveness and its nastiness no longer seem opposites. Tyler Durden, the charismatic teller of forbidden truths, begins to sound like a conspiracy theorist – precisely the sort of figure Elon Musk would employ to spread doubt about vaccines.
A noisy fan of Pat Buchanan, meanwhile, was busy creating a far-right version of Tyler’s militia. By 2016, Gavin McInnes, who co-founded the punkish magazine Vice in 1994, had become an online video host, railing against liberalism, feminism, and “globalism” – and drinking with his fans while declaiming passages from Buchanan’s The Death of the West, which bemoans the supposed replacement of white people by other races. As the journalist Andy Campbell reports in his 2022 book We Are Proud Boys, McInnes decided to turn his followers into a movement: this was the beginning of the militant organisation the Proud Boys. Some of them, Campbell told me, “specifically joined this because of the way it resembled Fight Club”. And “within their chats there are references to Fight Club all over the place… they absolutely love that iconography.” Campbell notes that McInnes’s approach to building his group was strikingly similar to Tyler Durden’s: “Gavin takes this group of sort of listless men and pelts them with all sorts of misogynist rhetoric, all sorts of bigoted rhetoric that they are fighting for something bigger than themselves. And it really follows the film to such a degree that you can almost see him watching the film for tips.”
Campbell laments the way the group has attracted men “treated poorly by any number of awful American systems”. He notes how one man, Ethan Nordean, saw his dreams of joining the special forces fall apart, leaving him stuck working in a restaurant, sinking into conspiracy theories and worrying about “the fall of American masculinity”. Nordean became a Proud Boy leader, and is currently serving 18 years in prison for his role in the 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
As a teenager, Campbell thought Fight Club was “awesome”; his friends “fought each other in bar basements pretending to be Tyler Durden and co”. He’s glad that there weren’t online message-boards like 4Chan around to applaud him for saying something stupid. But he eventually realised, unlike some, that the film was interrogating the ideas it dramatises, not endorsing them. As he puts it, “People like Elon Musk – these are people who think that this is still awesome in the same way that I did when I was in middle school or high school.”
For those born since it was released, Fight Club now looks like an elegy for the old pre-virtual world. No one in the film has a smartphone (the iPhone wouldn’t be launched until 2007). Email is mentioned once, as a symbol of corporate ludicrousness. One Project Mayhem prank involves sneaking magnets into video rental stores to wipe the tapes. Tyler tracks such actions by cutting articles out of newspapers. And alienated young men find like-minded others in basements and parking lots, not on 4Chan.
Today, as Harold Linde told me, heavy-duty policing has made his kind of non-violent action impossible, and he regrets the way students declare themselves “activists” when their only activity is online. All this might have rendered Fight Club a relic – yet judging by those TikTok and Instagram edits, the shift online seems to have bolstered the appeal of a film about life just before social media ate everything.
Fascination with Fight Club also brings together the sense that life in 1999 was better than today, and Proud Boys-style angst about “threats” to masculinity. Threads by the frustrated men of the incel (involuntary celibate) movement discussing the film reveal a grim world-view in which Norton’s character embodies the exploited white-collar “wageslave” or “wagecuck”, disconnected from his masculinity, a corporate cog, feminised by mothering and comfort – but one who is still better off than today’s young men because he has a decently paying job. As Maeve Park, a researcher who specialises in the far right and the “manosphere” told me, incels see a sharp divide between “alphas” like Tyler Durden who “effortlessly attract women” and “betas” like the narrator who “have to make money in order to become attractive”.
Some find Fight Club powerful because they buy into both its alienated-male toxicity and its anti-consumerist rebellion. These fans at times cast the alleged capitalist oppression of men in anti-Semitic, homophobic and misogynist terms. Some see in Project Mayhem a cause to believe in. Comments online suggest that their generation does have a “great war” to wage, not least against women. One announces that their “purpose” is to fight “this system until we’re replaced by a horde of mentally ill, materialistic and ultra-capitalistic transsexuals”. Perhaps what’s at work here, beneath the unpleasantness, is the lack Palahniuk identified in the first place: a need for a sense of belonging.
As a teenager, Park “loved” Fight Club’s portrait of a “subversive group that went against [the] capitalist system”. But she was struck to find that this baffled many young men, who viewed the film more narrowly, as dealing solely with the supposed oppression of men. She connects this obsessive focus on masculinity with support for Trump, and his revolt against “political correctness”: he is “teenage rebellion embodied in a 78-year-old man.” Not for nothing does one YouTube video switch Tyler Durden’s face for Trump’s.
The fact that extremist readings of Fight Club have risen in prominence since 1999 reflects the way that tensions visible then have since reached breaking point. But beneath those readings lies another interpretation, easily lost in rows over the film’s alleged fascism, which sees the film not as an extremist manifesto but a diagnosis of why such things become attractive. When the film came out, Faludi was promoting her book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, which mapped some of the same frustrations that drive Fight Club. In her review for Newsweek, she saw a story about men realising they had ended up in the same corner in which women had long been trapped, being subjected to some of the same unending, impossible consumerist pressures women had long put up with. As she notes, Norton’s character begins the film “trying to glean an identity from Ikea brochures, entertainment magazines and self-help gatherings”. In No Logo, Klein detected a similar shift, as culture jammers turned their fire from the sexist content of ads to the fact that they had spread everywhere. Faludi points out that, in the end, Norton’s character rejects Tyler and his devoted followers, and finally gets together with Marla, Helena Bonham Carter’s punkish waif. For “men facing an increasingly hollow, consumerised world”, Faludi wrote, the answer lay “not in conquering women but in uniting with them against the hollowness”.
We’ll soon see which option America’s frustrated men choose: the defiant woman, or the champion of the fanatics.
Phil Tinline is the author of “The Death of Consensus”. His next book, “Ghosts of Iron Mountain”, will be out in March.
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This article appears in the 09 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, 100 days that shook Labour