Let’s break all the rules, or at least rules one and two. Let’s talk about Fight Club. The movie, released in 1999, is directed by David Fincher and based on a novel, published in 1996, by Chuck Palahniuk. It stars Brad Pitt and Edward Norton playing, respectively, the id, named Tyler Durden, and the superego, named Jack (though that name is theoretical, as he’s never actually addressed by it), a man in the midst of an identity crisis; and Helena Bonham Carter, playing Marla Singer, the woman in love with them/him. I could tell you what Fight Club is about, but that would be like imposing a plot on a dream. And in any case, I don’t need to tell you, since Tyler Durden’s kiss—a soft press of lips followed by cooling saliva followed by burning lye—has been seared into our consciousness just as it’s been seared into Jack’s flesh: You already know it even if you haven’t seen it.
Fight Club is a masterpiece, but a repellent one—visually gorgeous, spiritually ugly—and brilliant, yet of severely limited intelligence. Its politics are reactionary; its attitudes toward women crude, Neanderthal even. And at the time it came out, it was largely ignored by audiences, savaged by critics. The usually mild-mannered Roger Ebert declared it “macho porn.” Ebert’s right: It is. Though he’s wrong to see that as a flaw. No, the movie’s explicit misogyny is a source of its unsettling and unsavory greatness. Fight Club is something more than great too. It’s prophetic. To watch it in 2021 is to realize that you were gazing into a crystal ball when you saw it in 1999. The crystal ball checklist:
9/11
Fight Club ends where it begins: with the destruction of those monuments to late-stage American capitalism, i.e., skyscrapers, by a group of terrorists. Two years, almost to the day, after its premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 10, 1999, the Twin Towers would be reduced to piles of smoldering rubble by a group of terrorists.
THE ALT-RIGHT
Like most movements, the alt-right attracts its followers by overtly appealing to their self-righteousness, covertly appealing to their self-pity. The alt-right talks tough, comes on with a swagger and a sneer. Really, though, it’s a cult of victimhood, one big boo-hoo number about how hard it is to be white and male. Says Tyler to his followers: “I see…the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering….an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars.… We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be movie gods and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact, and we’re very, very pissed off.” And what are the Space Monkeys, Tyler’s band of proto-fascist foot soldiers, but the original Proud Boys?
MEN’S RIGHTS GROUPS
As Tyler sees it, society has it in for men. It’s the old schoolyard taunt, “Girls rule, boys drool,” except the whole country is the schoolyard. In his view, there’s no such thing as toxic masculinity; or, rather, masculinity is only toxic when it’s bottled up, allowed no release, which is why he started Fight Club. He believes that, for men, spiritual salvation is achieved through physical violence. And though not homosexual, au contraire—Tyler’s a stud muffin supreme—he is homosocial. Women aren’t to be trusted. Men are better off sticking with their own kind. (The sole maternal presence in Fight Club is Bob, identified by his “bitch tits,” a former bodybuilder whose overuse of steroids has resulted in testicular cancer and in whose bosomy embrace Jack occasionally seeks solace.)
Men’s rights groups, many of which have adopted Fight Club as their bible—“Tyler Durden lives!” is a frequent post on their message boards—think Tyler’s on the money.
THE BREAKUP OF BRAD PITT AND JENNIFER ANISTON
Pitt and Aniston weren’t married, never mind divorced, in 1999. Fight Club, though, already knew the couple was doomed. “I want to have your abortion,” a lovestruck—or possibly cockstruck—Marla says to Tyler, this very nasty movie’s idea of a sweet nothing. Actually the line, which appears in Palahniuk’s book and Jim Uhls’s screenplay, was cut at the insistence of a horrified Laura Ziskind, one of Fight Club’s producers, who agreed to accept whatever Fincher came up with as an alternative. (The alternative, “I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school,” horrified her even more but she’d given her word.)
When it was announced in the press that Pitt and Aniston were separating, actor Eva Longoria was photographed in a T-shirt that said, “I’ll have your baby, Brad.” It was her response to the rumor—unfounded and unfair, incidentally—that Aniston’s unwillingness to start a family was the reason for the split. It’s also a riff, even if unknowing, on Palahniuk’s original dialogue.
MILLENNIALS
Tyler is very specifically targeting members of Generation X when he gives what is perhaps his most famous speech: “We’re the middle children of history.… We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives.”
In 1999, we X’ers (I’m one too, born in 1978) were already getting crushed by the boomers, the largest generational group the U.S. ever produced, boring us to tears with their self-important hippie shit, their endless blather about how epic the ’60s were, man. That X’ers would get crushed from the other side by millennials, an even larger generational group, and a sorrier collection of spoiled-rotten crybabies you’ve never seen in your life, It’s not fair, their anthem and cri de coeur, is something nobody could’ve anticipated back then—except somehow Tyler did.
DONALD TRUMP
Donald Trump is Tyler Durden, minus, obviously, the face, the bod, the hair, the style. (By the way, “Donald Trump” isn’t quite an anagram of “Tyler Durden,” but it’s close.) Like Tyler, Trump uses snowflake as a put-down. In fact, Trump possibly boosted it from Tyler. Or so says Chuck Palahniuk. “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake” is a line Tyler lays on the Space Monkeys.
Like Tyler, Trump is maniac and messiah, the self-help guru of our age—a self-destruct guru. But what he is above all else is a salesman, even when what he’s selling is not buying the other guy’s product (“fake news”; “no collusion”). He speaks in slogans (“Drain the swamp”) and never isn’t pitching (“Build the wall”; “Lock her up”).
Like Tyler, Trump has Big Dick Energy, even if his actual dick is, according to Stormy Daniels, disappointing in size (below average) and shape (mushroom).
Like Tyler, Trump is possessed of a power that is, by its very nature, annihilative. Tyler wants to eradicate credit card companies. Trump wants to eradicate the last 70 or so years. Both preach self-liberation while demanding absolute fealty. Both rule through ruin. (MAGA is just another name for Project Mayhem, Tyler’s plan to wipe out modern civilization.)
Like Tyler, Trump is a demon we cannot seem to exorcise. Jack, at the end of Fight Club, kills Tyler by shooting himself in the head. Biden, last November, defeated Trump in the most contentious and drawn-out presidential election in U.S. history. And yet Trump feels no more gone than Tyler does.
Oh, and if Trump turns out to be—as Tyler turned out to be—the physical manifestation of some pencil-neck, paper-pushing sad sack’s psychotic breakdown, doesn’t he finally and at long last make sense?
Tyler’s main job is manufacturing soap out of rich women’s blubber. (He raids liposuction clinics at night.) His side job, though, is movie theater projectionist. And sometimes, while in the booth, he takes a frame from a porno movie and inserts it into a family movie. He is thus an obvious subversive—blowing up buildings, etc.—but also a subtle one, slipping his radical and alienated thoughts into the minds of audience members, into our minds, so susceptible in the dark, so easy to dominate.
Is that what’s being done to us with Fight Club? Did Tyler vacate Jack’s mind only to take over Fincher’s so that he could then infiltrate ours? Is that why this movie more than predicted our future, shaped our future?
Tyler Durden lives! In Fincher. In all of us.
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