The enduring relevance of Fight Club
Just over five years ago, I wrote a review on Palahniuk’s Fight Club when I first read it. It is embarrassing to read my old writing. It’s pretentious, chock-filled with images like an old-school Cracked listicle, and shows what a terrible reader I was. Ironically, I criticized Palahniuk for being pretentious, dense, and also admitted I had a hard time following. Oh, me from the past, as John Green would put it, you were so young and so naïve. Of course, me from the past made the me of today, and me from the future would likely look similarly to the me of today.
The reason I’m revisiting Fight Club now is its striking continued relevance in today’s society, over twenty-five years since its initial publication. Although I didn’t think much of my writing during when I first wrote the review, I was happy that I had identified its accurate portrayal of male anger and alienation when I first read the book as well. Though I did manage some embarrassing quotes, such as “Tyler is to Jordan Peterson as Malcom X is to Martin Luther King”. I also complained that Palahniuk seemed to identify a problem, but proposed no solution. Then I ended off my review by hoping for “something like Ayn Rand’s progression from We the Living to Atlas Shrugged”. Anyways, some bad among the worse, but I’m digressing.
Palahniuk, through Tyler Durden, starts off Fight Club addressing modern alienation and meaninglessness, not just of the male variety. The protagonist attends various support groups for chronic and terminal illnesses, because it helps him sleep. Everyone there is kind to one another and the narrator himself is suffering from what seems to be a deep depression. Seeing raw pain and suffering seems cathartic to the narrator at a time when everyone and everything claims to be okay when they’re not. The narrator bemoans the loss of his IKEA furniture when his apartment explodes, while simultaneously claiming that it is something that he doesn’t need. None of his gripes with society or the supposed ailments of its denizens are specifically male-related.
“You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need. We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression. What we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.”
However, the novel then starts to focus on men. Perhaps because this was what Palahniuk knew best. Perhaps it was because he felt that women had better support networks in place, and didn’t succumb to these pressures as much. Perhaps it was because he felt that men were more easily swayed by charlatans peddling cultish cures. Perhaps because he wrote a novel entitled Fight Club to attract male readership. What ever it was, the novel accurately captured what could happen, and what is happening to men without many meaningful relationships and community.
The appeal of Project Mayhem, as well as the real-life pseudo-cults of messieurs Peterson, Shapiro, Tate, and Rogan, would not be there if it wasn’t for the meaninglessness of modern existence. God is dead, and so are the great wars. Nationalistic pride is frowned upon, cynicism is celebrated, and there’s no cause to devote our lives to. Though technology has improved and the average person is certainly more comfortable now than they were at any point in history, we aren’t satisfied with this comfort, and instead crave meaning. Accomplishment can provide meaning, but not everyone can be accomplished, and the aforementioned technology and comforts has sapped much willpower.
Even though these issues should affect both genders equally, it seems to afflict men more than women. This issue is one of the stated goals of feminism and therapy, but all their travails have yet to over come society and male psychology preventing men from opening up and connecting about these insecurities. Whether it’s plain stubbornness, fear, or a millions of years of evolution, men are angrier and lonelier than their female cohorts. So instead, men who don’t feel heard turn to these charlatans who provide a target for their negative emotions. The problem is women, liberals, immigrants, communists, or ironically, emotions and feelings. These are parroted by Tyler before the advent of any male influencers:
“What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women”
“I’m a thirty year old boy, and I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer I need”
“You are not a snowflake”
And the tired and wretched come in droves. They pay to be a part of this scheme, to join Tyler on his anarchical quest to destroy society. Tyler has spoken words that sound true to them, and they need a cause to devote their lives to, to find meaning. They line up at the door of a derelict mansion to scrub floors and make soap. They are told to bring money that will be used to bury them. They are belittled, and called space monkeys, but for the first time in their lives, they feel like they’re part of something. Palahniuk didn’t have any idea how bad it was going to be, that some of these men would be running pyramid schemes and sex trafficking rings, while others would repeat the inane Jungian drivel while dying from an all-meat diet. But he hit the nail on the head with the tough love, the cult-like adulation, and the real harm that these men would suffer while listening to these messiahs.
When I last read Fight Club, I was puzzled by its accurate depiction of modern masculinity. Though the roots of these issues were present some thirty years ago, they hadn’t manifested in the same way that they have now. The anger, frustration, and alienation were there, but not the cult leaders, the religiosity, and the violent behaviour. Was Fight Club remarkably prescient? Was I blissfully unaware? Or does life imitate art? Palahniuk writes that if readers start fight clubs of their own after reading, they’ve misunderstood the novel. What if they start exploiting the alienation and loneliness of men?
It’s unfair to blame Fight Club for these masculinity influencers, and Palahniuk not only predicted the rise of them, but addressed what he thought the root cause was as well. As I’ve discussed before, I think there is a damaging lack of empathy in the discourse about incels and other disaffected young men. Sure, their actions and thoughts are stupid and even dangerous, but calling them names and saying that they don’t deserve love only widens the rift, and doesn’t help them or others on the edge. As a satire, Fight Club not only identifies issues that are happening and what further issues could arise, but also helps us understand why these issues are happening at all. I think it is mandatory reading for anyone who wonders why messieurs Peterson, Shapiro, Tate, and Rogan are multi-millionaires with billions of streams.
