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RE: Watching Fight Club Again With New Eyes

in #journal3 years ago

I disliked Fight Club when I first saw it, on the grounds that it correctly identifies a social problem (the "middle children of history" speech, etc.), but it's "solution" plays into every negative stereotype of machismo and misogyny and violence and so forth. But I did respect its storytelling chops, even if I didn't like it.

More recently, I've come to understand it the way that some older, WW II veterans did, or people from failed totalitarian countries. Its "solution" isn't a suggestion: It's a warning. Specifically, a I recall a tweet from someone I saw a few years ago on the topic whose father (from 1930s Germany) was freaked out "because this is exactly how fascism starts".

Historically, yes, you can see the pattern. Take a large number of disaffected young men with legitimate grievances, promise them that they'll finally be significant if they just embrace machismo with a healthy dose of nihilism, tell them they're all powerful but only if they stay in line and do what the leader says, and use that to tear down institutions both literal and figurative. It's called fascism.

If you don't address those social problems in a good way, you create the breeding ground for fascism, totalitarianism, and violence.

Of course, as is usually the case, warnings about the dangers of social ill X get taken ad instruction manuals for how to embrace social ill X. (See also, "Wall Street" and so on.)

Our Fight Club is called the Proud Boys.