The far-left Guardian interviewed Fight Club (1999) director David Fincher, hoping to bait him into trashing the movie’s fans. He mostly side-stepped the many traps, but the interview does give you another look at the left’s hostility towards men:
Fight Club became a key text for a contingent of dissatisfied white men that we might call the “manosphere”: “incels”; neo‑Nazi fitness clubs; the Proud Boys (which the Southern Poverty Law Centre once described as an “‘alt-right’ fight club”); avowed misogynists and male supremacists in the Andrew Tate mould.
“I’m not responsible for how people interpret things,” says Fincher. The Fight Club being consumed by today’s aggrieved manosphere is not the same as the film that flopped on its box office release in 1999, or the one that became a campus hit on DVD, he says: “Language evolves. Symbols evolve.” But it has still become a touchstone for the far right, I suggest. “OK, fine,” he replies, seeming slightly exasperated. “It’s one of many touchstones in their lexicography.”
How does he feel about that? “We didn’t make it for them, but people will see what they’re going to see in a Norman Rockwell painting, or [Picasso’s] Guernica.”
When asked if Fight Club “was overtly tapping into this vein of resentful, disempowered masculinity,” Fincher answered: “It’s impossible for me to imagine that people don’t understand that Tyler Durden is a negative influence. People who can’t understand that, I don’t know how to respond and I don’t know how to help them.”
It’s pretty amazing who the left does and does not empathize with. Hamas can decapitate babies, rape, desecrate, and butcher, and the left is all, Cease fire! Stop stopping them! Understand their plight! But in a culture where young men are told to ignore their biological wiring and that their very nature (masculinity) is “toxic,” and that asking a woman out more than once is rape… In a society where men’s natural instincts to protect and provide have been undermined and made irrelevant by militant feminism, American abundance, and the religion of consumerism… (My novel talks a lot about this. You should buy my novel. Oh, gawd, please buy my novel!)
In a country where the natural way men sit has become a sin called “manspreading,”… There is no empathy at all. Men are treated like something unnatural, a virus infecting what would otherwise be a perfect system. The left wants absolutely everyone accommodated in every conceivable way, including sexual fetishists and child molesters, but not us, not men.
So, of course, Fight Club speaks to us. Of course, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) speaks to us. He’s our id. He’s our true self, saying don’t be ashamed of who you are.
“I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering,” Durden says at one point. “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.”
Amen.
Obviously, Durden takes things too far. Obviously. But how is that extreme wish-fulfillment any different from cathartic, female revenge movies like Carrie (1976), Thelma and Louise (1991), Kill Bill (2003), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009), I Spit on Your Grave (1978), The Beguiled (1971), or Peppermint (2018)? In a moral vacuum, they are no different. By the way, I love and own all those movies. I also love and own Fight Club. And because I’m not a one-dimensional narcissist consumed by something that doesn’t matter — like my “identity” — all of those movies speak to me on the same level, a human level, about feeling like a helpless outsider.
The left can feel for terrorists, but not a group of young men quickly advancing into middle age whose empty, Hellbound lives revolve around Marvel movies, online porn, and marijuana.
We took away everything that made men men, from the factories where men taught boys what it meant to be a man, to not feeling like a villain when we sit comfortably. My heart breaks for these guys. Yes, some of it is their own fault. They need to take more control over their destiny. But America’s elite culture is built around keeping them down. Tyler Durden may not be a hero, but at least he recognizes that. In the vernacular of these stupid times, he sees them.
John Nolte’s debut novel Borrowed Time (Bombardier Books) is available today. You can read an exclusive excerpt here and a review of the novel here.