A Practical Application of the Movie, “Fight Club.”

Have you ever wanted to run a cult? Turns out they’re not so difficult to run. Just watch the movie Fight Club to find out.

Have you ever fantasized about starting a cult? Turns out gaining an ultra-devoted group of followers is not a practice restricted only to organized religion. Imagine a hyper-masculine demagogue recruits a small army of men emasculated, apparently, by their cultures, families, and societies. Men who would do nearly anything, even resort to acts of terrorism, in order to feel like they actually belong to something bigger than themselves.

Here we have a description of the nineties blockbuster, “Fight Club,” starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. Weirdly enough, the narrative of the movie accurately describes the cult phenomenon that has gripped global politics in the last century — the first inklings of which began to reach mainstream media through the perception of sleeper-cell “terrorist” organizations in the Middle East, the Balkans, and South America. No less, the nineties also saw a series of mass shootings and large-scale massacres such as Columbine, the Unabomber, etc. that seemed to mirror such a phenomenon right here in our backyard in the United States.

The danger of this phenomenon could be said to have culminated in 9/11, which saw a small, organized, terrorist group tragically bring down the two towers in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States. Similarly enough, the climax of “Fight Club” sees the small organization run by the protagonist Tyler Durden also literally bringing down a skyscraper. Although Muslim “terrorists” are the main villain in the media narrative of such type of cult-like organizations, this tactic has been employed by even the greatest actors on the world stage since the beginning of the 20th century — European organizations such as Partito Nazionale Fascista in Italy, the Nazi party in Germany, and even the Soviets in Russia.

What does each of these organizations have in common? Each of them was created by a small group of emasculated individuals who believed in their cause so strongly they were willing to commit atrocities against society at large in order to consolidate their own power.

Although the movie was not a huge initial success at the box office, people instantly recognized how impactful it was. It was instantly decided to be one of the most controversial and talked-about films of 1999, and The Guardian even hailed the movie as an omen for American political change. Once the movie was re-released to DVD it began to see much more success, and, 10 years after its release, was dubbed by The New York Times as “the defining cult movie of our time.”

In order to fully visualize this “Fight Club” phenomenon, if you will, I will go over the plot of the movie, to some extent, and try not to give away too many spoilers in the process.

When the movie starts off we are introduced to the protagonist (Edward Norton.) We come to understand that he lives in a rather dreary world, populated by bouts of insomnia and a certain numbness that is translated through the tone of his voice, and the banality of the life he is describing. He will often wake up on random flights, and there are portions of his life he simply cannot remember anymore due to insomnia.

He finds a way out by feeling emotion through support groups for various cancers and other diseases. This cures his insomnia temporarily, but not until other imposters begin to crash his support group parties. Eventually, our protagonist meets Tyler Durden, a soap salesman, on a business flight home. Our narrator gets Durden’s number and heads home. Coincidentally, when he gets home he finds that his apartment had exploded by some freak accident and that all of his material possessions — the things he had once used to define his life — had been destroyed.

Not knowing who to go to, our narrator calls Tyler and meets up with him at a bar. Tyler goes on to explain how consumerism has dominated the narrator’s life. After a few drinks, the two of them go outside, and Tyler encourages the narrator to get in a fistfight with him. The two knock each other around for a bit and then head back to Durden’s house — a dilapidated and empty house in their city’s industrial district. The narrator starts to live with Tyler in the house.

The two continue this tradition of beating each other up outside of the bar until other men see them and begin to join in. More and more men begin showing up, and thus we have a creation of a “Fight Club.” These men begin to meet up weekly in the basement of their bar to beat the living shit out of each other for a few hours. Many have their different reasons — some come to feel alive, some come to hurt, some come to exert power over another human being (some of the only power some of these men were allowed to exert in their lives.) The group quickly becomes more and more popular, and Fight Clubs start popping up all over the country.

Eventually, Tyler Durden begins bringing the more devoted members of Fight Club to his home to further train and indoctrinate them into his principles. At this point, the narrator is still going along with what is happening and even believes in Tyler. Tyler instills discipline in these men by forcing them to follow his directions, constantly degrading them, and teaching them his anti-corporate, and anti-materialist philosophies. He begins giving them homework assignments —such as starting fights in their everyday lives or starting a fight at their job — in order that they can start being more aggressive in their regular day today instead of just at Fight Club. What started off as an innocuous “Fight Club” was quickly turning into an organized, anarchic militia.

Right around this point, the narrator begins to realize the true gravity of what Tyler was doing, and how dangerous he could be. Without the narrator, Tyler begins to organize Project Mayhem, a group that engages in subversive acts of violence, and vandalism under the guise of revolution. The narrator, having had enough of Tyler’s behavior, tries to follow Tyler’s paper trail to cities all over the United States and discovers numerous organizations of Project Mayhem all over the country (Spoiler alert coming in one sentence). Also, the narrator can’t find Tyler. It isn’t until members begin addressing our narrator as Tyler that the narrator finally realizes that his name is Tyler Durden. He had been manifesting another personality during his various states of insomnia. Again, if you want no spoilers, just skip this next paragraph.

Our narrator, after realizing he is actually Tyler Durden, figures out a plot to bring down a couple of skyscrapers that hold credit card and debt information for much of the American populace. Tyler, sickened by the prospect of being responsible for so much violence, attempts to fight himself and the dissociated personality of Tyler Durden. He discovers that even the police are in on the plot, and there is seemingly nowhere to go without finding someone who is indoctrinated into Project Mayhem. Ultimately, Tyler shoots himself in the cheek to convince the alternate personality that he has decided to kill himself, and Tyler and his romantic interest, Marla Singer, hold hands as they watch the skyscrapers fall around them.

This is where the movie ends. There is no huge happy ending with a solution to all of our problems. We are simply left with a vision of the world burning down and the state of mind of those who were willing to burn it down.

Although Fight Club details a process that could be interpreted as a tale as old as time, it’s a much more modern interpretation than anything we’ve seen before. The problems affecting the main characters of Fight Club — materialism, consumerism, a monotone society defined by dehumanization — are many of the problems that still face society at large today. The causes that galvanized Germany’s small group of Nazis and Russia’s small group of Bolsheviks to come together and burn down the society they had known are not the same causes as we see today. It can be easy to be blinded by these slight differences, but symbolically, they are the same.

If we take a look at the inner circle of the Nazi party, and the two, arguably, most powerful members — Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler — we can begin to see how their rise was so similar to that of Project Mayhem in Fight Club. Both of these two men were failed artists. Goebbels wanted to be a writer, and Hitler wanted to be a painter. Both of these men felt emasculated by, not only that but also Germany’s decision for the armistice at the end of WW1. Furthermore, the entirety of German society was broken down by the Treaty of Versailles. Suddenly, men such as Hitler, who were willing to die for their beliefs, regardless of how evil they may have been, had an audience of like-minded, emasculated individuals who felt desperate enough to resort to violence and anarchy in an effort to regain control of their lives.

Similarly, let us examine a more recent evolution of a sleeper-cell organization — the Taliban, or Al-Qaeda. Many of the individuals who make, or made, up these organizations were people who felt victimized by the western world at large. It’s possible that these people had lost family members or suffered economic damage from western aggression. Regardless, these people had been emasculated by the realities they were born into, and possibly fell victim to propaganda machines that were built to capitalize on people who feel such away. These may be weak-minded individuals, but it makes no difference.

Everything mentioned thus far, however, has taken place before the information age. These were, for the most part, more classic examples where those who were willing to engage in the anarchic groups felt inclined to actually go in person and take part. There wouldn’t be a Fight Club, after all, if the men did not actually meet in person to fight each other. The internet, and subsequent rise of social media, has given more sinister applications to this Fight Club phenomenon.

It is important to note that the reasons that make people feel emasculated by their societies are very real. Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) would not have been able to find an audience if there had not been like-minded people who had gone through the same terrible realities as him. The evil that the real Tyler Durden recognizes (Edward Norton) is the terrible nature of manipulating these scarred individuals into acts of violence in the name of their cause. By seeking acceptance within a community that is dominated by a cult of personality these individuals only succeed in further dehumanizing themselves. The cycle of violence and emotional damage is not resolved, but only further perpetuated and enacted onto a new set of victims. The cycle, in this manner, only further perpetuates itself in the same way as one of the most important laws of physics — every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

We’ve seen this kind of phenomenon translated into incel communities on 4chan that spread venomous misogyny leading to acts such as Elliot Rodger’s mass shootings in California. Communities on Twitter and Facebook have been mobilized for Trump campaigns to violently refute any essence of the truth in what people have, in the last several years or so, dubbed “fake news.” Hell, even liberal social media utilizes the power of “cancel culture” to attack those who marginalize minorities and those who have already been marginalized.

If we can begin to see the reality behind this phenomenon, and how it affects each and every one of us in our lives, then we can begin to take steps to counter these kinds of movements with the understanding of where they come from, and how they are formed. People do not come inherently packaged with hateful beliefs — these beliefs are manufactured by scarred individuals who may be seeking violence in some way against the world for their pain. Furthermore, these beliefs are indoctrinated into a populace primed for a sense of community — a sense of community that has, in many cases, been denied to such people. It is only through understanding that we can recognize the problem, and attempt to begin to root it out at its source.

As always,

Gabrielknowseverything.