SNOWFLAKES

“Actually Sweaty, Fight Club is Woke”

Part 3 of what will now be a 4 part series on Flight Club and Wokeness. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.

SNOWFLAKES

Few films in living memory have had as much of an impact on American culture as Fight Club. Beyond the catchy lines of dialogue that entered common parlance, the film both overtly and subtly inspired subcultures that have had a major influence on American politics. Strong currents in the culture over the ensuing two decades have been traced back to the ripple initially made by Fight Club. Some of these cultural phenomena were directly inspired by the film, while others arose because of the cultural climate it created. Few, if any, were coordinated and resembled one another in only tangential ways, and all had debatable results for America at large. What cannot be denied however, is that everything attributed to Fight Club, fairly or unfairly, involved a reassertion of masculinity in ways unsanctioned by any prevailing cultural institution. Now those institutions are trying to wrestle Fight Club's legacy away from the people it inspired and reappropriate it for the woke agenda currently wreaking havoc on American culture. 

By the time of the Trump election, it can be said that the main influence of Fight Club was to partially inspire the “Alt-Right.” The Alt-right is really an amalgamation of various subcultures and individuals with very few similarities beyond their support for Donald Trump and a general right wing political bent, conscious or otherwise. Some probably, in the absence of Trump, would consider themselves apolitical if they considered politics at all, and Project Mayhem itself was  an apolitical organization. The name refers more to anarchy than anything ostensibly right wing, and were it not for the 2016 presidential election the factions that made up the alt-right may never have been grouped together as a political movement. Once they coalesced behind Trump and garnered national attention however, the influence of Fight Club was overt and immediate.

All over mainstream media and the internet, Trump supporters were gloating over their victory by calling the hysterical opposition “snowflakes,” directly and conscientiously quoting Tyler Durden. In fact, though the term faded from use soon after the election, it enjoyed a lackluster and short-lived revival in 2020 when the liberal media tried to turn it on Trump voters. The rampant use of the term snowflake and the disposition it inspired among conservatives (Ben Shapiros “the facts don’t care about your feelings” is another way of calling someone a snowflake) is merely the most direct and popular reference to the film. It was also quoted and referenced heavily online among the pickup artist movement, which was either made up of or frequented by future alt-right and Trump supporting figures, and was adjacent to the incel community which at least tangentially incorporated ideas from Fight Club. One of the most famous contingents of the alt-right, the Proud Boys, was structured just like Fight Club, with a charismatic leader, a firm set of rules, and an initiation ritual that involved being beaten by other members. And of course, their entire reason for being was to go out into the streets and fight people. 

All of this and more comes under the umbrella of what the left calls “Toxic Masculinity,” and there has been a discussion in the mainstream media since 2016 as to whether or not Fight Club critiques or endorses it. It seems the current prevailing attitude of the liberal media is that Fight Club critiques it, and that these ignorant brutes on the right got the film entirely wrong. This flies in the face of the first wave of criticism the film received from the left, which accused it of endorsing violence and even fascism, because after the legalization of gay marriage, the ascendancy of trans-rights and trans-advocacy, and in the wake of #metoo, the gay male in America has become an important cultural signifier for the left. Therefore, they seem to feel it is incumbent upon them to appropriate the film, the book, and the author as part of their agenda. This, as I’ve said, is one important facet of their over-coding of American culture post-Trump, in an attempt to make all history conform to their world-view, and to make anyone who sees things differently appear idiotic, crazy, non-existent, or all three. 

Analysis and critique of the film is available all over the web from a myriad of major and minor outlets, not to mention the countless comments and write-ups by social media users from reddit to twitter to incel forums. A survey of these reviews reveals a change in posture towards the film in mainstream and liberal journals, beginning in about 2017 when GQ asked, “Why Trump Supporters Love Caling people Snowflakes.” They said use of the term held an unwitting irony in that Palahniuk is openly gay - the implication seeming to be that he would obviously have supported Hillary Clinton (I can find no indication of who he supported in 2016, and he appears to be silent on Trump/Clinton). This position not only reads the film in new, woke lighting, but invokes the homosexuality of the books author to lend credit to this interpretation. Before considering the merit or folly of doing so, it would be useful to recount the woke reading of Fight Club, which is of course rooted in political identity “literary theory.” The woke reading basically sees the “fighting” as a thinly veiled metaphor for gay sex, Nortons relationship to Durden as one of closeted homosexuality, and the film is ultimately a critique of toxic masculinity. This is a tried and true tactic of the woke, to reappropriate something that doesn’t service all of the ever-increasing demands of identity politics and critical race or gender theory. 

Fight Club is a film about disillusioned straight white men that became the hallmark of disillusioned white men, who are the enemy. Whenever something or someone is too popular to suppress or edit out of history, the mainstream tries to repackage its thesis and fit it into a liberal worldview. Perhaps the quintessential example of this conceptual neutering is the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who became the philosopher of “amor fati” and “eternal recurrence,” rather than of Master/Slave morality and the invaluator of values. As a favorite of all the post modernists and critical theorists, Michel Foucault in particular, Nietzsche is far too influential and prevalent to be cast out. Fight Club clearly depicts a celebration of male violence as an antidote to the ennui and outright effeminization of urban consumer culture, but somehow the move by critics is to read the film as a critique *of* the violence. As we shall see, this recourse to male instinctual violence is also Nietzsche's solution for the reduction of men to that of grazing sows. Just as cademia reworked Nietzsche to serve its agenda, the media is reworking Fight Club to fit its own, and the perpetrators of this reappropriation are all the usual suspects.

ACKCHYUALLY

Probably the two most egregious re-reads I’ve found were from Vice and Jezebel - shocking, I know. Both are openly feminist outlets, and although their naked ideology is grounds for immediate dissmissal in the world of ideas, their activity in shaping the perspective of mainstream culture is of critical importance. The media has a central role in both starting the fires and fanning the flames of cultural movements, and these two digital rags have been front and center in everything from normalizing pornography, pushing the gay agenda, providing a bullhorn for #metoo, and lending mainstream credibility to any number of other harmful and destructive leftwing trends. So when they turn their eye to Fight Club, along with GQ, The New Yorker and The New York Times, and many others, we need to take note that the pushers of left-wing ideology and rewriters of history have identified an idol of the enemy, and they’re setting themselves and their orcs to work to smash it to pieces. 

Vice has probably the most egregious and fatuous misread, in an article entitled “In Defense of ‘Fight Club,’” in which a self-proclaimed asian feminist - who for the sake of argument we will assume is an actual female - tells us the movie is “ackchyually” about non-white women expressing their rage at the patriarchy in a non-violent manner. To bolster this argument - I guess? - the author embeds a video of “feminist fight club” (produced by Vice) in which women supposedly get together and fight to get out the rage they feel at *their* “oppression.” While of course a not insignificant portion of the video is dedicated to one woman talking about how the “feminist fight club” is about “feeling sexy,” even more time is given to a fat, pasty troll who feels oppressed because shes been “cat called” or “touched without' consent” (sure you have, darling). Beyond all that, one speaker makes it a point to tell us the club is not “trans-exclusive,” and clearly a few of these participants are men, and a few others are of questionable gender origin, and also the club appears to allow male onlookers. Lastly, their “fighting” is mostly hugging, laughing, and weekend motivational group-exercises like sticking out their tongues and shaking out their hands.

“Feminist fight club” is further proof that women are intolerant of male-exclusive cultural spaces, and they cannot help but to infiltrate them, neuter them, and make them about themselves. This is happening all across our culture, making Nortons initial predicament seem prophetic, and it began with Gamergate, in which women attempted to insert themselves into gamer culture and took their oppression grievances all the way to the UN! Gamergate is well known as the event that catalyzed the alt-right and it included, among many others, the previously mentioned “PUA” and incel groups. One New Yorker journalist says he spent years lurking on their forums, where he saw Fight Club references and Tyler Durden worship everywhere. Even to this day the right wing news outlet “ZeroHedge,” which has 1.5 million twitter followers and whose website averages almost 40 million views a month, uses Tyler Durden as its twitter avatar, attributes many of its original content to a pseudonymous “Tyler Durden,” and has as its tagline “on a long enough timeline, the survival rate of everyone drops to zero.” So we see that not only is Fight Club still influential to this day on the right, the mainstream is trying to perform a sort of gender-reassignment surgery to its message. 

By making a “feminist fight club” and having “smash the patriarchy” feminists celebrate the film, the left is continuing its overturning of civilizational control through its liquidation of male figures and male subcultures. #metoo was more about getting rid of men in power than it was about sexual “justice,” our first female vice president rose to power on a wave of abject defeat at the polls, the unelected New York state governor was installed after her (admittedly terrible) predecessor was surgically excised from office on laughable charges, and women are replacing the dashing, sword wielding hero in all new fantasy and comic book movies. Another place in which Fight Club is praised by a self-proclaimed feminist is Jezebel, the openly feminist journal, but they take a different tack than Vice. To be sure, the praising of this male-centric film by a feminist is itself an attempt to reappropriate the movie, but here they choose to go the gay route rather than the “what if we replaced the male characters with women” tactic. This tactic is “ackchyually, the main character is gay.”

If women cant exactly infiltrate a male subculture, another way they attempt to neuter it is by trying to make the character gay and the central message about homosexual desire. The people attempting to do this with Fight Club think they have an even better leg to stand on than in other cases, because Chuck Palahniuk is gay. Never mind the fact that he himself mocks the reading, in the afterword to editions of the book released after 2005, in which he says he placated a male flight attendant who presented that read to him just to get free drinks. “Yeah sure, whatever,” he says, and reviews several other interpretations of the book, including my Freudian read, and dismisses all of them, like any good author should. However this isn’t simply the tactic of an artist who understands he must take a distance from his creation, for Palahniuk seems to truly disregard all of these analyses. Elsewhere in the afterword he refers to the book as simply a love story, between the narrator and Marla. And while I use the Freudian interpretation to support this reading of the film, that at base Fight Club is a love story, the message is far more clear in the book. Norton explicitly states that he, himself, and not “Durden,” loves Marla, and that he “manifests” Durden to find some way to be with her and, lastly, he wants to end project mayhem - at least in part - to protect her. But this isn’t enough for the woke. 

Jezebels article, Two Fight Club Virgins Watch the 1999 Cult Classic for the First Time, is a conversation between - can you guess? - a feminist and a gay man. While the homosexual read of Fight Club is all over the internet, even in some cases coming from the right, this one is exemplary of the tactic used to reappropriate male culture, and is illustrative of the hurdles women face when trying to analyze art. After raving about how turned on she was by Brad Pitt and his outfits, she discusses the “intimate” quiet moments between Durden and Norton and found herself hoping there would be a “romantic solution” to the tension between the two. She’s disappointed however, when in the last 20-30 minutes, the film takes a “turn to fascism.” Still, these “journalists” take it for granted that this film purposefully presents itself as “homoerotic,” even heavy-handedly so in its marketing - theyre surprised that the homosexual themes are not more prevalent, based on its “marketing.” What exactly that means, they don’t say. We can deduce perhaps the fact that a movie poster that excludes the female supporting role and a trailer that featured a shirtless Brad Pitt is, to Jezebel, inherently “homoerotic,” but i suspect there’s something more to that claim. The article was published in 2021, during the torrent of re-examinations of the film in the popular press, and at that time it was well known that Palahniuk was gay. Unlike the original viewers of the film, many of whom didn’t even know it was a book (Palahniuk mentions this in his afterword), these viewers went into the film in a completely different cultural climate. By 2021, Palahniuks homosexuality had been established for over a decade, and gays and topless women had been all over the press for years with rainbow flags and pussy hats combating “global fascism.” Hence the confusion and disappointment when the film takes its “fascist turn.” 

The desire of the female subject for inter-male tension resolution thorough homosexuality is some sort of misappropriation of the supposed “mothering instinct,” in which their sexual fantasies are enmeshed with their motherly desire for boys to “express their feelings.” This is a way for women to have their cake and eat it too, for the homosexualization of male relationships allows women to both coddle and sexualize adult males. The accessing and release of their feelings through gay sex is a “safe” way for women to experience the processing and release of male tension, aggression, existential confusion, and the search for a male father figure or role model (the last is overt in the film and referenced in the article in question). Keep in mind, this is all a female superimposition onto male relationships and bares absolutely no relation whatsoever to male friendship or the expression of male aggression.

Women know that turning boys and men gay is a way of castrating them in the interest of making civilization their playground of nails, perfume, and non-commital sex with unthreatening men. This conceptual castration, through superimposing homosexuality onto any male relationship in myth and fiction, is becoming *real* castration through gender reassignment surgery and administering hormone blockers to teenage boys. Once again, we see the satirical depiction of American culture at the beginning of Fight Club bearing out in frighteningly literal ways - Norton attends meetings with testicular cancer survivors who’ve had their balls cut off and are growing female breasts.

The third major woke misread of Fight Club, which tangentially incorporates the feminist and homosexual read, is that it critiques “toxic masculinity.” While toxic masculinity doesn’t really exist - it’s simply “masculinity” - we must take it for granted that we know what it means: anything that isn’t Woke. This misread is everywhere, including outside the pillars of the mainstream media, coming from regular social media users on forums and reddit and twitter, and in some cases finding massive amounts of endorsement and agreement. What this tells us is that the masses have so internalized woke ideology that often they don’t need the propaganda outlets to feed them the script for seeing the world through a distorted woke lens. As referenced above with the GQ article, this “critique of toxic masculinity” argument holds that because Chuck Palahniuk is gay and Edward Norton shoots himself in the face, the violence in Fight Club is nihilistic and intentionally depicted as such in the film/book. Durden is a fascist leader using toxically masculine traits to abuse his followers into submission and lead them to their own ruin, depicting violence as a dead end and a pathological way for men to process their emotions. 

In the New Yorker article “The Men Who Still Love Fight Club,” written in 2019, the author (the aforementioned “lurker” on incel and PUA message boards) discusses the film with the administer of a dating advice website for men. This website exists explicitly to reroute young straight men away from PUA, incel, and gamer communities online, and targets men of “nerd culture.” It must be assumed, and perhaps is stated outright somewhere, that this site was erected to combat a repeat of what happened with GamerGate. Regardless, Dr. Nerdlove and the New Yorker writer discuss Fight Club in the exact terms I’ve used to characterize the woke reading of the film: that it serves as a critique of Durden and project mayhem, and male violence in general. 

“In the final scene, Norton’s character “kills” Tyler, implicitly recognizing—and picking—a path between mindless middle-class consumerism and the nihilistic will to power of the terrorist. This act is crucial to the movie’s most articulate defenders: proof that “Fight Club” functions as a critique of Tyler, not a valorization.”

And later: 

“In theory, O’Malley (“Dr. Nerdlove”) said, “Fight Club” was a cautionary tale about where the adrenaline rush of “waking up” can take you. Tyler starts by preaching empowerment and authenticity but ends up sowing violence and terror, demanding cult-like subservience from the men he claims to be liberating.”

O’Malley also notes that he receives emails from and provides one-on-one coaching sessions to young men who bring up Fight Club so regularly that he has “come to expect it.”

All of these articles I’ve reviewed were released during the Trump administration, in the wake of the “snowflake” epidemic and the million women march. We have to understand this as a retaliation against the outpouring of, among other things, male cultural and political assertion that found its voice in the “grab them by the pussy” president Donald Trump. Fight Club still had, in 2019, a strong influence on male culture, and the mainstream clearly decided the best way to deal with it was an attempt to do confused and awkward conceptual acrobatics to try and make it about something it’s not. If we keep in mind my Freudian read from part 1 and apply Nietzsche to Fight Club, we can expose this attempted coup on the film and American culture for the lie that it is. With this read, we will better understand what is already implicitly in the film, and explicit in the book: that male violence is not a nihilistic response to the alienation of modern life, but a solution *to* the nihilism of consumer culture.

*This series will conclude with a read of Fight Club through the lens of Nietzsches philosophy of Zarathustra and the Last Men.*