Tired, but I cannot stop thinking about the phenomenon of film bros completely missing the point of Fight Club and thus glorifying what was intended as ironic, to the point of turning "snowflake" into a legitimate insult. I feel like they would be so much happier if they could get past their biases and judgment and think critically about the points of this movie.
I know this applies to every stereotypical demonstration of toxic masculinity, but I think where Fight Club differs from these movies is the nuisance. The protagonist isn't a misogynist, he isn't a stereotypical asshole, and he doesn't seem violent when the movie begins. He's a likeable, severely average guy when the audience meets him and Tyler Durden on the plane. He's stuck having this disillusionment that "The American Dream" does not exist and was never for people like him. He's going through this midlife crisis, realizing that his only satisfaction and worth is based on frivolous consumer bullshit. He's attending support groups (and empathetically hugging crying men!!) just to have his emotional needs met.
The narrator isn't some macho action hero. He's in the pit of depression, battling insomnia, and romanticizing his own death. The fact that so many men can look at this character and go "He's so me", if you get past the arguably comedic irony of it all, is just so sad.
Like. They have the point in their hand, and they still can't comprehend what they're looking at. There's a probably a dozen or so different themes you could take from this movie, but what struck me the most was how desperate all these men were to belong. Chuck Palahniuk wrote about how women had all these novels about connection, and bonding. "These were all books that presented a social model for women to be together. To sit and tell their stories. To share their lives. But there was no novel that presented a new social model for men to share their lives."
This whole story was based on the premise that men need to bond. To connect. The fact that Chuck Palahniuk decided a mutual exchange of violence was the best way to do that is a whole other conversation.
Only men could sit through a two-hour movie that regards the dangers of cult mentality, and toxic mentally, and come out with the idea that they are action heroes.
Fight Club is about human connection. Men need to start talking to their friends, and expressing their feelings instead of misunderstanding satire, and using it as an excuse to insult anyone they don't see eye to eye with.
