Fight Club 15 Years Later: Marla, Men's Rights, and the Internet ⇒

Eric D. Snider, pithy and brilliant as always, for Complex:

To watch Fight Club now, 15 years after its release, is to be amused at how much the Narrator sounds like today’s Men’s Rights Activists and #GamerGate numbnuts.

And later:

What I didn’t fully appreciate at 25 that I do at 40 is that Fight Club doesn’t endorse Tyler Durden’s nihilism, it mocks it. Tyler is an extremist, taking good ideals too far and losing the moral high ground. Peeing in soups and blowing up buildings isn’t rebellion; it’s idiotic and pointless. Tyler Durden’s followers are too blinded by their perceived wrongs and grievances to see that.

Bingo. I have always had an uncomfortable relationship with David Fincher’s Fight Club for this exact reason: the film serves to reinforce the very thing it critiques. The fight club in Fight Club makes fun of male bravado, and yet countless dorm room walls have been adorned with the infamous “rules” as if they were words to live by.

Great art should confront the issues of the day. As Snider points out, Fight Club is still resonating, for better or worse.