us3r

the name stuck sorry

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professional procrastinator. computer enjoyer. 1-800-didge.


PhormTheGenie
@PhormTheGenie

So there's a bit of a meme/post floating around various social media feeds where Fight Club is being held up as an example of Gen-X basically being ungrateful and ridiculous. The premise is that the protagonist of the story "goes insane" because his job is boring, and that such a response is unfathomable because he has a high income and job security.

And, like...

Pinches the bridge of her nose while exhaling

Look, the conflict that's being overlooked here in the current discussion is more or less the issue that's been eating at me for years, so I'm going to talk about it at least a little.

The issue the protagonist has in this story - and this is all but made boldfaced obvious if you watch it - isn't that he's bored. It's that he's hollow.

Yes, he has employment. Yes, he has money. Yes, he has a home. But the cost he's paying is literally everything else. The idea is that he has to squeeze himself into a tiny little box, play to expectations, and give up having anything resembling an identity, a community, or purpose. Instead, he's been conditioned to be a middle-manager constantly feeding the engine of corporate life.

And that's it.

He's not kinda tired of it, he's unfulfilled. And while the actions he takes in response are ill-advised, the underlying cause isn't any less valid a problem.

The main issue that's at play is that while he has access to stable income, a job, and housing - These are conditional. These are not rights, these are things he's been given under the pretense that he's not going to step out of line. He tries to replace meaning in his life with material objects he can purchase, because while he has money, he has no purpose. There comes a moment when the elation of 'success' fades and one understands that it was someone else's definition of success the whole time.

So now he's in this situation where he feels hollow and empty, without purpose, identity, or community. But to seek any of those things would be to put that financial security and job safety at risk.

You think - particularly back in the 90s - you could have that kind of employment and status while being queer?? Shit, even today, that's hard. There's a reason that once people transition they find themselves on a PIP, being told the quality of their work has suffered, and that people are uncomfortable around them.

Your purpose is made work. If you're home and you have free time, you should be thinking about work. If you have friends, they should be work friends. You want fulfillment? Go buy something. The fact that these endeavors don't actually provide satisfaction, purpose, or comfort is the point. The protagonist in this movie snaps because he's built his whole identity around the illusion of success and fulfillment provided by a hypercapitalistic system and never questioned that - Seeing the hollowness it provided him is more than enough to break him.

And that's the whole point. You either play by the rules, or you get marginalized to hell and back.

It wasn't that he was bored, it was that he was willingly drinking poison, and the way out felt like slitting his own throat.

Addendum: I feel like I have to at least tangentially address the fact that this movie was also hijacked by people trying to ply it as an endorsement of toxic masculinity, which is another misread in my opinion. The protagonist's response to this conflict isn't an advisable, or even functional, one. That's made clear by the narrative, but there are still chuds who thought the message was ultimately, "Real men go out and punch each other".


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in reply to @PhormTheGenie's post:

Yeah. The circumstances of my youth hollowed me out for different reasons and once their influence was excised, but not immediately replaced by these much more common circumstances for being hollowed out, I found myself in a very dangerous place. Empty and hungry with only the mental illnesses I was imbued with to act as a limiting factor. Slowly pasting bits and pieces of a "self" together and that meager understanding of existence searing the desire to never get into a situation in which any of what was "me" could be muted or erased again. I find the idea of selling my body and/or mind for the benefit of someone's pocketbook incompatable with my desire for life.

When I first saw Fight Club, a few years after its release, I knew it wasn't meant for me but understood the message of it implicitly. The power fantasy of "I am Jack's smirking revenge" must've made so many unwilling cogs shudder in their gear housings.

Yeah, I very much understand where you're coming from with this. It's extremely hard to pull a self together in the first place, let alone being threatened to have it yanked away and expunged. And so often we have to make that trade in order to get the essentials for survival.

I distinctly remember seeing Fight Club as a Freshman in college, when I was on the verge of making a lot of discoveries about the world and myself. It sure did make my brain rattle around a lot in my skull.

I can only imagine what it did to less pliant individuals.

I feel like something particularly insidious about the rot of capitalism in the US is that hollywood has spent 30 years putting out movies about the hollow, soul-crushing systemic structures of the modern world, and popular audiences are still struggling to diagnose how those characters could possibly fall like they do.

I saw it described elsewhere as being a case where Gen-X and Older Millennials have been denied the top of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs (Denied Love and Belonging, Self-Esteem, and Self-Actualization)

But then, younger Millennials, Gen Z, and on from there are just being denied the entire damned pyramid down to the foundation of Physiological Needs.

When you're unable to even get housing, food, and health care, it makes sense that you'd regard soul-crushing, identity-destroying work as being an improvement, just for the fact that it pays the bills.

to make things worse, you get bombarded by a nonstop cacophony of grindset memes and influencer fairytales of success.

and when you're thoroughly broken, come the fascists with promises of community and purpose

I generally have pretty mixed feelings about the discourse around this film because Chuck Palahnuik is iirc pretty right leaning so I find the positioning of him as some sort of anti-toxic masculinity hero a little challenging to believe (and usually the supporting evidence given is just "he's gay" which doesn't prove anything) but I really like this reading.

I completely agree with you on this one. I feel like while the underlying issues that cause the action in the film are what they are - but the response taken by the main character & co. are preeeeeeety toxic. So like... I guess, my interpretation would be shitty responses/answers to admittedly shitty problems in that regard? I'm a little jumbled up in the head right now, so not sure if that scans - But I totally get what you're saying.

And thank you much, too!

What's funny is that Fight Club's take isn't even new; in the 1950s they were talking about conformity and meaninglessness in suburban careerist America; the organization man, the man in the grey flannel suit. And people made the same counterarguments, that you have all this stuff, you have the highest standard of living in the world, etc etc... and then the following generation, perceiving the emptiness and soullessness of this and the system at large, resisted it in a big way.

The first blockbuster pharmaceutical product in the US was meprobamate, an anti-anxiety drug; something like 5% of the population was on it in the mid-1950s. To be swiftly replaced by diazepam. People couldn't deal with their empty button-down lives and they were popping pills in order to tolerate their existence. Again, nothing we haven't seen before...

You know, somehow I never picked up on the fact that this was happening as far back at the 50s. But on reflection the 1950s housewife bored out of her mind and drugged up to avoid thinking about how unfulfilled she is became a stereotype/trope for a reason.

It's kind of shocking, and also simultaneously unsurprising, that there is such widespread nostalgia for these past eras - Not so much because they were good, but rather because they were less shit.