Looking back, thinking forward: Fight Club’s 20th Anniversary.
Sharing some of the best content around content mindfulness I looked at this year. Particularly ones I thought they might be clues for bigger things to think about. This one is about one movie that’s influenced men’s identities over the last 20 years. Fight Club.
The Men Who Still Love Fight Club – By Peter Baker of The New Yorker.
Books and movies can create cultural shifts.
If there is one contemporary book in the last twenty years that has connected and influenced men around ideas of masculinity, it’s Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.
A once hardly noticed book that found its cult following via rentals when it became a movie starring Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden, the alter-ego of Ed Norton’s nameless character.
This article reflects on the movie’s 20th anniversary and how the movie has influenced male events like the pick-up artist movement, complaints about the “loss” of masculinity in the age of late capitalism, the rise of toxic masculinity and why many men quote Tyler Durden as a voice of their frustration.
Though correlation is not causation, it is interesting to look at this movie and wonder how its content and themes may have influenced the rise of male-centric movements in both their good and bad forms.
Men and masculinkity post Fight Club.
Post Fight Club, we’ve seen the men’s rights movement advocating more rights in divorce, to the seemingly bitter and often misogynistic (Men Going Their Own Way) MGTOW. A group that acts more like gender separatists.
It’s also tempting to look at the self-committed celibates, called Incels, to violent hate groups that mirror Fight Club’s Project Mayhem as proxies by which males are expressing frustration with their changing roles and identity.
Check out the article about Fight Club from The New Yorker