Hold up - you mean there are people who watch Fight Club and don’t realise that Tyler Durden is meant to be full of shit?
I mean, his doctrine of radical individualism is a sham that ultimately reduces his followers to faceless conformity. This isn’t deep metatextual wankery - it’s the literal text of the film.
How do you see the film and not get that?
My ex didn’t get this. He loves Tyler durden. I’ve never seen fight club so I DIDN’T KNOW.
Yeah, in the film he’s a total con-man. His grand speeches sound good if you don’t think about them too deeply, but they’re not meant to be insightful - they’re meant to be a snake-oil salesman’s patter, calculated to bamboozle dumb, angry young men into doing his bidding.
Trouble is, they’re sufficiently well-written that apparently they work on the dumb, angry young men in the audience, too.
I’ve actually written about this academically! There’s a really specific genre I call bro cinema that includes fight club, all of kubricks work, some Scorsese, and Tarantino (all of which I love TBH.) These directors don’t explicitly condemn toxic masculinity and instead trust the audience to have COMMON SENSE and realize that Alex from A Clockwork Orange or Tyler Durden or Travis Bickle are horrific misogynists. But without the film telling the audience how to feel about these characters, men misinterpret the objectivity as glorification. Fight Club is about how shitty masculinity is, but it’s been warped by men grasping for justification for their misogyny
I JUST REALIZED that this is why I love Fight Club but I hate that my dad loves Fight Club