Said David Fincher, quoted in "David Fincher Says ‘I’m Not Responsible’ for ‘Fight Club’ Being a Hit With Incels and the Far Right: ‘I Don’t Know How to Help’ People Who Idolize Tyler Durden" (Variety).
Fincher said he didn't make "Fight Club" for "incels and far-right groups." He's "not responsible for how people interpret things," he says. "Language evolves. Symbols evolve.... We didn’t make it for them, but people will see what they’re going to see in a Norman Rockwell painting, or Guernica."
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72 comments:
never watched that movie. Never will.
woo hoo.
Brad Pitt is always a negative influence!
nice accent
I think he won the fight when he was supposed to lose. Or vice versa.
Snatch is still the best gangster movie I have ever seen.
A fairly successful right-leaning news and finance site uses "Tyler Durden" as the pseudonym for generic content:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/drone-yemen-intercepted-over-southern-israel-un-warns-war-spreading-outside-gaza
Now, let's take a look at what the right did to The Punisher comics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punisher
And the 300 movie:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/300_(film)
And the notion of a red pill in The Matrix:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_and_blue_pill
Deal with it.
If he thinks that's bad nobody tell him about the red pill from the Matrix. His head will explode.
"Fight Club" is one of the weirdest white guy fantasy movies I've ever seen before in my life. If you put me or Ice Cube in that movie, it makes no sense whatsoever. It just totally breaks down. Even Kathleen Kennedy couldn't remake that movie with black actors and make it work. Along with David Mamet's film, Edmond, it says a lot about what's wrong with the white American male these days. Definitely more than they want to admit.
"Far right" blah, blah, blah
Reminds me of The Matrix and the Wacowskis (sp?) Red Pilled came from that movie and has been adopted by the right as a descriptor for seeing the world how it really is, usually in some way counter to left wing dogma. The Wacowskis, at least one of them, said they didn't intend it that way and wanted to reclaim it. But both the Matrix and Fight Club came out in the 90s. Maybe the artists intended their stories as breaking free from an oppressive right wing culture and what they didn't anticipate was people now feeling like they need to break free from an oppressive left wing culture.
I'm confused by "incel". Are we supposed to hate men who, either due to objective hopelessness or choices based upon the high emotional costs, are unable or unwilling to do what is necessary to get women to consent to sex? Why?
If all women were Bella Abzug, I would be an incel. If a lot of women are Bella Abzug-ish, a lot of men are going to be involuntarily celibate.
Incels are, in a certain sense, the male version of the women in Lysistrata who refused sex until the members of the opposite sex came to their collective senses.
You can't rely on David Fincher or his ilk to tell you which end is up.
never justify a non-problem
Sometimes a weird movie is just a weird movie.
Why do people in the entertainment and publishing always want to gatekeep and censor. And it applies double to the critics and the press in general. You worry that this or that might be liked by the "Wrong people"? Fuck you. The whole idea of an organic culture is beyond them. Instead, culture is a top down propaganda exercise. Every author and filmmaker must toe the party line or else.
I liked the author's response. He wrote his book, and people can interpet it the way they wish. Its not his job to attack them.
I saw the movie 20 years ago (15 years?) and liked it. I thought it was an attack American commericialism and how stifling and plastic American corporate life is. Particulary for young men. But who knows? Maybe that was 180 degrees from what the author intended.
Norman Lear created Archie Bunker as a stupid bigot to be shown up by Mike and guest star liberals, instead people liked Archie. IN the 90s one of the Trek shows created a villian and the fans loved him so much, the Producers got upset and made the character into a crazy pycho killer, a sorta "We'll show them".
SO authors intent doesn't equal audience interpetation. This seems to happen a lot when conservatives like some liberal entertainment/art product.
What does the novelist have to say about the matter?
I find it amusing that incels are fans of the movie- incels are pretty much all fat slobs, soy boys, or drug addicts who couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag, and most of them surely are Democrat voters, so Fincher is definitely hitting the audience he wanted to but is embarrassed by it today I am guessing. I understand that Fincher wanted to highlight the left-wing notion that corporations control the world, and in 1998 that probably was a left-wing belief system- but the Left seems quite happy today to have corporations run the world since they have gained firm political control of them in the intervening 25 years.
Sounds like the way Norman Lear (a family friend worked for him as a producer) used to whine about the viewers who didn't get that Archie Bunker was supposed to be the "bad guy" in All in the Family. America flat out loved him because he voiced many of the things we wanted said and some things we knew he shouldn't. To be fair we admired George Jefferson too, who was buffoonish in his own way.
Fun fact: The Jefferson's black neighbor, married to the fat white guy on the show, was IRL Lenny Kravitz's mother, who was married to a fat white guy in real life. My friend Vince grew up with Lenny in the California Boys Choir* and said she was the sweetest mom other than his own.
*Bonus fun fact: Vince and Lenny both sang back-up as children on the Alice Cooper track "My God" produced by Bob Ezrin just before Ezrin went to work on the Pink Floyd's The Wall (which also featured a children's choir, but English this time).
Stupid fact: I've never seen fight club. From the part of me that dislikes boxing (post-Mohammed Ali) and despises MMA.
Language evolves. Symbols evolve.... We didn’t make it for them, but people will see what they’re going to see in a Norman Rockwell painting, or Guernica.
Or the old "OK" hand sign?
David Fincher also made this in 1990, which inspired a lot of young men to dance with themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCZuYS-9qaw
Finchbird song interpreted:
I made a sequence of images which "just happens" to mimic the sequence valued by the far right and they like it and I made money that way and I don't know how to show they them that they like it because they are shit but though I like the money I made by glorifying them which made the movie popular and thus made me money (as I knew would happen and that's how I got backers) I am not shit. At least not the same kind. I have sunshine up my money.
Hollywood has made so many violent movies, and now there is an argument about "stochastic violence."
If your work can be judged to make violence somewhat more likely, especially among fanatical or mentally ill groups, and violence actually happens, you are responsible for the violence. If it's murder, you're a murderer. Scorcese?
Fight Club ends with a nihilistic orgy of destruction that I don’t think anyone takes literally, but if he wasn’t saying the best men have a bit of Tyler Durden in them, then what was he saying?
Joss Wheden couldn't understand why his "Firefly" series was such a big hit with conservatives.
I never saw fight club.
Acts of Vengeance (2017) was okay. There was a fight club in that. Not an outstanding favorite though.
I've never seen Fight Club. I will say that you can create art, but you have no control over how people will interpret it. People look at art through the lens of their own live experience.
Just look at all the musicians who freak out when a conservative politician uses one of their songs at a rally.
To those who have never seen the movie- you should- it is an excellent film. You won't be bored by it. Fincher has made some really good films, and this one was the best of them.
I saw a George Clooney interview a number of years ago when he was asked how he handled fame and crowds.
Clooney replied: (this is close to verbatim) 'If it gets too crazy, I’ll point in the distance and say, "hey look. there's Brad Pitt"! they all run away and I leave"'
Looks like I was too late to mention Snatch/Brad Pitt.
(Which is my number 1 favorite movie).
Fincher probably just wants to avoid getting cancelled. If anyone could prove he had any impure right-leaning thoughts he'd never work again. It's a CYA.
Also, if he really wanted people to understand that Pitt's Durden was a bad guy, he shouldn't have made such a mindfuck movie.
This is on brand. The far right tricked gullible Christians into thinking that the bible calls for the rich to reach insane heights of wealth, via subsidies, tax cuts and calls for poor people to eat their shit.
Are people who believe in literal interpretations of ancient fairy tales just more malleable than the general population?
People understand that Brad Pitt's character represents chaos and a rejection of society.
The actor is charismatic, the idea is compelling and, to steal from Virginia Postrel, the character is glamorous.
Palahnuik built the character up from his own life experience. The charismatic scumbag with good intentions gone awry is a staple character of his. Anyone whose life has taken a sideways turn knows these sort of guys. In real life though they are the fun guy, the guy that get you the coke for your binge weekend, the kid that suggests boosting a car cuz he saw how to do it on the internet, or in Chuck's real life, the guy that suggests going to real estate open houses and blind swallowing a handful of any prescription pills found in the bathroom or bedroom.
Tyler is a negative influence, but he's a better version of the guy some of us know. And I am bit shocked that Fincher doesn't understand that.
For those of you who have not seen Fight Club, it is not at all what you expect. It's one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. In this case do not judge a book by its cover. I'd not call it right wing or left wing, just plain weird.
Haruki Murakami weird.
Hayao Miyazaki weird.
“We are a generation of men raised by women.”
Fight Club was about boys of divorce. The latch-key kids whose moms went to work after divorce. The movie was very astute about Therapy Culture.
Crack is right. It is a white male movie. A satire since the latch-key kids of divorce didn’t quite turn into Project Mayhem. Perhaps ahead of its time as far as incels and far right groups. The closet Black version is Boys N The Hood. Doughboy and his brother Ricky don’t have a Dad. And their mom isn’t up to the job of doing it by herself.
If only the Narrator in Fight Club had Furious Styles as a father, it would have turned out better for him.
Roger Ebert opened his Fight Club review with: ""Fight Club" is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since "Death Wish". I always wondered if he slept through the second half.
Having actually seen the movie and understood what the author of the book was shooting for, I would just quote the author of the book: "You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world."
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club.
No, in the world of prevailing leftist values, I simply can't see how those truths would resonate with the average guy who didn't go into hock to get a BS degree but instead, works with tangible things and not just words. Why would he embrace those ideas just because he doesn't measure up to our chattering class womens' measure of a man? No six figure income? Scrub.
Tyler durden is literally a mental disease living inside the head of the narrator.
Why are lefty Incels upset about "Fight Club?" I've never seen it and Brad Pitt was only good in "A River Runs Through it." People have real things to worry about.
Things Tyler Durden said in fight club:
"You are not special. You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We’re all part of the same compost heap."
"You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet."
"I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we've been all raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't and we're slowly learning that fact. and we're very very pissed off."
So... I dunno.
Isn’t there a LOT of daylight between incels &the far right? Like, a multitude? Who the f/k did he make the movie for, then?! Ohhhh- not who… but, what.
$$$$$
Greed.
Be best …
Just another unexpectedly unintended consequence. This time a pretty harmless one though.
I used to be even more dismissive of incels then Yancey the Nancy boy 🤪. This NYU marketing professor and successful tech entrepreneur has a very good data driven theory on how the incel situation has been created unintentionally by our modern society.
https://www.profgalloway.com/boys-to-men/
I dunno.... I agree of course that he's not responsible for how people interpret his work. But this whole 'I don't know how to help them' comes across as a little self-involved, in a plaintive way. And his whole embrace of China editing the ending to his movie, into a Mao-approved social message for the audience is both weak and creepy.
Nobody needs your help, Jack. Just stick to making movies that sell, OK? And grow a pair.
"It’s impossible for me to imagine that people don’t understand that Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is a negative influence."
Until recently, it was impossible for many people to understand that the BLM organization or Students for Justice in Palestine are hate groups.
The funny thing is, when you think about it, 'Fight Club' as it pertains to young disenfranchised men, really enjoys more parallels with the extreme Left than it does with the extreme Right, when one considers the mentality and activities of Antifa. I guess the Fincher missed that low-hanging intellectual fruit. Who is it that has been focusing their attention on Cop City, for instance? Not the FBI dudes dressed up in their khakis as the Patriot Front, that's for sure. The only thing they're setting on fire is the occasional tiki torch, and then only when the cameras are there.
The Cop City Antifa radicals on the other hand, they're shooting up a storm and setting earth-moving equipment on fire. Not to mention the CHAS zone and other fun activities on the Left Coast. Like Tyler, they hold down fairly mundane jobs during the day - like, in elementary schools, teaching your kids - and come out at night to 'pahr - tay'.
Happened in wrestling all the time. Characters are introduced as one thing but the audience rejects them in that incarnation.
For example, when The Honky Tonk Man was introduced he was strongly pushed as a face. But the audience immediately hated him and he turned heel almost overnight, becoming one of the most successful heel wrestlers ever.
I haven't watched it in 30 years, but I assume it's still the same way. You can't easily control the reaction to a product once it's out in the public domain.
Pitt was good in "12 Monkeys." I even liked Wills in that one, and of course La Stowe--so fine, so fine.
I've never seen "Fight Club" through, though some of my friends--neither incels nor rightwing, most of them--told me it was very good. I don't need new dystopic fantasies by paranoids myself.
I've not seen Mamet's "Edmond" either, and likely will not, but it's nice to know someone is sampling the weirdness and warning the rest of us.
I idolize Cliff Booth.
"...both the Matrix and Fight Club came out in the 90s. Maybe the artists intended their stories as breaking free from an oppressive right wing culture and what they didn't anticipate was people now feeling like they need to break free from an oppressive left wing culture."
?!
We're still in an oppressive right wing culture, bub.
"I'm confused by 'incel.' Are we supposed to hate men who, either due to objective hopelessness or choices based upon the high emotional costs, are unable or unwilling to do what is necessary to get women to consent to sex?"
No. There are many men (and women) who are unable to find partners who will have sex with them. They just can't get laid. They're not necessarily "incels" in the sense the word has come to define. "Incels" are guys who can't get laid and who blame women for not wanting to fuck them. Incels consciously identify themselves as such to mark themselves as part of a group of men angry and resentful of women, often to the point of wanting to harm or kill women. The first prominent male incel was Elliot Rodger, who posted a series of YouTube videos lamenting his fate, asserting his hatred of the women he could not have, culiminating in his stating his intent to kill women...which he ultimately did, before he was killed in a barrage of police bullets. These guys should be shunned as resentful crybabies, some of whom are potentially a threat to others.
This is a toxic transformation of the original term and idea of incels. The term and description of incels was created in the 1990s by a bi-sexual woman who sought to create an online community of people--women and men--who were unable to connect with others in romantic, sexual pair/bonds. She meant it to be a forum for self-therapy and fellowship.
Fincher didn't create Fight Club, he adapted it to the Big Screen. Chuck Palahniuk created Fight Club, and if you can't discern the anti-consumerist and populist strains in the book, as well as its straight-into-my-veins attraction for young American men, you're just not paying attention. If Fincher doesn't like what he hath wrought, he shouldn't have wrought it.
Fincher did a good job, in my opinion, and Fight Club is a good movie. But its core strength is the story line, which isn't Fincher's work product.
He's "not responsible for how people interpret things," he says.
WTF kind of self respecting leftie dooshbag artist response is that? Go talk to the recording artists who have learned to micromanage their audience…
It was always entertaining to see millionaires, and in some cases billionaires, lecturing ordinary Americans about their materialism. Or to think that a movie that says violence is the answer to your existential angst would not be seized upon by young males who have a violent Streak by nature.
The far right tricked gullible Christians into thinking that the bible calls for the rich to reach insane heights of wealth, via subsidies, tax cuts and calls for poor people to eat their shit.
I never ceased to be amazed by the mind-reading abilities of the insane, far-left.
"Along with David Mamet's film, Edmond, it says a lot about what's wrong with the white American male these days."
Sorry, Crack, that's your fantasy, not ours.
I miss the BW 50s wrestling, both US and Mexican.
Even Kathleen Kennedy couldn't remake that movie with black actors and make it work.
I dunno, she could (and likely would) make it with heavy-set black women, set it in a Denny's and it would be like watching YouTube.
I liked Pitt in Fury. I haven't seen the other films.
I liked Pitt in Fury. I haven't seen the other films.
I liked him in Se7en, but that may've been more to Morgan Freeman than anything Pitt did.
Welcome to liberal la-la land. You had me at Pro-Choice. NOW lose your religion.
Well, Howard, if anyone would have a deep insight into Incels, it would be you.
I like Fight Club. It's a provocative movie. It's a pro-man movie, about fraternity and being strong. The movie kind of mocks the "chick flick" talking style of therapy, where you sit around and talk about your problems. It suggests a man therapy where you fight and feel better that way.
It's a punk or anarchist movie. I suspect a lot of men who dress up as Antifa like Fight Club. Men who bitch about corporate life and want to fight a war against the machine, or against "the man."
Not the best movie, but it's in my top 500. Fincher also did The Game which is fantastic as well.
Chick Fight
R · 2020 ‧ Comedy/Drama ‧ 1h 37m
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CHICK FIGHT Official Trailer (2020) Bella Thorne, Comedy Movie HD ...
Chick Fight I One Winner | There can only be one winner in the ...
Chick Fight (2020)
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4.8/10 · IMDb
38% · Rotten Tomatoes
When Anna joins an all-female, underground fight club to turn her mess of a life around, she soon discovers she's much more personally connected to the history of the club than she ever could have imagined.
Initial release: November 13, 2020
From my book...
479 Fight Club (1999) It's a movie about anomie, alienation, and isolation. It's about how obsessing over material things can make you feel spiritually empty inside. The film also darkly suggests that violence feels good. Even getting hit in the face feels good. Feeling pain is a lot better than feeling nothing. Pain reaffirms for these characters that they are alive.
Anybody who knows anything about formalized male bonding knows this is quite a common ritual, from fraternity hazing to marines screaming at you. Suffering makes you feel alive, but it also unites people. Early in the film the main character tries empathetic, feminine suffering. He rejects that, and decides to get in touch with his masculine side. What makes this film great is that Edward Norton is not a tough-looking man. He’s not muscular. But he is willing to fight, bleed, die. Reminds me of the boxing scene in Cool Hand Luke. This film also reminded me of Persona, the idea that scalding water cuts through all that pretentious b.s. "No, don't!" Pain is real.
https://feminisminindia.com/2021/11/25/female-representation-in-fight-club-examining-the-layered-gender-politics-of-the-film/
Howard: "Tyler durden is literally a mental disease living inside the head of the narrator."
Good to see that someone else read the book. And quite literally an excellent use of the term "literally."
Ultimately, it's just a romantic black comedy with a twist. The narrator is rescued from Jungian archetype insanity by his love for Marla.
!!Tyler Durden also writes for Zerohedge??
I was getting David Lynch and Fincher confused and considered that both Dune and Fight Club and the Matrix have similar themes about young males (white, I guess though I don't think it matters all that much) "waking up" (WOKE?) to take control of their own lives/destiny. Throw Taxi Driver in there.
I think most people innately realize that male idleness is a significant threat to social stability and alot of effort is put into controlling and steering them into socially acceptable paths. These movies are provocative because they appear to be saying, on the surface, that there is a third way besides drug-dulled idleness, or socially acceptable behavior.
Sounds like the way Norman Lear (a family friend worked for him as a producer) used to whine about the viewers who didn't get that Archie Bunker was supposed to be the "bad guy" in All in the Family.
========
bringing discussion circle back to Trump > is Trump 21st century Archie Bunker?
Just as the MSM cannot say "tax cuts" without automatically appending "for the rich," for the past decade or so, they also cannot say "the right" without inserting "far."
There has to be a segment of the population that is merely "the right," no? Probably not, since the Overton Window has been picked up and carried two towns over by this point. If Bari Weiss and Bill Maher are starting to think they're on the right (or are being perceived that way), then of course garden variety conservatives are now the "far right."
William F. Buckley must be rolling over in his grave. He kicked the John Birchers out of the conservative movement for their racism only for the entire movement to be labelled racist fify years later.
It's dishonest and it's projection. In only the last month, the left (and not just the far left) have proven themselves to be far more hate-filled, far more racist, far more bigoted than those they project those pejoratives on.
That said, I read the book and saw the movie. Enh, on both counts.
"I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we've been all raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't and we're slowly learning that fact. and we're very very pissed off." That, observing all that, we still can't make black people be like us.
Jupiter said...
"Sorry, Crack, [the movie Edmond is] your fantasy, not ours."
HA! David Mamet wrote that - a very-public, very white, very Jewish, and very conservative playwright - not me. And he didn't write it FOR me, either. He wrote it for "a white-collar worker,..." (If I would add anything it's "after a visit to a fortune teller,...") Anyway, he wrote it for white guys - and he wrote it for a reason. A reason most of you want to avoid wrestling with, like the plague ("He concludes that by conquering his fears, he might lead a better life.") Did any of you notice, how quickly this guy tried to turn one of the few films out there about white males - specifically - into an attack on me? I did:
This poor thing probably needs to watch that movie more than anyone else on this thread.
Nobody’s mentioned Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde yet. The book riffs on that theme a bit. But the movie pretty much filtered out those elements.
Saint Croix, I think you have completely misread FIGHT CLUB.
Jordan Peterson: Be a monster, then learn how to control it.
As for Tyler Durin being a negative influence: can anyone really argue that the unnamed narrator did not become a better person (at the end) due to Tyler's influence?
Several problems with internet discussions:
1) Dumb people who can't read things in context
2) People jump in the middle of convesations and don't understand its the middle
3) People think every sentence stands alone. They don't.
4) Bad faith actors put the dumbest or worst interpetation on every statement
5) People just want to engage in "pushback" and make stupid arguments and statements
Time is short, and comments have to short. You can't keep repeating stuff and putting in endless qualifiers, so lazy dumb readers can understand. Or put things in BIG BOLD LETTERS, so they can understand.
Tyler Durden looks like Brad Pitt, is a leader among men and gets the ladies. Oh and he blows up the banks.
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