Mark Zuckerberg talks to Joe Rogan about his dissatisfaction with the "neutered" corporate world.

 

The clip I'm extracting is part of a long discussion of what jujitsu has done for Zuckerberg. He says:

I do think a lot of our society has become very, like, I don't know, I, I don't even know the right word for it, but it's, like, it's kinda, like, neutered or, like, emasculated and.. there's, like, a whole energy in [jujitsu] that I, I think it's, it is very healthy in the right balance. I mean, I think part of the reason, I mean, every one of the things that I enjoy about it is I feel like I can just like express myself.... It's like when you're running a company, people typically don't want to see you being like this ruthless person who's like, just like, I'm just gonna like crush the people I'm competing with.... I think in some ways when people see me competing in the sport, they're like, oh no, that's the real Mark.... It's like, that's the real one.... I think a lot of the corporate world is, is like pretty culturally neutered. And... I grew up, I have three sisters, no brothers, I have three daughters, no sons. So I'm like surrounded by girls and women like my, my whole life....

He masculinized himself through martial arts — or so he says to Joe Rogan. Later, they will discuss hunting... with bows and arrows. Zuck exults in his discovery of masculinity: 

So I think, I don't know, there's, there's something, the the, the kind of masculine energy I think is, is good....

Masculinity is good. There. He's said it. But he must hedge: 

And obviously, You know, society has plenty of that, but, but I think corporate culture was really like trying to get away from it. And I do think that there's just something, it's like, I don't know, the, these, all these forms of energy are good. And I think having a culture that like celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive.

That goes on my list of things he may have discussed with Trump. Absurdly, this song played in my head:

Back to Zuck:

And that's, that has been, that has been a kind of a positive experience for me. Just like having a thing that I can just like do with my guy friends and... it's just like, we just like beat each other a bit. I dunno. It's, it's good....

Fight Club! 

And then, no surprise, Zuckerberg must acknowledge the women who have called for a reshaping corporate culture. He switches into a neutered version of himself and says what every non-jujitsu fiber of his being knows he must say:

It's, I like, I do think that I, if you're a a woman going into a company, it probably feels like it's too masculine. And it's like there isn't enough of the kind of the energy that that, that you may naturally have. And it probably feels like there are all these things that are set up that are biased against you. And that's not good either, because you want, you want women to be able to succeed and and, like, have companies that can unlock all the value from having great people no matter, you know, what their background or gender, you know.

Having mouthed the article of faith — women have a rightful place in corporations and corporations work better when they give women what is owed — Zuckerberg critiques the excesses of feminism:

But, but I think these things can all always go a little far. And I think it's one thing to say we want to be kind of like welcoming and make a good environment for everyone. And I think it's another to basically say that masculinity is bad. And I, I just think we kind of swung culturally to that part of the, the kind of the spectrum where, you know, it's all like, okay, masculinity is toxic. We have to like get rid of it completely. It's, like, no, like it's, both of these things are good, right? It's like you want, like, feminine energy, you want masculine energy. Like I, I think that that's like you're gonna have parts of society that have more of one or the other. I think that that's all good. But, but I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung towards being this somewhat more neutered thing. And I didn't really feel that until I got involved in martial arts, which I think is still a more, much more masculine culture....

Is Zuckerberg truly masculine? He longs for masculinity, but it's a longing that seems to arise from a feeling that there is too much femininity and that femininity is enervating. There's something strange — something Californian — about all this discussion of "energy" and something sad about feeling "surrounded by girls and women like my whole life" and seeking a cure in a fight club. Zuckerberg does have a father — and he seems like a fine man who was entirely present in the family. Maybe Zuckerberg is doing a performance for Joe Rogan (and for Trump). But all that jujitsu training sounds like a lot of work. I'll assume for now that his search for masculinity is sincere. And quite aside from his physique and his psyche, his thoughts on gender energy in the corporate world matter. Some of us might think the workplace should be gender neutral — just treat everyone as an individual! — but he seems to have some woo-woo ideas about the balance of masculine and feminine energy. 

"It’s impossible for me to imagine that people don’t understand that Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is a negative influence."

"People who can’t understand that, I don’t know how to respond and I don’t know how to help them."

 
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."

"[Film] critic Sheila O’Malley wrote about the phenomenon of 'back-ting,' in which an actor is turned away from the audience...."

"'To this day, I am fascinated by moments when actors turn their backs on the camera. It is actor as storyteller, actor as auteur.' Rewatching... Fight Club, I was surprised by just how many moments of back-ting there were, the most mesmerizing of which occurs in an early scene, when the eponymous club is just starting to gain traction. Tyler Durden (Pitt) is simply walking through a bar to the tune of 'Going Out West' by Tom Waits."



"But in this singular moment, we can see, even from behind, that Tyler has what the unnamed narrator played by Edward Norton lacks: unbridled, unending confidence and a clarity of self. 'All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me' Tyler says later, sitting with the stillness of a coiled snake that’s waiting to strike."

From "Every Brad Pitt Movie Performance, Ranked A closer look at the Oscar-nominated actor’s body of work" by Angelica Jade Bastién (who goes to a lot of trouble)(in Vulture).

In case you're wondering, "Fight Club" is ranked #6. #1 is not "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," the 2019 movie for which Pitt received an Oscar nomination. That is #3. #2 is another 2019 movie, "Ad Astra." And #1 is "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" (from 2007)

Anyway... "back-ting"... that amused me. And it fits with today's mini-theme, hyphens (here and here). If you'd coined the word, would you have written "bacting" or "backting" instead of "back-ting"? It's hard to do portmanteau words, and here you need to find a way to make readers see "back" and "act," with the "k" and the "t" in some weird conflict. Worth it though! Because acting while turned away from the camera is something you have to think of noticing.

Ah! Here's the original Sheila O'Malley column, "Back-ting." Excerpt:

"Over the summer, I had a series of phone calls with 'Fight Club' enthusiasts: the type of superfans with 'Fight Club' tattoos and pets named after 'Fight Club' characters...."

"[T]heir focus was overwhelmingly on the movie’s first act: on the nameless protagonist’s sense of ennui and adriftness; his mistaken assumption that endless work hours or the purchases that they enabled him to make will bring him meaning; his intertwined currents of emptiness and longing. One man described how 'Fight Club' helped him toward the realization that he didn’t have to work all the time, and didn’t have to worry so much about what other people thought about his life choices. Another talked about how the movie helped motivate him to specialize in existentialism when he pursued a master’s degree in psychology—and, eventually, to write and self-publish a novel about a bitter office worker who... goes into therapy. At first, the office worker hates therapy, but eventually his sessions help him work his way to a new level of honesty.... To my mind, stories like these—stories of men driven to take some ownership of their fate, but without seeking out opportunities to inflict pain on others—are more interesting and vital than anything in 'Fight Club.' But how many people would want to watch these stories?"

Writes Peter C. Baker in "The Men Who Still Love 'Fight Club'" (The New Yorker)(on the occasion of the 20-year anniversary of the release of the movie "Fight Club").

I love the movie "Fight Club," by the way, and even after 20 years I don't like seeing the spoiler that's at the link (and not at this post). It's something I had an extremely powerful reaction to when I first saw the movie (intense, all-over bodily chills) and experienced in almost the same way when I re-watched the film. But Baker is very contemptuous of this movie, and I have to share this paragraph:

Of course, “Fight Club”... has its share of female fans. But it’s also a symbol for certain insistent myopias of masculinity. The story has just one female character of any significance: Marla Singer (portrayed in the film by Helena Bonham Carter). The nameless narrator pines for Marla, though we never see him getting to know her well; Tyler uses her for acrobatic sex followed by emotional neglect. What does it mean for a man to tell his girlfriend that this, of every movie in the world, is his favorite, or the one with the most to say about gender today? [The on-line dating advice columnist Dr. NerdLove says that — a]mong women who get in touch with [him], “It’s kind of, like, Yeah, if his favorite author is Bret Easton Ellis, his favorite movie is ‘Fight Club,’ and he wants to talk about Bitcoin or Jordan Peterson—these are all warning signs.”

Warning signs of what? That he longs for a meaningful relationship with a woman and sees emptiness in endlessly working in a soul-sucking job and buying things from the IKEA catalogue?

The idea and the visual images of making soap from liposuctioned human fat is already there in the book and movie "Fight Club," so...

... is it anything at all for an artist to actually do it — make the soap and even sell what is actually usable soap?

Vice tells us that the artist, Julian Hetzel, is Dutch and got his human fat from plastic surgeons in the Netherlands and that the final soap product only has 10% human fat. The artist clumsily instructs us about the intended meaning of his product (which is called Schuldfabrik):

"We decided to work with fat as a material that represents guilt or that contains guilt and to understand, can this be used as a resource?... Can we use guilt as something productive? Can we profit from our own guilt? How to make money with guilt."

Is it guilt or shame that drives people to liposuction? I would have said shame. Maybe it's a bad translation from the Dutch. According to Wikipedia:

Guilt is a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person believes or realizes—accurately or not—that they have compromised their own standards of conduct or have violated a universal moral standard and bear significant responsibility for that violation.

Wikipedia illustrates the concept with this image:



That's "Soul in Bondage" by Elihu Vedder, a painting from the 1890s. Is that more helpful in understanding guilt than Hetzel's soap made from liposuctioned fat? Vedder's soul doesn't seem to have any ideas about how to use guilt as something productive or how to make money at all.

If you choose to respond to the artist's prompt and analyze the meaning of his making soap from human fat, please take into account the historical antecedents. Here's the Wikipedia article, "Soap made from human corpses." Excerpts:

"Turns out America today, in its sense of randomness and meaninglessness and indifference to consequences, is like 'The Great Gatsby.' And like 'Fight Club.' It’s also like 'No Country for Old Men.'"

"It’s even like 'True Detective,' though we don’t learn why," Carlos Lozada complains about the "scattershot in her cultural references" in Michiko Kakutani's new book, "The Death of Truth."

Lozada — in "Can truth survive this president? An honest investigation" (WaPo) — continues:

But she is more focused when exploring the left-wing pedigree of post-truth culture. Even though she laments that objectivity has declined ever since “a solar system of right-wing news sites orbiting around Fox News and Breitbart News consolidated its gravitational hold over the Republican base,” Kakutani calls out lefty academics who for decades preached postmodernism and social constructivism, which argued that truth is not universal but a reflection of relative power, structural forces and personal vantage points. In the early culture wars, centered on literary studies, postmodernists rejected Enlightenment ideals as “vestiges of old patriarchal and imperialist thinking,” Kakutani writes, paving the way for today’s violence against fact in politics and science.

“It’s safe to say that Trump has never plowed through the works of Derrida, Baudrillard, or Lyotard (if he’s even heard of them),” Kakutani sniffs. But while she argues that “postmodernists are hardly to blame for all the free-floating nihilism abroad in the land,” she concedes that “dumbed-down corollaries” of postmodernist thought have been hijacked by Trump’s defenders, who use them to explain away his lies, inconsistencies and broken promises.

Even as Kakutani plows through all that left-wing postmodernism, Lozada plows through 4 more books bemoaning the moribundity of truth.

I'm going to read the Kakutani book. I'm interested in all the cultural references! "Fight Club," "Great Gatsby" — that's right up my alley! And I'm fine with quick jumps that show the author's mind at work. It's what I do, and I'd like to read somebody else doing it.

I wouldn't use the adjective "scattershot," because I feel the references are coming at me, and I don't feel as though I'm being shot at, but as if various ideas are being thrown my way, and I'll see what I can catch, that is, what seems right to me. I know that sounds, ironically, like a reinforcement of the thesis that we're living in a post-truth world. But, no. Not really.

The author of "Fight Club," Chuck Palahniuk says he coined the term "snowflake" and he stands by it.

After Kellyanne Conway used the term recently, the Evening Standard called up Palahniuk to ask him about it:

“It does come from Fight Club,” he confirmed down the phone from his home in Oregon. “There is a line, ‘You are not special. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.’”

In Fight Club, Tyler Durden leads a generation of emasculated men to rediscover their inner strength by beating the hell out of each other.

Two decades later, Palahniuk sees the modern generation as delicate flowers more than ever. “There is a kind of new Victorianism,” he said. “Every generation gets offended by different things but my friends who teach in high school tell me that their students are very easily offended.”...

Chuck says this is a problem with the Left, not the Right. “The modern Left is always reacting to things,” he opined. “Once they get their show on the road culturally they will stop being so offended.” He added self-effacingly: “That’s just my bulls**t opinion.”

Asked about Donald Trump, Palahniuk said “I’m going to pass on that one.” So who's the snowflake? Is he one of the hidden Trump supporters? But I can understand a culture-critic wanting to avoid any partisan alliance. He's not necessarily bullied into silence. It can be a way of making your own writing better. It's what I call cruel neutrality.

"It's Brad Pitt in 'Fight Club.' That's the body blokes ask for."

"Yesterday: Roided out bodybuilders. Today: V-lined ab-focused fat free men ready for their HD selfie."

Brandon Hardesty plays "Goodfellas" as Jimmy Stewart and Stephen Hawking.

It's #2 in a series that is up to #56. Why haven't I noticed this YouTube channel before? This adorable reenactment is quite brilliant (with the familiar "Goodfellas" language):



The video that got my attention is Hardesty's reenactment of the famous bunker scene from the movie "Downfall." This was embedded at BoingBoing a few days ago and linked in the NYT last night. There's that annoying German production company that got YouTube to take down all the "Downfall" parodies that used the original footage from their movie. I hope they don't come after this use of the script.

I'm not going to watch the other 54 videos all at once, but I'm going to get to all of them. I was going to watch the "Fight Club" one, but I see that it's the scene that reveals the key secret, and I can't play it while Meade is in the room. He's never watched "Fight Club," though we've started the DVD a couple times.

(How long is it supposed to take to get your new lover/spouse to get through all of the DVDs you deem essential? I don't think we're going to live that long.)

"My favorite thought-piece about Ferris Bueller is the 'Fight Club' theory..."

Do not read on if you have not already seen "Fight Club." The way the secret in that movie is revealed is the most thrilling cinematic moment ever for me. Watch "Fight Club" tonight. Watch "Fight Club" as a double feature with "Ferris Bueller" and then come back here and discuss the incredibly cool theory. Or if you're a properly prepared member of our popular culture and have seen "Fight Club" and "Ferris Bueller," then read on and join the conversation now.

The quote is from MetaTalk via Throwing Things:

My favorite thought-piece about Ferris Bueller is the "Fight Club" theory, in which Ferris Bueller, the person, is just a figment of Cameron's imagination, like Tyler Durden, and Sloane is the girl Cameron secretly loves.

One day while he's lying sick in bed, Cameron lets "Ferris" steal his father's car and take the day off, and as Cameron wanders around the city, all of his interactions with Ferris and Sloane, and all the impossible hijinks, are all just played out in his head. This is part of the reason why the "three" characters can see so much of Chicago in less than one day -- Cameron is alone, just imagining it all.

It isn't until he destroys the front of the car in a fugue state does he finally get a grip and decide to confront his father, after which he imagines a final, impossible escape for Ferris and a storybook happy ending for Sloane ("He's gonna marry me!"), the girl that Cameron knows he can never have.

Ha ha. Brilliant. (I've never seen a Metafilter comment with that many "favorite" votes — 381, including mine.)

I wonder what other movies are susceptible to the "Fight Club" theory.

AND: For law fans, here's the AskMetafilter thread aimed at listing all the crimes Ferris Bueller and his friends commit during "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

Is my caveman a murderer?

All right, this looks like another one of those articles that made Bob R say "So how long until NYT subscriptions drop down to the level where every subscriber gets an article about them like this? Althouse already had hers." (In case you're new here, my article was this one.)

Anyway, today's Article About You is "The New Age Cavemen and the City":

LIKE many New York bachelors, John Durant tries to keep his apartment presentable — just in case he should ever bring home a future Mrs. Durant. He shares the fifth-floor walk-up with three of his buddies, but the place is tidy and he never forgets to water the plants.

The one thing that Mr. Durant worries might spook a female guest is his most recent purchase: a three-foot-tall refrigerated meat locker that sits in a corner of his living room. That is where he keeps his organ meat and deer ribs.

Is it one of those refrigerator cases with a glass front, so that the hanging meat is a bit of an art display? If I were the woman in that scenario, the first thing I'd think is: How do I know those are not human body parts? Is that the last woman he brought home? I'd be thinking about Jeffrey Dahmer, who had all those human parts in his regular old Milwaukee apartment refrigerator. But now, here's a meat locker in the living room in New York. Is this some kind of artsy upgrade on Dahmer? Would I vocalize my questions and be the sort of nervy comedienne I've always wanted to be or would I be out of there?

As it unfolds, Durant is supposedly living like a caveman. In New York City. At least in the ways that he's decided he can, because, of course, the caveman didn't have a meat locker or even a place to plug one in.

The caveman lifestyle, in Mr. Durant’s interpretation, involves eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors faced between hunts. Vegetables and fruit are fine, but he avoids foods like bread that were unavailable before the invention of agriculture. Mr. Durant believes the human body evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and his goal is to wean himself off what he sees as many millenniums of bad habits.

So... it's a diet?

These urban cavemen also choose exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon.

A diet + exercise. Because you know you need exercise too. So buy meat in a store and jump up and down, and it's pretty similar to survival-level hunting on the tundra.

In a city crowded with vegetarian restaurants and yoga studios, the cavemen defy other people’s ideas of healthy living. There is an indisputable macho component to the lifestyle.

“I didn’t want to do some faddish diet that my sister would do,” Mr. Durant said.

Durant wanted a manly faddish diet.

The caveman lifestyle in New York was once a solitary pursuit. But Mr. Durant, who looks like a cheerful Jim Morrison, with shoulder-length curly hair, has emerged over the last year as a chieftain of sorts among 10 or so other cavemen. He has cooked communal dinners in his apartment on East 90th Street and taught others to make jerky from his meat locker.

So the neo-Lizard King's found 10 guys to make jerky with him?

Then, there is Erwan Le Corre, 38, "who once made soap for a living." Soap? No thanks! I've seen "Fight Club"!

Exactly how cute are you allowed to be after the age of 40?

Is this going too far?



Oh, go ahead and trash her, but I love Helena Bonham Carter! She's beautiful and adorable. I loved her in "Room With a View" and "Howard's End." She was perfect for that sort of thing, and also perfect in the completely different sort of thing, the fabulous "Fight Club." And — look! — she's the Red Queen!

I love "Fight Club."

But this list is just nuts. "UK film experts" -- they are apparently all young guys!

UPDATE: Here's a top 50 films list my son Christopher came up with a year and half ago.

When the movie is better than the book.

When I started to write this post, I had the misimpression that the article I was linking to was going to be about movies that are better than the book they are based on. Obviously, usually people think the book is better than the movie (although people who've read the book may be a special subcategory of moviegoer whose opinion is not entirely trustworthy for those who don't like to read fiction books that much). So it's interesting when the movie actually is better. I was going to set up a post so that the comments could give a lot of examples, but then that post took a different direction.

Still, one of the commenters -- Joseph Angier -- picked up this theme and wrote:

One thing Caryn James only vaguely alluded to were the times when the movie-makers actually improved on the source book. Of course it's subjective, but off the top of my head I'd include "The Verdict" and "The Shining" on that list. Both times, the filmmakers saw powerful themes that had been given short shrift in the books. In the first, David Mamet and Sidney Lumet turned a so-so legal thriller into a meditation on Irish fatalism (yeah, I know, they're both Jewish). In the second, Kubrick and his writer (Diane Johnson?) added the writer's bloc, plus the word versus image battle between father and son. I read somewhere that Stephen King hated this movie, but as Nicholas Ray once told me (about the author of the book "Thieves Like Us," who'd written the first screenplay draft of what became "They Live By Night"): "He didn't understand his own book!"

So let's have a discussion on this topic. I'll throw out the really, really obvious example: "The Godfather." And I'll add two I feel strongly about: "Fight Club" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"

Okay, your turn.

UPDATE: Botched backwards post title fixed.

I can't believe this artist.

BBC reports:

An art work purportedly made from excess fat from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been sold for $18,000 (£9,862).

Switzerland-based artist Gianni Motti claims to have bought the fat from a clinic where the leader had a liposuction operation performed....

"I came up with the idea of because soap is made of pig fat, and I thought how much more appropriate it would be if people washed their hands using a piece of Berlusconi," Motti told Welwoche magazine.

We're asked to think the artist thought this up entirely independently of the widely known film/book "Fight Club." What do you think that bar of soap in Brad's hand is?

Whoever bought the thing is a fool for buying conceptual art where the concept is already extremely well known from a previously existing art work.

Why Brad Pitt is fun to watch half the time.

I agree with this theory. And don't forget "Fight Club," where Brad's good.

Wild animals in the city: 3 things.

The Capital Times reports this discovery in Milwaukee:

More than 70 ducks in a basement pen were only part of the menagerie authorities found in [Jamie L. Verburgt's] Milwaukee area apartment after other residents complained of the stench coming from the unit.... Others among about 200 live creatures in the apartment included snakes, rats, turtles, a pair of alligators, toads and scorpions. ...

John Walters, Verburgt's boyfriend, was prosecuted in 2000 for mistreatment of exotic animals. At that time, police found a female cougar, female leopard, silver-tailed fox, monitor lizard, two caracals, a coatimundi, chinchilla and a reticulated python in Walter's apartment in Greenfield, another Milwaukee suburb. ...

(Ah, see: there's someone for everybody.) (Mmmm... "reticulated"!) That story reminded me of this passage from "The Life of Pi":

If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it, you'd be amazed at all the animals that would fall out: badgers, wolves, boa constrictors, Komodo dragons, crocodiles, ostriches, baboons, capybaras, wild boars, leopards, manatees, ruminants in untold numbers. There is no doubt in my mind that feral giraffes and feral hippos have been living in Tokyo for generations without being seen by a soul.

And that reminds me of the movie "12 Monkeys," which has a great animals-in-the-city theme. (And to say that is to allow Brad Pitt to make a second appearance on my blog today. So I'll just add that I'm not really a Brad Pitt fan, but I do love a couple of his movies, "12 Monkeys" and "Fight Club.")