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Jan. 7, 2020 - I Don't Speak German

01:29:15

Episode 40: Fight Club

We start 2020 with what was meant to be our 2019 Christmas Special, a very roundabout chat about the disturbingly-relevant-to-today 1999 film Fight Club. Not a typical episode, if you're new around here... but we do this sort of thing from time to time. Content Warnings. Notes/Links: Dan Olsen's video on Fight Club and Toxic Masculinity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td88z08a_4c

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	Hello and welcome to I Don't Speak German, the anti-fascist podcast in which I, Jack Graham, and my friend Daniel Harper have conversations about the far-right's conversations.
	Daniel tells me what he learned from years of going where few of us can bear to go and listening to what today's far-right, the alt-right, white nationalists, white supremacists, Nazis, etc.
	Talk about and say to each other, in their safe spaces, their podcasts, their YouTube videos, their live streams, etc.
	The Waffle SS, I call them, and do they waffle.
	Daniel listened, so we don't have to.
	Needless to say, these are terrible people, and they say terrible things, so every episode comes with a big content warning.
	Daniel and I talk freely about despicable opinions and acts, and sometimes we have to repeat the despicable things that are said, including bigoted slurs.
	So be warned.
	And welcome to the second year of I Don't Speak German.
	It's episode 40, our first podcast of 2020.
	Happy New Year, everybody.
	And yeah, here we go.
	The first rule of I Don't Speak German is you do not speak German.
	The second rule of I Don't Speak German is you do not speak German.
	And the third rule of talking about Fight Club is that you have to start with stupid jokes.
	This is Jack's podcast, and here's Daniel.
	Scheisse.
	Anyway, we got the stupid jokes out of the way, so we're now legally obligated.
	We've fulfilled our obligation, we can talk about it.
	Yeah, now we get to wait, just do like 90 minutes of silent audio.
	Not blank, not just a blank file, but where you and I just sit here and breathe into the microphone for an hour and a half.
	That will be the rest of the episode.
	Yeah.
	Well, of course, everybody else realizes this, but I'm only just starting to realize that you don't really exist, you're just my imaginary friend.
	So every single one of these episodes, which I've never re-listened to, is just me talking to myself, obviously.
	Exactly, yeah, no.
	How we got that famous, I'm not sure.
	I don't know, it must be compelling for somebody to listen to, I don't know.
	So yeah, this is the episode where we talk about Fight Club, as you will have gathered from the stupid jokes.
	But first, we've... And from the title in the bar.
	Hypothetically, you know.
	And from the title.
	I would assume people, like, listened, like, looked at their phone, or their whatever player they're using, or their computer, before they hit play on this.
	But, you know, who knows?
	Maybe.
	Maybe not.
	It's possible.
	It just ran on.
	You know, somebody was listening to the previous one, and this one started in their podcast catcher.
	It could have happened.
	And if that happened to you, then I've got you covered.
	I used to listen to a bunch of Doctor Who podcasts, and a lot of times I would just kind of download the files that often had like non-descriptive file names, and then play them in like an audio player.
	And there's one show that would literally do like 15 minutes of banter before they even told you which episode they were talking about, and I didn't want to listen to the ones that would do an episode that I hadn't watched yet, and this was before I'd watched all the episodes.
	And so, I have had that moment of like, I spent 15 minutes listening to your stupid banter, and then you're like, and now we're going to talk about such and such, and then I have to go click, click.
	So yeah, banter on podcasts.
	Some people love it, some people hate it.
	We do it because it's fun for us, I guess.
	Yeah, it's a necessary evil, which isn't necessary.
	But, yeah.
	So, Fight Club, but first I believe we've been mentioned by one of our previous discussion subjects, I hear.
	Tim Murdock, Horace the Avenger, who was one of the acolytes of the now-deceased Bob Whittaker, back in our Bob Whittaker episode, which I think is two back.
	I think some of his fans found the episode, and on one of his livestreams he responded to some of the questions, and he is very disappointed that we got things wrong about him.
	And I am always regretful, and I mean this legitimately.
	I do try to sort of double check my facts and make sure I kind of know what I'm talking about, but we do make mistakes and I'm happy to correct.
	Apparently I got his age wrong.
	I believe I said he was 58 and I think he's 48, so I don't know where I kind of made that mistake, but he is not 58.
	He's in his late 40s.
	He might be 49.
	I don't know.
	I looked it back up.
	I'm not sure.
	I'd hate to be wrong again.
	So there's that, and it turns out that I had claimed, based on a secondary source that I found, that the original mantra was posted on the VNN forums, and he claims that's not true.
	He claims it was posted on one of the kind of sub boards of Stormfront and on, believe it or not, Yahoo Groups back in the mid-2000s.
	And that was what was first posted.
	Somebody might have posted it on VNN, but it certainly wasn't Bob Whitaker.
	It certainly wasn't us.
	And so, me, and he said this explicitly, me saying that the mantra was originally posted on the VNN forums, is a bigger conspiracy theory than believing in Nazi UFO stuff.
	Well, I mean, yeah, it is.
	Clearly.
	Clearly.
	Yeah.
	It's a much larger conspiracy theory.
	He was laughing at the silly conspiracy idea that the mantra might have been posted on the VNN forum first, which I had a fairly reputable source for.
	If it's a mistake, it was my mistake for trusting a source, whatever.
	I'll take that ding.
	But yeah, that's how he agreed with the basic thrust of that episode.
	All the stuff I said about the mantra, all the ideas about how it was used to get ideas into the mainstream through meaning before that was even really a big concept.
	He agrees with all that, but he has two nitpicks and is dismissive.
	He does call us an anti-white podcast, and that's probably accurate.
	We are anti-white here.
	To the degree that that term has any meaning, which it doesn't really.
	But yeah, we have a fan, I suppose.
	Well, you're trying to downplay it as a mistake, but as he says, it's a conspiracy theory.
	You came up with a conspiracy theory that it was posted on the VNM forums, and that makes you a conspiracy theorist.
	You've got a tinfoil hat on.
	I mean, I do wear a hat in some episodes.
	I'm not wearing a hat today.
	I guess I need to go get some tinfoil.
	Yeah, we should line our hats with tinfoil.
	We are definitely conspiracy theorists.
	According to Tim Dogfucker Murdoch.
	I just heard.
	I don't know if that's true or not.
	Somebody said that, I don't know.
	That he fucks dogs.
	I found it on a very reputable source.
	It's inaccurate, that's not true.
	It was Ernst Zündel's UFO publications in the 80s.
	Yeah, no one told me.
	And that's literally his source, that's literally his source for the Nazi UFO stuff.
	It's like, Ertzundl, his biggest sellers were his UFO books later on.
	It wasn't really the Holocaust revisionism stuff, which is what he's obviously more famous for.
	It was the UFO stuff.
	Those were his big sellers.
	And like, that's his source.
	That's his irrefutable source for the Nazi UFO connections.
	All that kind of occult nonsense.
	And believe me, we haven't even gotten into the actual bullshit that he believes.
	We're going to do another episode on that.
	It's going to be hilarious.
	What were you going to say?
	No, it's okay.
	We'll table it.
	I'm left a bit confused about what he does or doesn't believe, but it's okay.
	I am left under deep misunderstanding.
	don't know what he actually believes and doesn't believe because he is very cagey about that.
	It's almost like, I don't know, could be true, could not.
	I don't know, who knows.
	Because I can't tell from his rhetoric, you know, if he's saying, well, that's a bigger conspiracy theory than believing in Nazi UFOs.
	If, like, he's taking it for granted that Nazi UFOs aren't real, so he's comparing us to that to say it's a big conspiracy theory.
	Or if he's comparing us to what you said, to the belief in Nazi UFOs, because he actually thinks Nazi UFOs are plausible.
	I can't tell.
	He thinks Nazi UFOs are incredibly plausible, yes.
	Oh, right.
	It's the second one.
	He thinks they're... Oh, right.
	So he was actually defending Nazi... He believes that, like... Now, I believe this is actually documented.
	What are Nazi UFOs?
	Are they, like, UFOs that Nazis created?
	Well, it's essentially, like, after the war, the Nazis sort of, like, Operation Paperclip was ultimately about... Oh, I think I saw this episode of The X-File.
	It was, you know, that the Nazis did come over and kind of work on the US space program, But they were ultimately, you know, the actual, like, going to the moon thing was just sort of the sideline to the real thing, which was developing UFO technology and you get connections into, like, occult beliefs and into, like, previous, like, chariots of the gods, kind of, like, previous civilizations and all this kind of stuff.
	And it's all kind of connected into that same, you know, kind of, kind of larger belief structure.
	Right, so it's back to that sort of Himmler shit we talked about before.
	Yeah, no, it's very, it comes from that same kind of general thing, but he's always cagey about exactly, you know, how much of it he will kind of like support, because like, I just don't know, we just don't know kind of what's true and what's not, but he's kind of a global skeptic, and I don't know, we'll do a whole episode on it one day and I'll Highlight some of the nonsense.
	But yeah, look forward to that.
	We'll do it fairly shortly, I think.
	It'll be a fun one.
	Goodie.
	It's still more plausible than white genocide.
	Yes, yes.
	So yeah, thanks for listening, Tim.
	I'm sorry I said you fucked all, because that was a mistake.
	You don't.
	It was an error.
	By the way, do we have any updates on how long David Duke's audiobook of his autobiography is?
	I think there are many different cuts of that now.
	There's a director's cut.
	With deleted scenes.
	I think there's going to be a Zack Snyder cut of the David Duke audiobook at some point.
	and, you know, it'll...
	Yeah, that one will be good.
	That's the one where they shave off David Duke's mustache, you know?
	Yeah.
	It's fine.
	It's fine.
	It's just CGI over it.
	Yeah.
	We're bantering again.
	That'll be fine.
	We're bantering again.
	We are, yeah.
	Now that'll be fine because David Duke looks like he's CGI anyway.
	Yeah, Fight Club.
	It was a film.
	It was released in 1999, directed by David.
	You all know what Fight Club is.
	Directed by David Fincher, written by Jim Wu, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk.
	Is that how you say it?
	Palahniuk?
	Palahniuk, yes.
	Good.
	I was something of a...
	I was a weird fan of this movie when it came out.
	And I, like, watched all the director's commentaries back when you would, like, rent discs from an actual brick-and-mortar location and then had to, like, sit for four viewings of a film and watch all the commentary tracks in two days to take the disc back.
	So you didn't get charged a late fee.
	So back in the old days, back in the ancient times.
	So I did.
	I did spend a lot of time kind of learning about this film kind of back in the early 2000s at some point.
	Yeah, it was a big thing.
	It was a big thing.
	It was a big kind of like, you know, it came out in 99 and I want to kind of use this as a little bit of a way to talk about films in 1999 because there are like four movies that came out that have kind of a similar thematic heft.
	And I don't really want to talk about these other films, but I want to just kind of highlight this sort of phenomenon.
	And this is what I find interesting about kind of talking about Fight Club in this context.
	And just for the audience, we had intended this to come out for the holiday season, and then we just kind of got busy and distracted.
	And then we did a couple other episodes.
	And so this is coming out at the beginning of the year, but it was meant to be our sort of like present for the fans, like sort of a Christmas or New Year's gift.
	But we just didn't manage to get this recorded last weekend.
	And so it ends up being kind of our first release of the new year, which, you know, Happy New Year.
	We're going to talk about Fight Club.
	But there are four films in the summer in 1999 released between like March.
	1999.
	1999, yes.
	Yeah.
	That one released between March and I believe this one was in October of 1999, which was kind of my first year as a movie nerd, really.
	I was in my late teens and really kind of like getting into it.
	Like this was like that time period when like, you know, you first kind of like get into movies and you're like kind of reading all the websites and getting into the lore and learning all the history and watching Citizen Kane for the first time, all that sort of thing.
	And so it was a very kind of exciting period for me.
	And I went to the movies, I think, like every weekend, if not like twice every weekend for about a year and a half around this time and used like all my spare money on it.
	This was something, I actually saw Fight Club four times in theaters.
	Twice at the Dollar Theater at least.
	But it was like a half hour drive away.
	But at that time, gas was only 87 cents a gallon.
	So it wasn't such a huge imposition as it would be today.
	But anyway, there were four films.
	The Matrix, American Beauty, Office Space, and Fight Club.
	All of which have kind of well-off white middle-class protagonists who rebel against in some way or another the strictures of their kind of boring office drone job.
	And through rejecting it and through kind of embracing some version of a counterculture, some version of Crime or, you know, kind of just kind of dropping out of society.
	Find some, you know, kind of further meaning in kind of a larger world.
	And what I find interesting in this is that this kind of message really resonates with a lot of the kind of like ideas of like you're kind of caught in this system that you want to get out of.
	And there's a hostility to this kind of idea of kind of being stuck in This kind of establishment a lot of that kind of animates the kind of the rise of fascism And these kind of online spaces among fairly kind of you know mostly well-off You know kind of white guys who have you know some degree of privilege even if they're kind of underemployed But back in the 90s it was you've got a nice well-paying job that pays you health insurance And this is not nearly as satisfying as this other thing you could be and now I
	I would like to kind of poll some of our Nazi listeners and just kind of say, like, if you could get this, like, white collar job flying around the country and being, like, it might not be a great job, you might not enjoy it, but, like, I think most of the people who are Nazis who might be listening to my voice would kind of go, yeah, I'd take that job, that sounds great, as opposed to, you know, like, and this is kind of this era of plenty, this relative, you know, kind of good economy that kind of lasted the Clinton years.
	Versus, you know, kind of now after, you know, kind of two more decades of late-stage capitalism just kind of coming and crushing us all.
	And I find that dynamic interesting, and I don't know that I really have much more to say about it, kind of, in this context than that.
	But that's kind of what made me want to do this episode, was just to kind of, like, think about that and think about kind of what the film, what Fight Club does and doesn't do in terms of kind of, like, anticipating this kind of current era, maybe.
	I don't know.
	And also kind of talk about the film itself, and if you've got thoughts.
	I mean, I kind of want to use this as sort of a spitballing conversation as opposed to kind of going in some particular place.
	But I don't know, do you have any thoughts about that kind of general concept?
	Well, it is interesting what you say, you know, that back in the day they were all, the great focus of white male middle class discontent was the fact that they, you know, they were stuck in, I say they, you know, it was me as well probably, Although, no, in the 90s I wasn't well off.
	I worked retail jobs for 15 years, you know.
	Yeah, in the 90s I was working in a supermarket, so I was not doing great.
	I sold office supplies when Fight Club came out.
	Yeah.
	But yeah, the focus has moved from, you know, I'm so sick of being sort of prosperous and having a fairly good well-paying job, and how empty it is and how unfulfilling and how spiritually impoverished and etc etc it is, and the focus has now moved to I don't have a job, which is interesting, certainly is.
	It shows that these films that you talk about, I mean I've seen, I haven't seen Office Space, but I've seen the others, and Yeah, it's… I mean, the 90s were the era of the… in the West, anyway, you know, by which we mean Europe, America… Which is a complicated concept in terms of, you know, this podcast and subject matter, but I think we can accept that as given for the sentence and move on.
	Yeah, I think when I say the West here, I mean like Euro-America and Northern Europe, you know, Northwestern Europe.
	In that sort of very broadly speaking culture, because it's not one culture at all, but you know what I mean.
	In that, that was the 90s were the era of the neoliberal bounce.
	Not to go too far into this, but the economy started after the long boom after the Second World War, you got that long boom, and then by the 70s it's starting to decay.
	And neoliberalism is the response of the capitalist system to try to restore declining or stagnating profitability.
	The nature of neoliberalism is a big topic, I won't go into it here, but it started to have what success it had in the late 80s, early 90s.
	You have the long 90s from 1988, 1989.
	...through till, well, probably through till September 11th, 2001.
	You could call that the long 90s, where you have a period of, broadly speaking, political and economic stability, not to say, you know, mild prosperity.
	I mean, I always remember when...
	George W. Bush, quote-unquote, won in 2000.
	Afterwards, he said, it's a miracle that I won because I was running against incumbency, stability, and prosperity.
	And yeah, essentially he was.
	One of the first things that George W. Bush did when he took office was to give everyone a $300 tax rebate, or every kind of taxpayer who had actually paid into the system.
	So basically, like, upper middle class people.
	You know, everybody gets a $300 check because of like budget surpluses and it's your money.
	No, we can't actually fund social services with this.
	We can't, you know, this is compassionate conservatism sort of thing.
	But it was a little like, that's how good things are going.
	We're just going to give you some money back from your taxes as a, you know, like a gimme instead of using that to like sock it away for a rainy day.
	or whatever.
	That's literally kind of the level of prosperity.
	And it's also worth noting that, again, a lot of the kind of figures, like Mikey Nock, for instance, is roughly my age.
	He's a few years older than me.
	But he got started in the tech industry around this time.
	Like, he had kind of gone, he had done like a semester or two of college or something, and then had gone into kind of working in some software kind of coding job at a low level, and then kind of got hired into AOL just before the whole, like, tech boom crashed in kind of 99-2000, and then just kind of coasted in his career.
	And so I know a lot of people who are Two or three years older than me, who like I went to high school with, who kind of had that same trajectory, who never really went to college, he never really had to, never needed that four-year degree, and just kind of got decent paying tech jobs.
	As is snotting those teenagers effectively, you know?
	Yeah, well this is it.
	I mean, that year I'm talking about, the year of the neoliberal bounce, where the neoliberal restructuring of Western capitalism restores or makes a fairly good facsimile of temporarily restoring the profit rate for just a little while, It creates a period of relative stability and prosperity in the West, in the sense that I meant it before.
	But of course you've also got Eastern Europe tearing itself to pieces in Bosnia and places like that.
	You've also got the 97 Asian financial crisis.
	You've got Russia and the former Soviet satellite states being, you know, strip mind and hollowed out from the inside and fed on by the West, etc.
	It's not an era of universal prosperity.
	But they brought Pizza Hut to Moscow, and so that's a really important thing.
	That's it, yeah.
	But what you do have is in the West, again in heavy, heavy speech marks, air quotes, you have this period of relative prosperity and stability, particularly for the people who are, you know, relatively well off in that culture, which is like the The middle classes and within that, white men, I suppose.
	I mean, of course, as always, the people doing the best out of it are the people at the very top.
	But amongst the rest of us, the people doing best are that segment.
	And I suppose a lot of these people that we talk about on this show are the remnants of that generation who were told In the 90s, you know, it's the end of history and the economy's fixed.
	No more boom and bust, as Gordon Brown and Tony Blair used to say.
	It's all over.
	Ha ha.
	And, you know, we don't have ground wars anymore.
	Maybe we'll bomb Bosnia, but you won't have to have ground wars anymore.
	And etc.
	You know, don't worry about it.
	It's fine.
	And of course, you know, it wasn't the end of history.
	History, the mole of history, was still working.
	Exactly.
	But there is this sort of like, literally millenarian kind of aspect to this.
	And I think it's interesting, just to kind of focus specifically on Fight Club again, to kind of move into the movie a little bit.
	I think it's interesting just in the sense of like kind of how this sort of like celebrity culture this kind of consumerism thing was It's kind of portrayed.
	I mean there's a There's an I think it's an entertainment weekly.
	That's you know sort of in the in the Paper Street house We're assuming if you're listening to this if you don't know what the movie is You're probably are not here for the right thing Go like it has this is a go watch it.
	It's easy to find I promise you And spoilers, you know, we've already spoiled it actually.
	We're in a spoil, we've already spoiled the shit out of this and there is kind of a, this is also kind of the year of the big twist because Fight Club and Sixth Sense came out within a few months of each other.
	Yeah.
	And there were a couple other movies that kind of did that whole like third act like, and now everything changes!
	And I, yeah, part of the reason I saw this four times was to try to understand how I felt about that frankly.
	Um, and I kind of go back and forth on it, and the longer I sit with it, the more dissatisfied I am with the whole structure of the film.
	Anyway, um, but, uh, you know, there's an Entertainment Weekly with, like, kind of Drew Barrymore that's been sort of, like, got water damage from, like, dripping from the, uh, you know, and this is kind of the era of, like, the entertainment magazine.
	I mean, like, Friends was, you know, the top-running show for years and years, um, like, four or five years and four or five years after this.
	Um, you know, we're kind of at the height of that, of that kind of, like, I don't know, Jack, maybe I can ask you, not to ask a personal question, have you ever browsed an Ikea catalog while taking a shit?
	This does assume you take shits, which I know you may be kind of a disembodied robot or something, but have you ever had that experience?
	No, I don't take shits because I have too much constipation from the opioids that I abuse.
	Yeah, no, I actually have a couple of bits of IKEA furniture in my home.
	I'm totally unashamed to tell you because I just happened to be on the lookout for a bed one time and somebody said, why didn't you get an IKEA bed?
	There's an IKEA near where I am.
	So I went down and had a look and bought one.
	It's just a shop, for God's sake.
	This is my... I mean, not to derail this, but I rewatched Fight Club for this, and my reaction to it... I mean, I have lots of thoughts and so on and so forth, but if you want to boil my reaction to it down, it would be, OK Boomer, really.
	Because, yeah, you've got IKEA furniture.
	Jesus fucking Christ, man.
	Grow up, you know?
	This isn't a spiritual crisis.
	Who gives a shit?
	Well, and, you know, so I've never owned any IKEA.
	I've never lived in a place that had... I mean, I guess, you know, there's a population density difference in where you live and where I have always lived.
	I've never lived close enough to an Ikea to where that's sort of like, oh, that's the obvious option.
	Obviously, I own prefabricated furniture.
	I'm actually, well, this is an antique desk.
	I bought this.
	This is my fancy piece of antique retro furniture, the desk that I'm sitting at now.
	But I've got plenty of prefab bookcases and stuff all around me.
	Just not kind of the fancy Ikea kind.
	But I wouldn't have any kind of problem with that.
	I did find this sort of message that the narrator, Jack or Rupert or narrator, I don't know, we can call him whatever.
	He's called Rupert in the script because that's his first name tag is he's wearing Rupert.
	But he's not named in the book because it's the first person narrator.
	And I think most people call him Jack, but we can kind of call him, I guess we'll call him narrator just to differentiate him from you, although you may also be, maybe I'm Tyler Durden in this situation, that would be kind of a weird moment.
	Is Jack the real one, or is Jack actually Tyler Durden's imaginary friend?
	Well, in the book he shows Marla his... and I haven't read the book in a lot of years, so don't kind of quiz me on it.
	But I did read the book a few times.
	Again, I was really fascinated by this because I had issues with it even when I was a teenager.
	But the thing with the book is it...
	You know, at one point during the scene where Marla, where he kind of comes clean to Marla, because he actually does in the kind of the diner sequence, or the restaurant sequence, he actually tells Marla, oh, I've got a split personality.
	I've got all this, you know, like there's kind of a, he actually does come clean to her then, instead of like, you know, Cher never finding out.
	That's one of the major differences between the book and the film.
	But he shows her his driver's license, and it's not Tyler Durden, it's explicitly not.
	Tyler Durden is this kind of fictionalized version of himself.
	Most people think Blueprint is probably his real name, but it's never explicitly stated anywhere.
	I like, um, I've always thought that the film would be, like, a whole 10% better if, um, Brad Pitt was real in the universe.
	If, like, you turned the page of that copy of Entertainment Weekly and there was a story about Brad Pitt.
	Yeah, no, no, like if Brad Pitt shows up at the end.
	Yeah, during the scene later on when Tyler and, uh, whatever his name is, Rupert, we're calling him, And he just holds up the magazine and is like, well, didn't you think this was odd?
	it's become clear to the narrator that Tyler is an imaginary friend and he says, you know, I look like you want to look, I fuck like you want to fuck, etc.
	I've always thought it'd be good if he could say, look, I mean, look, I'm Brad Pitt.
	Yeah, and he just holds up the magazine and is like, well, didn't you think this was odd?
	Did you not see Seven?
	Yeah, because it would actually make more sense.
	Legends of the Fall!
	I know you cried when you saw Legends of the Fall.
	Because I've always thought that one of the key moments in the movie, and I am deeply undecided upon how conscious the movie is of the complex of ironies attached to this, one of the key moments of the movie is the bit where Brad Pitt is delivering his speech about how we're all told we were going to grow up to be millionaires and rock stars and movie gods, but we're not.
	And we're very, very pissed off.
	And to me, it's just so incredibly, intensely ironic that that line is being delivered by Brad Pitt, right?
	You know, we were told we were going to grow up to be movie gods, and we're not.
	And Brad Pitt is like the hottest shit in Hollywood in 1999.
	He was the sexiest man alive, I think, like three or four years around that time.
	I mean, he was that kind of guy.
	And he's still a giant movie star.
	He may win an Oscar this year.
	You know, he's 56 years old.
	Have you seen him in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?
	He's fucking gorgeous!
	Like, you know.
	Well, okay, calm down.
	I'm just saying, you know.
	Okay, you want to fuck Brad Pitt, I get it.
	Who doesn't?
	That's fine, that's fine.
	I don't.
	I don't imagine Jennifer Aniston does.
	Touche, touche, touche.
	I'm not against ambiguity about, certainly not ambiguity about authorial intention, because ultimately authorial intention, particularly with something as co-authored as cinema, is secondary at least.
	I feel like it would clear up something that's a little bit muddled in the film there.
	It would make it at least a little bit clearer that the film is conscious of some of the ironies that it raises.
	And I think it is, because it makes a point of having Jack and Tyler...
	sort of snigger at a Gucci advert, you know, where the model has this washboard and sneer at the idea that that's what a man looks like.
	But then, of course, you see them shirtless in the fights and they look exactly the same.
	So I think the film is conscious of these ironies.
	Well, it's funny that you don't have, like, you know, this is, like, not only kind of, it's not a huge budget film.
	I think it's, like, a $40 million film, which was mid-budget around that time.
	I looked this up, it's $63 million.
	Okay, which again is a fairly decent budget, but certainly not kind of a major thing.
	It's probably like a $90 million movie today or something.
	It was originally intended to be a fairly cheap sort of indie release, but it was one of those things where the project kind of snowballed as it went along.
	First you get Fincher involved, and then you get Brad Pitt involved, and during the course of it being made, the director insists upon this set and that sequence, etc., and it just gets more and more expensive to the intense spookedness of the Fox executive.
	Oh, 2055!
	No, what's interesting is that Fincher himself was at that time, I mean, he was kind of an A-list director, but he'd really only done a few films.
	I mean, he'd done Alien 3, which was his feature debut.
	He'd done Seven, and he'd done The Game.
	And Seven was kind of this big, and oh, by the way, talking about Kevin Spacey, he's also in America Beauty.
	So that gets really deeply fucked up and problematic.
	We need to revisit everything he's ever done, and all the people he's ever worked with.
	and maybe get them bodyguards but you know he had done really just a handful of films and the game had kind of like my understanding is that it kind of underperformed that was kind of like the big release from the guy who did 7 which was very well received but certainly not something that kind of like set Fincher into the stratosphere and I think he was kind of seen as being in free fall around this time
	despite the fact they were still kind of giving him money his next film would have been Panic Room which I still think is one of his better films because it's so like streamlined and he just kind of does the thing that it does I I'd like to re-watch that as well.
	I'd like to re-watch 7 one of these days because I remember really liking 7 when it came out.
	I have a feeling we've talked about this before actually.
	Yeah, the last time I re-watched Seven I was really annoyed because at the end the twist just doesn't make any fucking sense.
	It's that kind of preternatural serial killer movie.
	But Fincher, again just to finish my initial thought, Fincher was kind of known more as a music video director.
	Commercial director.
	He did Madonna's Vogue, didn't he?
	He did a ton of music videos.
	I mean, I don't have the list in front of me, but he did Madonna's Vogue.
	He did some stuff for Billy Idol.
	He did Cradle of Love.
	Some of them best received music videos of the era, in that period when the music video was seen as a little bit of an art form.
	It was kind of this thing that the way you became a big name director was to do really well received music videos.
	It was kind of your showreel And so and Fincher was kind of the king of that medium.
	He did a ton of these and And all kind of visually distinctive and you know, so so so you're not only kind of giving this Product this project Fight Club.
	He's not only making this film, which is at least on its on its surface a critique of consumerism and a Critique of capitalism which obviously it is not and I think we should discuss that before in this episode but but you know a critique of consumerism given to this person who is very well known for making literally consumer advertisements you know yeah
	and if you want to kind of dig into how this film is in no way a critique of not really a critique of some consumerism and in no way a critique of capitalism i'm definitely game for that when it kind of i just want to say my favorite david fincher film by far is alien 3 which i really like alien I actually haven't seen Alien 3, so one day we should work through the Fincher filmography on another.
	You and me, not even record ourselves, just do it for ourselves.
	We'll record it, and then not release it, and let people know that they exist, but then not ever release them.
	That's the way to do it, yeah.
	But first we have to do our planned watch-through of Mike Nichols' movies as well, I think, don't we?
	We've just got to beat all the Nazis, and then we can do things that we enjoy more.
	Yeah.
	That's fine.
	But, yeah, I like Alien 3.
	It's one of my favorite, you know, with favorite being distinct from I think is good.
	It's one of my favorite movies.
	Sure, yeah.
	But, yeah.
	You asked me about whether to critique capitalism.
	Well, we can kind of go wherever you want.
	I mean, first of all, what do you think of its sort of critique of kind of this consumerist or, you know, what do you think of that?
	Or, you know, kind of superficiality.
	What do you think of its critique of consumerism, I think, first of all?
	Well look, I mean, Dawn of the Dead is an immeasurably superior critique of consumerism.
	And by that I'm assuming you're meaning the Romero version as opposed to the... Of course, the only version.
	Even I think the remake might do a better job of actually critiquing consumerism.
	And that's not because this is a... I don't think this is a bad critique of consumerism, right?
	Right, yeah, yeah.
	I just think... I think these things are better approached indirectly.
	Like, this might just be... I'm quite prepared to accept that this might just be a personal aesthetic taste of mine.
	But when a story is a consumer looking around the stuff they've bought, going, this doesn't make me happy, but I don't know what else to do, that's fine, but that doesn't strike me as a critique of consumerism.
	It strikes me as characterization, maybe.
	I feel like if you actually want to attack things like this, you have to get deeper, because the fundamental problems are deeper.
	And what this film does, And I remember liking it at the time when I watched it.
	I remember loving the idea that he's looking around his own apartment and it looks like a catalogue to the point where he can see the write-ups and the prices pop up in midair.
	You know, I remember seeing that at the time and loving it.
	Which still looks great, and that was like cutting edge at the time and it still looks really nice.
	It does, yeah.
	But ultimately it is just a character saying, I am disenchanted with consumerism at you, isn't it?
	So, okay, yeah, that's fair enough.
	That is part of the characterisation, and it is a legitimate thing that many people felt and feel.
	They seek fulfilment through the consumption of consumer goods and fail to achieve it, and are left knowing that they are unfulfilled by consumerism, and yet also feeling Yeah, that's fine.
	But ultimately, all Fight Club does is, in a very stylish way, it just has a guy saying that.
	So it might make the point, but it fails to put it across in a way that is...
	Artistically powerful, for me.
	Because it fails to connect emotionally.
	Whereas the sight of grey-faced, shambling, undead monsters wandering around a ruined, desolate, post-apocalyptic shopping mall, bumping into each other and getting their heads blown off by people who are chuckling, that, for me, gets far more at the actual emotions, the actual experience of what it feels like to live in a consumerist hellscape.
	This was a very important place in their lives.
	Exactly.
	And even that's kind of on the nose, but it's still better.
	Which was, at the time, sorry, this is one of those weird Romero things, one of those facts.
	Yeah.
	Like, at the time, the shopping mall was new enough that they felt like they had to kind of explain what it was, or the audience just kind of wouldn't understand it at all.
	And then even by the time the film was released, like, the shopping mall had become a thing that, you know, so now it feels like ridiculously on the nose, although now it probably feels like You know, what's fucking shopping mall in 2019?
	Yeah, exactly.
	The mall is dead.
	The mall is dead.
	Yeah, I know.
	The whole concept has just been destroyed by online retailers, which is another thing that the film just... It's very of that moment, right?
	There's a moment in the film where they go and degauss VHS tapes at a video store, and this is literally the last possible moment in which that was at all a reasonable option, because everything switched to DVD two years later.
	But no, I find that, like, you know, part of what he's kind of lamenting is the kind of loss of, quote-unquote, authenticity.
	You know, he has this kind of line where it's, you know, oh, there are these, like, tiny imperfections in the plates that prove that they're made by the indigenous people of such and such, wherever, you know, which is really, I think, the line is something to that effect.
	And this kind of idea that, like, kind of prefabricated furniture, like IKEA furniture, And, you know, that you're kind of buying this thing that is supposed to be sort of an individual choice, and yet you're just sort of, like, building an existence out of kind of this kind of pre-structured thing that, like, you know, there are a million of these shelves, and you buy one, and you say, like, this one represents me, but, you know, a million other people own that same piece of furniture or whatever.
	And that's not an invalid kind of criticism.
	It is a, it is very like, I'm 13 years old and first read a book of philosophy kind of like, it does feel very, very superficial and very, you know, sort of, you know, kind of dorm room conversations.
	And I guess, you know, I saw this in my late teens and it kind of like struck me, even then I thought it was a little bit facile, but it certainly struck me more kind of like coming into my adulthood and kind of, you know, kind of Trying to figure out what kind of man I wanted to be.
	I think it mattered.
	I think it, you know, this film and certainly Office Space was something that really spoke to me in kind of weird ways that are kind of difficult to talk about, certainly for an audience like this, you know.
	But, you know, these films did affect me around that time and kind of did kind of make me kind of question certain things about, about who I wanted to be.
	And I probably made some bad decisions.
	Like I ended up dropping out of school and that wasn't solely based on this, but it was kind of based on this idea of like, I don't want to be an office drone.
	You know, I'm going to go work retail.
	Like that was a really bad decision.
	Um, although it really wasn't, you know, it really wasn't a decision that, you know, I had complicated kind of, kind of personal history around that time.
	Um, but, uh, there is, there is this kind of thought that like today, at least from, from kind of a left perspective or kind of a socialist perspective, you know, the idea of like the thing that's wrong is this kind of consumerist kind of, kind of buy mentality.
	And sort of the idea is like, well, I'm going to buy this kind of cheap bookshelf that's going to last me for 10 years.
	And then I'm going to have to replace it, you know, this kind of planned obsolescence concept, or it's not going to be fashionable in order to impress my friends.
	I need to buy another bookshelf and that sort of thing.
	And the way you get around that is not by blowing up your apartment, you know, but by, you know, buying things that are made to last and not caring about the fashions and sort of embracing a more, you know, authentic lifestyle.
	And certainly there's complicated things around that as well, but it is sort of like the direction that the film goes is the absolute wrong answer if you were actually going to sort of like critique You know, consumerism from a materialist basis, I guess.
	Well, the thing is, the film has the guy tell you how he feels.
	And that's fine.
	But it doesn't really communicate the feeling of that kind of hollowed-out feel, I think, that a lot of people felt.
	But it's trying to.
	And what it's trying to express is that feeling of...
	The kind of lifestyle that was considered the lifestyle of the future, this sort of utopia of market provision that was going to be provided.
	I was talking about it before, the long boom after the Second World War, the 1950s and everything.
	The market system was going to provide for the wants of the healthy individual and the healthy family, and it was going to do that through the miracles that consumer culture could provide, because consumer culture would respond to the needs and the wishes of the consumer.
	And it would provide you with things that you needed, wonderful things, and because they came as responses to your needs, they would fulfil your needs, and society would get ever more streamlined and efficient and fulfilling along those lines, and of course that didn't happen.
	And that's at least as much to do with faults in the original logic as it is to do with the fact that, of course, the whole thing was built on sand, and society ended up being totally restructured.
	And that whole moment there after the Second World War, in actually very few parts of the world, like, you know, America and other prosperous countries, It was a product of brief and unusual historical contingencies that passed, you know, and the capitalist system kind of reverted to normal.
	And the neoliberal restructuring hollowed out loads of the gains and consequently loads of these promises that people had been led to expect didn't arrive.
	Or they arrived and then they were taken away again.
	And, I mean, one of the lines in the film is Tyler Durden's, you know, we're the middle children of history.
	This is the generation who come along after that, and they're still living, as it were, in the ruins of those promises.
	But the promises have been rescinded long ago, and what you have instead is stuff like flat-screen televisions and Ikea catalogues, and as long as you are this guy who has this office job.
	Yeah, I think the thing the film does then, because it's responding to that malaise without diagnosing it.
	It's not saying where that comes from or why it happened.
	And of course, it is a film, not an economic analysis of neoliberalism.
	But what it does then is it suggests that the way out of that malaise is through actual human connection.
	It suggests, rightly in my opinion, that the way, at least in outline, in principle, the way out of those sorts of feelings is through actual connection with other people.
	Human connections, social connections.
	Because what he does, what the narrator does, is he goes in search of human connections, probably unconsciously, but that's what he's doing, in the support groups that he goes to.
	Unfortunately, what happens then, and this is what I do like about the film, this is what I do like about its take, He takes commodity fetishism with him.
	Commodity fetishism isn't just liking the stuff that capitalism produces.
	It's not just prizing yin-yang tables.
	It's also the fact that in capitalist society we don't relate to each other as human beings.
	What we do is we relate to things.
	Human relationships become mediated through stuff, because the commodity production is how our society is organized.
	It's not organized in terms of Human relationships.
	Human relationships are organised around commodity production, so we end up viewing things as if they're alive, and people as if they're things.
	And so he flees that, because that's what he's suffering from, unbeknownst to him, and probably unbeknownst to the film, because I don't think anybody involved in making it will up much on The Marxist Theory of Commodity and Fetishism.
	But that's what he's fleeing, and he flees in the right direction, essentially, which is to, as I say, actual human connection.
	And he nearly gets there.
	There's the crucial scene where he actually lets go when he's hugging Bob at the Testicular Cancer Support Group.
	He might be the best character in the film, honestly.
	Yeah, sadly Meatloaf is now a climate change denier.
	Sadly, we had to record this this week, not last week, and so now we get to shit on Meatloaf, but it's a great character regardless.
	It's a great character.
	Meatloaf is scarcely the worst human being in this film.
	Yeah, as Dan Olson says in his video, probably within this context, the paragon of actual development of an actual healthy masculinity.
	Olson says, I love that video, this will be linked in the show notes for sure.
	Um, it's part of his old, like, kind of folding ideas thing, and it's from, like, 2015, I think.
	Um, so it's a few years old, but it does, like, speak, I think, eloquently, and it's got a lot to say that, um, I just, I highly recommend, uh, that video.
	Um, I would probably quibble with some stuff, and I think, you know, I need to think about it, I need to think on it some more, um, but I, but I really like it, I think it's really thought-provoking, let's put it that way.
	Yeah, I would quibble with some things in it.
	I think sometimes Dan Olsen makes some claims about the film that aren't actually backed up by the text, but I do like it on the whole and he expresses a lot of things that I think about the film, although obviously I use different terminology.
	But yeah, that's the moment where the narrator has a chance to make an actual connection.
	It is actually still rather narcissistic.
	He's not connecting with Bob so much as he's just responding to the fact that Bob is there And he's not judging him.
	He does show his capacity to connect with Bob later on when he almost takes him under his wing within Project Mayhem and responds with basic human decency, which is progress by this point to what happens when Bob gets his head blown off.
	Yeah, but unfortunately what he's doing is he's actually bringing fetishism with him, because he makes the mistake of thinking that the support groups work for him not because of the human connections that are on offer, but because the support groups become like another commodity that he consumes.
	So he sets about consuming them.
	And he sort of shops around and chooses, oh, I want this one and I want that one, etc, etc, just like he's shopping from an Ikea catalogue.
	So what the film is showing us is the fact that within capitalism, within the system of commodity fetishism, it is actually incredibly hard to break out of these relationships with things and to treat human relationships as if they are things and to treat people as if they are things.
	And to actually forge real connections with people and between people and not fall back into fetishizing commodities, which is essentially, you know, to use my terminology, that's what he's doing.
	And the film is interesting in that he keeps on doing the same thing.
	He moves on from the support groups to Fight Club, which he then, instead of taking that as a capacity to have relationships with other people, he fetishises that to the point where it becomes like this gigantic corporate This is another point Dan Alton makes.
	It becomes a reflection of the corporate system that it ends up being funded by and which he thinks he's fleeing from.
	You know, complete with like a pyramidal hierarchical management structure and a franchise system.
	He will start franchising it, yeah.
	There are franchises all around.
	They're like McDonald's, but they're fight clubs and they're underground.
	Because they're not charging admission, like this isn't a commodity fetishism, this isn't an example of anything like that.
	It's again a more, it's an artificial construction of human relationships.
	And you know, it couldn't be, we like to kind of meet in the basement and have sparring matches and fight and kind of feel something and enjoy the camaraderie.
	And then that's it.
	It has to then become this kind of all-consuming drive to destroy everything around them.
	And, you know, it's sort of like... They say, you know, what we're doing is kind of destroying this, you know, this consumer culture that's kind of annihilating us, and we're doing this in this kind of reaction.
	But it is this sort of idea that, like, the human connection, just kind of the human moment, this thing of, like, kind of embracing each other and enjoying Whatever we're getting out of this human experience isn't satisfactory in the end.
	It has to become something else in order to be valid, which I think is... It does feel like, again, watching it as a teenager, it does feel like a really left turn that the film takes, even though it's very straightforward within the film, that it is sort of like...
	It's criticizing consumerism, it's criticizing political capitalism, which obviously it's not.
	This is criticizing capitalism.
	I hope we talk about the ending here shortly, you know?
	I kind of think that's a little... I mean, I kind of challenge that.
	I think it is.
	I just question, on a more fundamental level, the capacity of anything that is, you know, any work of art that is produced as a commodity by the capitalist system to actually challenge capitalism.
	I mean, I think even if the message is as uncompromisingly anti-capitalist as it can possibly be, if it's been made as a commodity to be sold to people, you know, cinema tickets and DVDs, then that just completely undercuts its capacity to actually be Okay, it can be a critique, but I think it shows the limit of critique then, doesn't it?
	Okay, it's a critique.
	Then what?
	Then nothing.
	People pay their money, they leave the theatre, they go home.
	Capitalism remains completely unchanged.
	Except maybe people have been given some stuff to think about.
	But I think even just in terms of the system, within the system of commodification, I think the most thought-provoking critique is just defanged because it exists within this economic context.
	I don't think that necessarily means that it's not a critique of capitalism.
	I mean, textually, I think it is a critique of capitalism because, as I say, it hooks into the fact that we live in a commodity fetishist society and that commodity fetishism is incredibly hard to escape, even if you are actively trying to do so.
	I think there's just a paradox there, that it's impossible to escape, and I think it's worth pointing out that it's impossible to escape, and also kind of a little bit unfair on individual works of art, because I think it's just general across the entire culture industries.
	Well, what I say is that it's a, you know, not really a critique, is that it never really seems to challenge the ideas of capital accumulation, that it does sort of recognize this alienation, and it recognizes that this alienation comes from something that's in society, but I don't think it really kind of recognizes the sort of, like, the actual thing that they're alienated from, and it sort of, like, uses consumerism, it uses the IKEA catalog as a sort of, like,
	This is sort of a shorthand for that.
	And then the sort of revolution at the end, sort of the project mayhem idea, this, okay, we're going to blow up the credit record, and we're going to make the credit system not exist anymore, and therefore we're going to be free, and we're all going to live in, like, primitivist, this kind of primitivist reality where there will be vines crawling up the ruins of what used to be the Empire State Building, etc., etc.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, it completely lacks any sort of, like, concept of... Again, it's a very, like, 13-year-old's idea of, like, what it means to sort of, like, revolt against society.
	It's a very simplified notion.
	So, I do want to just highlight this while we're on this, and I do want to get your thoughts on this, but it just fits in right here, so I'm going to use it as an excuse to talk about this.
	They do not say anywhere in the film where the film is set.
	Neither the novel.
	The novel is... it doesn't say.
	But in the commentary tracks, and if you can kind of work it out from internal cues, from internal clues, that the film is set in Wilmington, Delaware.
	The state of Delaware is home to something like 50% of all U.S.
	corporate offices and 60% of the Fortune 500.
	Is it that much?
	It is that much, yes.
	You can Google...
	The Delaware General Corporation.
	The Wikipedia page will give you a kind of brief summary on there.
	It links to articles.
	I'm not going to give you this, but this is well known.
	But I do want to read.
	There's one building located at 1209 North Orange Street.
	I am not doxing this.
	This is on a Wikipedia page called the Corporation Trust Center.
	And I'm just going to read a little bit of this.
	It's a single story building located in the Brandywine neighborhood of Wilmington, Delaware, USA, operated by CT Corporation.
	This is CT Corporation's location in the state of Delaware for providing quote-unquote registered agent services.
	In 2012, it was a registered agent addressed to no fewer than 285,000 separate businesses.
	Yada yada yada.
	Notable companies represented by CT at this location include Google, American Airlines, Apple, Incorporated, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Verizon Internet Services, and Deutsche Bank, with about 430 of more than 2,000 subsidiary companies and special-purpose companies.
	Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have registered companies at the center.
	So, just to be clear, Even if you were to like bomb this building, this is just the sort of like the paperwork that makes these kind of corporations work within kind of the existing legal structure.
	So long as the legal structure exists, they will kind of find ways to justify their existence.
	Oh yeah.
	At a gun, if necessary.
	Even more so now, in the era of digital storage.
	Right, right, right.
	Exactly, exactly.
	Interestingly, there is sort of another angle on this.
	After the 2008 financial crisis, you know, a lot of people were having their, the mortgages were being, you know, underwater mortgages they were having, you know, being kicked out of their homes and that sort of thing.
	And it turns out that a lot of people, you know, one of the recommendations is like, force your mortgage company to provide proof that they actually own the mortgage on your house, right?
	And the reality was that all these mortgages have been sliced and diced so many times into so many different pieces and sold to so many different organizations through this collateralized debt obligation structure.
	That actually providing concrete evidence that this particular bank owns your mortgage was harder than it seemed in many, many cases.
	And so a lot of people got kind of sweetheart deals on getting to stay in their house.
	I mean, they still had to deal with kind of the bullshit around it.
	I mean, this wasn't like kind of a magic bullet.
	But a lot of people avoided eviction purely by kind of like forcing these companies to abide by their own rules, which they have been manipulating for a decade through these kind of complex legal shenanigans.
	So there is a sort of, like, reality to this, but it's a lot more complicated than, like, oh, if we just blow up the buildings, then, you know, everything collapses to nothing.
	And so that's kind of the angle.
	Like, I understand kind of where you're coming from, that it does kind of get at something that is sort of this, like, critique of capitalism, but it really isn't.
	It's not very sophisticated.
	Kind of look in terms of when you look at kind of the structure of the film.
	Although, you know, it may be kind of meaningful in kind of the way that you're viewing it.
	And I think that is an interesting angle, and I would step back slightly in that it is absolutely not a critique of capitalism, but anyway.
	Well, no, I mean, look, if you really want to critique capitalism, what you need to do is read Capital by Karl Marx, right?
	And a film can't do that.
	A film tells a story, etc.
	And it's not what a work of art's for, right?
	So, ultimately, all a work of narrative art is going to do is depict things about capitalism.
	And I think this depicts, I think it probably depicts more than it knows.
	It certainly depicts more than the characters know.
	Yeah, there's much more here than I think anybody making the film has any understanding of.
	Yeah, and if you, I think if you come to the film with a, you know, I wouldn't even necessarily say a Marxist analysis, but if you come to the film with a certain lens, a socialist lens, You can tease stuff out of it, because it is quite acute in some of the way that it depicts the all-pervading cultural hegemony of alienation.
	And not just noticing that it's there, but noticing how it works.
	Like, as I say, the recurring process of fetishization.
	And the way he keeps trying to escape from it and then recreating it.
	And ultimately what you're talking about there with blowing up the buildings and the credit system, that's the same thing again.
	Because what he's doing there is he's mistaking the buildings for the system.
	And that's ultimately what we mean by fetishism.
	It's actually a slightly problematic term because it goes back to Western narratives about Tribal people in Africa and stuff.
	But if we're using that term, what we mean by it is that people use things to represent other things, and they load the meanings of other things onto this other thing that's right in front of them.
	So what he's doing there, by thinking, we'll bring down the entire system by blowing up these buildings, is he is literally fetishizing the commodities again.
	Because buildings are commodities, and they're full of commodities, because everything is a fucking commodity in capitalism.
	He is again fetishizing commodities and imagining that they represent the system.
	And he's trying to bring down the system because he's come to the point where he thinks that's his only choice of personal narcissistic fulfillment and escape from alienation.
	And of course it's not going to work.
	As you say, it's fairly acute in identifying the credit system.
	Because again, what it's documenting, whether it knows it or not, is the malaise of neoliberalism, this relative localised prosperity and stability that nonetheless was incredibly unfulfilling for people because it was built on consumerism.
	And that was completely propped up by the credit system.
	And 2007 is when that massive bubble finally burst, the bubble that had been inflated by the credit system.
	So yeah, there's something fairly acute there in noticing that credit is the thing to go for.
	But ultimately, as you say, even if you fell some corporations, like knocking down the buildings brings down the corporations, right, for the sake of argument, and you bring down loads of them in one night, The system is still going to endure because the system is not the individual actors within it.
	It is a network of power relationships and economic relationships that are not ultimately going to be affected by this.
	I mean, well, not brought down anyway.
	So the film is... I mean, a lot of people talk about the film like it ends with the fall of civilization.
	No, it ends with the fall of some buildings.
	And the narrator might think that that's the fall of civilization or the fall of capitalism or anything.
	The film doesn't actually say that.
	The film just depicts that he is successful in bringing down some buildings.
	And if you could, you know, revisit the characters a year hence.
	They wouldn't be living in a post-capitalist society, or at least not in the real world, any more than flying planes into the World Trade Center ended capitalism.
	Well, in this, I mean, this is also, and this kind of gets into some dicey area here, you know, where we're not trying to give certain terrible people advice or anything, but, you know, the whole idea of the, like, kind of the siege pill boogaloo stuff, you know, I mean, like, in the film, this is definitely portrayed as a terrorist organization.
	You know, this is absolutely, you know, something that, even though they're mostly not killing people, you know, they're committing mostly property crimes and kind of vandalism, but I think we can assume that there were people in those buildings who got bombed, and we're certainly kind of given the touchy-feely version where we don't actually get to see any of the death that kind of results from Project Mayhem.
	Tyler actually gets a line, doesn't he, about how the buildings are all empty, you know, because all the people that work in them are all our people.
	Right.
	Even so, you can't knock down... If you've got that kind of mass movement, I mean, how big does it have to be to where he literally goes everywhere?
	And, like, this thing has spread to that far.
	Like, at that point, General Strike, motherfucker!
	Yeah, exactly!
	If you've got that many people, you don't need to knock down buildings.
	Right.
	But the whole idea of, like, this sort of boogaloo, this racial holy war concept is, you know, we're gonna just kind of increase the tension in society, we're going to accelerate things to the point where we're going to force the sort of powers that be to react against us and against people like us until like everybody fights back and then something something something we get a big piece of the pie at the end and um there is that sort of you know this is this is what bin laden was doing
	this is what sort of sort of um you know al-qaeda and isis and and all these you know all the all the kind of uh terror attacks in europe through the 2000s and 2010s um uh the quote-unquote islamic terror or whatever um you know was was built on this idea of like we're going to make uh we're going to drive trucks into things and and kill people as a way of sort of forcing the hand of the states to become more oppressive for instance to make them bomb more places to increase resentment and increase
	um hatred towards quote-unquote the west um in in our homelands and And, I mean, that's an oversimplification, but that's certainly sort of, that's kind of the big picture goal.
	That's what a lot of this stuff was meant for.
	And so, kind of making us, making you hate us more is the goal.
	And, you know, you could see this as like, again, a more sophisticated kind of look on this is like, oh, we're going to blow up the credit card companies so that the U.S.
	military kind of comes after the patriot movement, etc., etc., etc.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, terrorist accelerationism.
	Yeah.
	Which, I mean, you can't blame the film for not sort of like foreseeing what was going to happen a couple of years down the line.
	But certainly, you know, again, from the point of view of 2019 and with any kind of understanding of the history of the last couple of decades.
	Although it was 2020, I keep saying 2019.
	From the point of view of 2020.
	With 2020 hindsight, you know, it does seem myopic.
	To what extent do you think Fight Club functions as a good depiction of how people end up recruited into fascist movements?
	It's just a little bit of a problem.
	It doesn't seem to function very much like stochastic terrorism, as we've talked about on this podcast before, does it?
	This is definitely an organized group.
	I mean, you know, they do exist in a cell structure, but with a very definite kind of top with Tyler Durden and then his kind of army of people who are like not communicating amongst themselves.
	But this is a very traditional kind of counterinsurgency or insurgency kind of paramilitary operation, essentially.
	They're just, you know, kind of playing pranks on consumerist ideals as opposed to, you know, kind of waging war against a nation-state, which is kind of a weird angle to take, but it doesn't look very much like stochastic terrorism at all.
	And, I mean, it is interesting that, you know, the novel was written in 96, and Palahniuk comes from Washington State, so he comes from the Pacific Northwest area.
	He would have definitely been kind of aware Or at least hypothetically, where he was in his 30s.
	He had kind of worked a blue-collar job for a few years.
	I mean, you have to imagine that he had some understanding of the then-at-its-height Patriot movement.
	I mean, this was published the year that Oklahoma City, the 10th of May, blew up the Murrah Building.
	Or the year after, actually.
	Yeah, it's the year after the Murrah Building was destroyed.
	And so, you know, and yet it doesn't sort of interact with that at all.
	It doesn't interact with kind of the actual existing kind of terrorist activity.
	And that's, you know, it's meant to be a little bit more of a view of, you know, the narrators and kind of Tyler Durden's kind of character.
	It's really kind of this more nihilistic personal vision as opposed to something that's really kind of really digging at sort of something that's actually kind of going on in these terrorist movements.
	But I do think that there is something to, we're going to give you something that is fun.
	We're going to give you something that gives you meaning, and it gives you something that sort of isolates you from the rest of the world, and that sort of envelops your life.
	There is something to that, in terms of kind of the way the Fight Club is.
	And then, as you get deeper into it, and as you sort of like get more and more from the rest of the world, we're going to give you more and more Homework assignments we're gonna kind of give you more hardcore stuff which then just kind of further insulates you from the rest of the world Until like you're just kind of and then you only just kind of trust your brothers around you So there is something to that definitely, but it doesn't really match a sort of stochastic terrorism or this kind of lone wolf stuff and it doesn't really match a
	What it actually seems more like actually, in terms of its structure as depicted, is like a growing business.
	Which might be intentional, honestly.
	such a parallel at the time that the book was written and the novel was, the novel was published and the film was made.
	What it actually seems more like, actually, in terms of its structure as depicted, is like a growing business, you know, that recruits.
	Which might be intentional, honestly.
	Yeah, I'm sure it is.
	I'm sure it is.
	I mean, I think the mirror image of the corporate system that forms from Fight Club and turns into Project Mayhem, I think that is absolutely deliberate.
	I mean, it even goes out of its way to show that Project Mayhem ends up being funded with corporate money, because the narrator sort of blackmails his boss into funding him, doesn't he?
	It does, yeah.
	So literally, this organisation which is supposedly devoted to the fall of the corporations, it ends up structured exactly like a corporation, recruiting headhunting people, opening branch offices, etc, and actually funded with corporate money.
	So, yeah, I'm sure that's deliberate.
	There's a strange way in which it kind of makes it muddled and a little bit more insightful all at the same time.
	Because it seems like, because you're doing it that way, you can't then make it look quite as much like actual real-world fascist organizations as it needs to if you're going to actually depict them.
	But at the same time, the fact that it's kinda sorta a fascist organization and also kinda sorta a corporation, that's actually fairly piercing, I think.
	Not necessarily because fascist organizations in the real world, of today anyway, work very similarly to Google or whatever.
	But because there are similar power dynamics in play, and of course, ultimately, fascist movements are products of capitalist society.
	Yeah, I know, absolutely.
	It is interesting to think about how this does and doesn't relate to actual fascist organizing.
	I find one of the things I come back to over and over again when I think about films that The way that these organizations work, and again, this is going to sound really bizarre, and I have not seen this film since I was literally a child, but if you think about the F.O.O.T.
	organization the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film where like on the surface it's like a bunch of arcade games and like a skate park and stuff and then like underneath it's like oh no we're actually going and it's like a criminal organization and they're fighting the Ninja Turtles sort of thing um and you know there's even one moment where like the big bike comes through the skate park and a kid kind of walks up to him and like bumps in and then he falls down he's terrified and the guy just goes go play um I remember that when I saw that when I was like 10 years old or whatever but um yeah no
	I mean that that that image kind of comes back to me more often than than Fight Club does with this stuff um Partly because a lot of what these, you know, this kind of alt-right, and even sort of the more old school kind of white nationalist stuff, Maybe not sort of the skinhead groups.
	Sorry, let me, so like the modern alt-right, or whatever, the dissident right, this kind of online subculture, kind of gets sold as sort of a measure of fun, and a measure of kind of community first, which then gets kind of like programmed into, you know, kind of a political end, but it's kind of more sold as this kind of like cultural kind of thing that's just sort of like A way to sit with your buddies and tell jokes all the time.
	Yeah, but then it does often sell itself in this quite sort of speciously wholesome communitarian way, doesn't it?
	Which is totally absent from the organisation and the film.
	Right, but they're going after teenagers who are kind of lonely and isolated.
	I mean, you know, the way that Ed Norton's character, you know, would be obviously not a teenager, but you know, this kind of isolated subculture and then kind of saying like, you know, You want to get away from your kind of bullshit job or your school or your parents who don't understand you or whatever.
	Hey, come and share Hitler memes and just laugh about it, you know, sort of thing.
	Interestingly, it compares more favorably to kind of the skinhead groups of the kind of 80s and 90s, and what they would do is kind of find People kind of living in in kind of shitty circumstances and Christian Piccolini He's kind of said like I was 14 years old, and I had nowhere to go I was standing on a street corner one day and somebody came up and said hey You want to make 20 bucks and do me some favors and like before before he knew it He was you know like working for this this white nationalist gang.
	I mean, you just kind of join a gang as a way of kind of fighting the other gangs, and it just kind of becomes its own thing.
	But, like, with this kind of explicit kind of Nazi ideology and, you know, within its kind of larger political organization, which matches Project Mayhem a little bit better in terms of its recruitment.
	It is interesting how little recruitment we see.
	We really don't see kind of why people, how they kind of approach people.
	And I think that's partly because you can't – the structure of the film really can't give us the actual pitch because we're not supposed to know that it's not – that Howard Durden doesn't exist.
	Yeah.
	And the film isn't really interested in sort of that kind of organizational structure.
	It's just sort of something that's happening behind the scenes.
	It's something that's kind of always happening like literally when Rupert or when the narrator is asleep, you know this organization is happening Yeah, and so he just sort of wakes up one day and suddenly there's like this, you know crew of people living in his house or like digging gardens Yeah, that's kind of it is kind of an interesting kind of kind of angle, but it does kind of make the film less Less interesting in a way just in terms of trying to kind of understand, like, what is it really saying about the way that these organizations form?
	The people in the group must be, ironically enough, they must be talking about it.
	Although, when we see people join, it's usually done in a visual way.
	You see a crowd forming around a fight, and there's also the process of, you know, one of the homework assignments is go out and start a fight, and one of the members picks a fight with a priest or whatever, and then the next time you see him, he's in one of the One of the fight meetings and stuff.
	Even the, like, do not talk about Fight Club, second rule, don't talk about Fight Club, is meant to make people go talk about it, right?
	Yeah, it is.
	There's this secret thing, and it's giving this whole new meaning to my life, but I'm not supposed to talk about it.
	Like Robert Paulson.
	You know, Bob.
	Yeah, the first rule is I'm not supposed to talk about it, and the second rule is I'm not supposed to talk about it.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Loads of them do that, yeah.
	And it's, I mean, there's a reason why every time anybody ever talks about Fight Club they start with a joke riffing on the do not talk about Fight Club thing.
	It's incredibly memorable, it's incredibly catchy.
	It was also, like, front and centre in the ads.
	It was front and centre in the ads, yeah, for the film, yeah.
	Absolutely.
	And they had this weird, like, very early viral marketing campaign for it.
	Like, they had these kind of weird trailers, you know, kind of TV ads and early internet ads.
	I remember there being, like, this kind of, like, really kind of interesting kind of online marketing thing and this kind of, like, then nascent internet.
	It was kind of one of the early examples of that.
	Sorry, just highlighting that.
	They also put ads in between, you know, in ad breaks in wrestling shows, apparently.
	And this predates really MMA kind of being a thing, to some degree.
	It is kind of interesting, like, it would have been amazing.
	Can you imagine, like, Fight Club branded MMA?
	Ironically, I think real-life fascist movements are actually more overtly commercial and corporate than Fight Club because, you know, a lot of the time they will overtly be selling, you know, their CDs, their music CDs and stuff to each other, to their recruits and stuff.
	I mean, like, in another Edward Norton movie, which, I don't know, this is another film we might talk about one day, American History X, that actually shows like a neo-Nazi...
	Like in so many ways, but yes.
	Deeply, but interesting.
	That actually shows a neo-Nazi skinhead organization kind of from the inside in a couple of scenes, and you see them flogging their CDs to each other and tickets to their... Which is how they made money for years.
	This is how, like, when you actually had to kind of maintain a mailing address, possibly in Delaware.
	We actually had to maintain a mailing address and, you know, had to, like, print flyers and stuff.
	Like, the internet kind of made it much, much cheaper to organize.
	But at the time, like, you literally had these record labels where the money made, just how they kind of fed themselves.
	It's how they kind of kept the doors open of a lot of these organizations.
	And interestingly, as the music industry was destroyed, and as the Internet kind of came into being, kind of came a much more potent figure or place or factor in American life, they no longer needed the money, but they also couldn't raise it in the same way. they no longer needed the money, but they also couldn't Like, you know, you do still see they are still kind of like far-right record labels and that sort of thing, but it's much more kind of like individuals making stuff and putting it on SoundCloud or YouTube or whatever, which is interesting.
	But the film eschews the more overt comparison between a fascist movement and a corporation by nothing like that happens.
	We don't see any money change hands in favour of something more general and thematic.
	I mean, it's not depicting Fight Club or Project Mayhem as a pyramid scheme, but it's very much depicted as a pyramid in terms of hierarchy.
	So it's doing that more general thing.
	And it's selling.
	I mean, it is selling.
	It's selling exactly what the consumer culture being critiqued in the early part of the film is critiqued for doing.
	And I think, again, it's very deliberate.
	It is selling a worldview.
	I mean, you know, the whole thing at the start is that the idea is that if you buy this table, or you buy this particular bowl, or you buy this particular whatever, then what you are doing is you are buying a meaning that you will find meaningful, that you will find fulfilling.
	And that is, you know, people should read Naomi Klein's No Logo, a classic text of the 90s anti-capitalist movement, where she talks about how the way corporations, you know, to a large extent, I mean I have some problems with this analysis, but She talks about, to a great extent, corporations don't sell stuff anymore, they sell brands, and brand images, and brand meanings.
	And that is part of what's being critiqued in the film, it's part of what dates it very much to that era, the 90s era, you know, that Seattle... Yeah, you can definitely see this is in the conversation to some degree with Naomi Klein's work.
	Yeah, I think Seattle is a bit after this, but it's the same sort of general... Yeah, the WTO is like a It might have been right around the same time it was released, but certainly after the film was in production.
	Yeah, but the same sort of vibe is feeding into it.
	Again, what is Project Mayhem doing?
	In its form, it is nihilism, a lot of it.
	Tyler Durden preaches to his acolytes that they're just matter, they're just decaying meat, etc.
	But it is nonetheless, in formal terms, he is selling them meaning, he is selling them ideas, he is selling them stuff to fill their lives with that has been left empty by consumer culture, which claims to be able to sell you, you know, if you buy these jeans it makes you a hero, if you buy this whatever, it makes you this.
	I mean, I remember 90s ads.
	I remember 90s ads about how if you just wear these jeans then suddenly you're rescuing children from in front of fascist tanks and stuff like that.
	The commodification of dissent.
	There's a very good Thomas Frank book, actually, which is called something like Selling Dissent or Selling Rebellion, where he talks about how 90s brands, they completely appropriated the visual and thematic language of 60s rebellion, you know, to sell you 90s consumer crap.
	And yeah, it's kind of doing that.
	Fight Club is trying to... it might not be getting money out of you, but it's certainly getting labor.
	It's certainly getting labor out of Oh, no, absolutely.
	I mean, it's selling literally a lifestyle.
	Like, literally, you know, come give away everything you own.
	Come with, like, two pairs of socks and a beanie and a blanket.
	And you won't even have a name anymore.
	And, you know, come and come and dig in our garden.
	Yeah, come and join the organisation, submerge yourself into it, donate your labour, we will take your labour, the fruit of your labour, and in return you will get meaning.
	Again, it's part of the film's policy of mirroring the malaise of corporate consumerist capitalism within the organisation that is set up by somebody desperately trying to escape it.
	Which is, again, the narrator bringing the fetishism of commodities with him everywhere he goes down the line.
	And it is exploitative, in exactly the same way that fascist movements are exploitative of the people they recruit.
	And it gets the class position right as well, actually, because The narrator is in that completely deracinated, disconnected, lower-middle class office worker zone from that period, which is completely disconnected from any old-fashioned notion of the working class, completely disconnected from any more profound and deeper idea of the working class, which is anybody who has to sell their labour.
	Again, in the 90s, the total triumph of neoliberalism, you know, there's no unions or anything like that, workers' struggles completely destroyed.
	So yeah, that is the class position in which fascism will breed, those people stuck in the middle with no, you know, they're not in the ruling class, they're not in the, they don't think of themselves as being in the working class either.
	And Tyler is explicitly He's explicitly petty bourgeois.
	He actually takes human material.
	He takes the fat from women who've undergone liposuction.
	And he exploits... He literally exploits human bodies and then sells soap as a small producer.
	So he's literally a petty bourgeois.
	So it gets a lot of things right about the essentially capitalist nature of fascism and the class position it emerges from, interestingly.
	Yeah, no, that is interesting.
	Man, you're making me want to re-watch it again.
	That's not where I thought we were going to end this, but I do think we have to kind of wrap up here.
	Is there anything else?
	Just to keep these not three hours long.
	I think the last one people did enjoy, but I don't think we can do that every week.
	It's a shame because we haven't really talked about gender and patriarchy, which in many ways is more front and center than any of the stuff I've been talking about.
	Sure.
	I mean, we could revisit this here in a couple weeks.
	I think nobody would really mind us kind of coming back to this.
	We just have to kind of wrap up here.
	You've just had enough.
	Yeah, okay.
	Did you have any other kind of major thoughts?
	I mean, again, we really haven't discussed masculinity and gender and all that stuff, and we are kind of planning on a Manosphere episode at some point in the not-too-distant future, and maybe we'll come back to American History.
	I think American History X would be an interesting one.
	Yeah.
	There are some kind of complicated dynamics at work in real life with that one.
	But I guess the one thing I would just like to highlight is that again in real life Edward Norton does not in any sense challenge these ideas despite the fact that he was a big fan of sort of the script and he really liked the kind of like challenging commercialism and some of the commentary tracks and stuff.
	When Uber first came to Los Angeles, he was the very first official ride.
	He's personal friends with the founder of Uber.
	I'm reading this book super pumped, The Rise and Fall of Uber, which is all about that, and that's a really juicy tidbit that I realized as we were planning this episode.
	So, yeah, Ed Norton did not absorb the lessons that we have gleaned from this film, obviously.
	No, you know, ultimately in the capitalist system, works of art are, generally speaking, commodities, and as such it's very difficult for them actually to be anti-capitalist in any real sense.
	The Film Fight Club certainly can't escape its own nature as a commodity, no matter how much it tries, and I think it does try, and that's one of the interesting things about it.
	But yeah, it's for people, you know, ultimately people can Use art, you know, to think with and talk with and investigate.
	And the work of art, you know, a hammer just sits there.
	It takes a person to pick it up and do something with it.
	And a person can pick it up and Hammer a nail in it and nail in with it and put up a picture or they can pick it up and hammer somebody over the head with it.
	It's for people ultimately to take back their own agency and to use the things that capital produces either for or against capital and I think that's as true of art as it is of pretty much any other commodity.
	Agreed.
	I think that's a great place to end it.
	So, yeah.
	Thanks a lot for being here, as always.
	Yeah, and next time... I'm always here, so it's fine.
	Literally no effort at all.
	Clearly that's not true at all.
	We always appreciate that.
	This is a two-man crew.
	I sometimes start to feel guilty that we don't do our pronouns at the beginning of every episode.
	I feel like that would just piss off our Nazi listeners and would make us a little bit more trans-inclusive and we are obviously both huge proponents of the trans people, non-binary people, trans community, etc.
	I have been considering, like, we should start doing that, but we can talk about that later.
	Alright, next episode we are going to be doing Augustus fucking Invictus, which is not his name.
	It's Augustus Soul Invictus.
	But, yeah, we're going to be talking about him because he went to jail the first of the year.
	he's in the news and we've been meaning to do him for a while uh he's a pretty fucked up figure even by the standards of the nazis we normally cover and we're going to do him next week our next episode whenever we get around to recording so i'll look forward to that that's where we're going next that was i don't speak german Thanks for listening.
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