Why We Need Fight Clubs

Revisiting David Fincher's Fight Club.

For reasons that I can’t fully explain¹, I’ve been revisiting the songs and bands I loved in high school — including Taking Back Sunday, and their absolute banger “Cute without the ‘E’.”

I never really got the video when it came out. It didn’t matter, as I was most interested in the lead singer’s face-obscuring bangs and alluringly heartfelt wails.

But this year, finally, it clicked. The depressing office? The waiters’ outfits? The sad men? The music video was referencing Fight Club.

David Fincher’s violent, comic film was a comparative flop at the box office in October 1999, but became an instant cult classic upon DVD release.

A prècis, for those who haven’t seen the film: Fight Club stars Edward Norton as the Narrator, an unnamed office drone driven to near-insanity by his pointless job, mindless consumerism, and generally aimless existence, who accidentally befriends a charismatic and wildly masculine soap salesman named Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt). After a mysterious accident leaves the Narrator homeless, he moves in with Durden who one night, in the parking lot of a local dive bar, teaches the Narrator to fight. The two end up starting a secret, all-male fighting club, drawing more and more similarly disaffected men from all sectors of society into their circle to beat each other to a pulp — reviving their masculinity and giving them something to live for in the process. Of course, things spin out of control (think: paramilitary terrorist operation).

It makes sense that the disaffected, emotionally bereft members of my favorite screamo band took it to heart; nearly every guy of a certain age did. For many men, Tyler Durden — roguish, magnetic, in charge, agential— became an icon. And nearly 25 years later, Fight Club’s portrayal of a tortured modern masculinity seems prophetic,² as does its ill-fated idealization of a Nietzschean Übermensch.

But what’s most striking upon rewatch is the fact that the inciting events for the movie’s storyline could not happen today – and the reason why is a major loss for both men and those around them.

The Narrator and Tyler, the movie’s two main characters, meet first on a plane, but truly connect in a bar, where the eponymous Fight Club is formed and where they recruit new members. Fincher’s social satire is a movie about male friendship and community in physical settings. There are hands-on-tasks (literally, mostly involving punching each other in the face), 1:1 mentorship and non-erotic connection. 

Today, however, there is no “bar.” Its substitutes — posting in depressing online fora, playing video games, collecting on social media — are lackluster, to say the least. Analog meetings rarely happen, rites of passage are harder than ever to find. Middle class boys, at least, don’t even get into fights anymore³ — they’re oversupervised, cowed by ever-shifting social norms, and also, too often, inside.

In this isolated moment, the idea that anyone might ask to spend the night at a stranger’s apartment (the Narrator asks this of Tyler over pay-phone, no less!) is downright shocking. The idea that a group of men might live in a shared home, find purpose, and form community sounds like something out of a dream.

Which is perhaps why this tweet from the young Democratic activist David Hogg caught my attention (I mused on it in my own Substack, too):

I hope I’m wrong but if we lose in November I think the main reason why will be the number of young men of all races that are no longer Democrats. … we have a real problem to deal with. … I think a lot of this is caused by Covid and the epidemic of male loneliness in this country and the ensuing commodification through social media of misogyny.

Fight Club raised the salience of male disaffection, but also made it seem like something that could be recovered from, albeit through questionable means. The cure wouldn’t be found in isolation, but in community.

Today, the same problem exists, perhaps in heightened form. But over the past 20 years, the avenues for solving it seem to have evaporated. For all its depravity, Fight Club showcased a potential solution that doesn’t seem to exist today.

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This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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1. Nostalgia? “Back to school” energy?

2. “We’re the middle children of history, man: No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war; our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

3. *As one masculinity researcher told me with obvious dismay. (The suggestion that physical violence is a necessary component of masculine fulfillment deserves a post of its own, but I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.)