So, the director hid a swastika in one of the shadows to indicate that he thought the society was evil, among a ton of other things. He talked about it in the director’s commentary. But yeah, it’s actually super easy to miss unless you know it’s actually a warning (which, like you said, the teenage boys it’s marketed to wouldn’t understand)… Which is kind of the problem with a lot of media, like the entire genre of cyberpunk.
So, Fight Club is about how masculinity within patriarchy destroys men. A man who is an isolated consumer isn’t allowed to cry because he’s confirming to masculinity, he has a mental breakdown and turns to expresses his sadness as violence. At the end of the book he gets in to every fight until his cheeks wear away and he’s described as looking like a jack-o’-lantern. After he confronts Tyler and shoots himself, he becomes catatonic and lives in a mental hospital.
The fact that the plans wouldn’t actually do anything are part of the point. It’s just an unfocused attack on a system that dehumanizes. In the end, it just becomes part of the system he attacked. Which is also his critique of what became ecofascism.
The author is gay. A big element of masculinity is cisgendered heterosexual, as least in the US context and especially in the late 90’s when he was writing. He was excluded in some ways from masculinity at that time, while socialized in it. So he has a lot of reasons to explore and decompose masculinity.
Brad Pitt, when playing Tyler, understood the critique as well and continued to push on the what masculinity means. While regularly playing an architypical man, he’s often worn dresses. The fact that he can do both demonstrantes the malleability of the definition of masculinity (this is also called “queering” masculinity).
I know all this because that’s one of my favorite movies/books. I was in highschool when it came out. I was studying AP English, so I decided to my final paper on absurdism and antiheroes in Fight Club, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Good Soldier Ŝvejk. But even after reading it and having a ton of context, I actually didn’t really understand it. It wasn’t until years later that I was able to revisit it through the lense of feminism that I understood how much of Fight Club is actually feminist.
Even though all the information was available to me, I still didn’t get it. Fight Club, Starship Troopers, Rick and Morty, and other films and media that criticize masculinity, violence, and authoritarianism are so often misunderstood by their fans… Like the point of Nirvana’s In Bloom. Could the fact that the majority of people who watch these movies completely miss the point make them, by definition, bad art? They fail, fundamentally, to relate their ideas. Isn’t that a problem?
I don’t think the fact that people don’t understand a piece of art makes it bad, and I’m really careful about criticizing art without having context… especially if I’m not the audience.
Context is super important. For example, a lot of people don’t realize that the whole “modern art is shit” meme was super important to Hitler. He claimed that Jews were creating “degenerate art” that degraded German culture. They did art shows that were compilations of things they didn’t like or didn’t understand before burning them… Kind of like this compilation. So things like criticizing the concept of modern art (especially out of context) or taking about sterilizing people with disabilities that I always push back on. A lot of people don’t know the connections with those.
I work in computer security now, and have for like 15 years or so. Almost every vulnerability is someone trying to solve a problem they don’t fully understand. Occasionally someone will try to solve a problem that isn’t a problem at all and make a problem in the process. Some problems people keep trying to solve when they really need to step away and let a professional handle it, like cryptography.
I’ve seen too many people make a huge mess trying to solve a problem they didn’t totally understand or didn’t comprehend the impact of a solution.I always ask myself if a problem needs to be solved before trying to solve it. In a world where people are making money off genocide, starving people, inciting terrorist attacks, and making life unlivable on the planet, is some people acting silly really a thing worth fighting against? It just feels a bit like punching down.
They aren’t two completely different problems, they’re in direct opposition. Making cars more tolerable increases demand for cars. Improving mass transit and bike infrastructure decreases demand. One is sustainable, the other is not.
Yeah, so this is all covered in that video. Spiderman is probably the closest to progressive listed. He’s working class, he has trouble with cops, his family is poor. He’s reactionary in the literal sense, because he takes action in response to super villains. He doesn’t ever do anything proactively to make the world more just, he just responds to people trying to make it worse. Imagine if he robbed a bank and gave it to the poor or broke in to an ICE vehicle depot and disabled all their vehicles so they couldn’t raid immigrants. By the standard construction of the genre, he’d automatically become a villain… And that’s the point.
Subversions of the genre aside, It can be no better than liberalism. It’s like Obama, being a black president who probably did more than any previous president to address mass incarceration while simultaneously ordering drone strikes against civilians, crushing Standing Rock and Occupy, and presiding over the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in all the history leading up to it. In a lot of ways Obama was the most progressive US president… But liberalism limits the frame of operation. Just like the genre, the best you can do is virtue signaling without ever really challenging the status quo.
The Overton window for the super hero genre goes from (perhaps slightly left of) center to fascist. No matter how many identity labels or progressive situational elements you add, it’s still a genre that’s literally reactionary and therefore trends politically reactionary.
Again, this is all covered in the video. If you want to challenge your understanding of the world, great. If not, I’m not really going to keep paraphrasing a video that presents these ideas more effectively than I do.