Brett's Fight Club Notes

Fight Club(1999)

Background Notes

This was screenwriter Jim Uhls’s first credit. His next credit was for the NBC TV movie Semper Fi, which is described by the first featured imdb reviewer as a “Nice promotional movie for the marine corps.” Never major credit is Jumper, directed by deep state filmmaker Doug Liman (the cover features “Illuminati” Egyptian symbolism). His only other feature screenwriting credit is “in production.”

Helena Bonham Carter hails from a super-elite (most Jewish) banking family, part of the British peerage. Her father was a director for the Bank of England at the International Monetary Fund. Her great grandfather was Prime Minster H. H. Asquith. She is a “CBE,” Commander of the British Empire, the third highest rank in the “Most Excellent Order of the British Empire,” which, according to Wikipedia, awards “contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service.” Evidently her “contributions” to cinema have pleased the Anglo-American establishment.

Advertising/Marketing

AC: “I think that this film probably more accurately depicts my take on advertising in its…in what it provides for society…than any advertising I did.” “You work where you can. Nobody was that interested in hiring me to make movies early on. So I made movies and commercials—just as a way to ‘play with the tools.’” Elsewhere says he hated making commercials and yet he continued to do so well after becoming a multi-millionaire, big-time Hollywood director. Motives sketchy; not altogether candid.

And note the extreme use of paid product placement in a movie supposedly raking corporate consumerism over the coals. Kind of says it all there.

From Jasun Horsley’s article on Fincher:

Perhaps the most surprising thing to me about Fincher’s career arc was that he went back to directing commercials, not only after his fiasco with Alien 3 (for which the studios gave him little creative control and which he abandoned pre-editing), but also after Panic Room, in 2002. So the man who made Fight Club in 1999 spent half the following decade making commercials for Coca-Cola, Nike, Motorola, and Heineken (with Brad Pitt!)?! What’s wrong with this picture?

Horsley’s conclusion: “there is nary a subversive frame in the whole film—not even subliminally—but only a simulation of subversion, a controlled opposition. While posing as edgy art, it doubles as an invitation to counterfeit consumer revolt and pseudo-awakening, offering ‘false models of revolution to local revolutionaries’ (Guy Debord).”

Through his work in music videos and commercials, Fincher made signal contributions to the worship of celebrity that he purports to critique in Fight Club. Is this movie about (the trade secrets of) mind war/culture-creation sectors like advertising and music videos? Fincher certainly tries to give the impression that he likes poking at corporate culture. Where does the cult angle fit into this?

“Guerilla marketing,” marketing as subversion of values and therefore can’t be subverted. The message is that advertising and marketing are inescapable; they cannot be eliminated, only repurporsed. Consider Project Mayhem’s “departments” of “disinformation” and “mischief.”

The Feedback Loop

Palahniuk says he took the name “Tyler” from the 1960 Disney movie Toby Tyler or Ten Weeks with a Circus. Given that Tyler is clearly a form of trickster, this reinforces the archetype (circus, carnival, clown). The narrator uses the aliases “Rupert” and “Travis” at the support groups, which Fincher admits in the AC are taken from the De Niro characters in The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver, respectively. The narrator is the next stage, or another version of, the proto-incel archetype represented by the De Niro characters.

Since Tyler is the narrator’s shadow, these personalities can also be connected to Tyler. More precisely, we could say that they represent the narrator in transition toward his transformation into Tyler Durden, his shadow who is ostensibly waging war with post-industrial Western society through trickery and sabotage (note the smiley face designs on the burning building and by the telephone in the Paper Street house).

As in The Joker, the subtle messaging is that he who controls the clown controls the crowd, and he who controls the crowd controls the world; and the movie itself and the whole project hint that Tyler the trickster, like the Joaquin Phoenix Joker and his precursors in the two Scorsese films, is a tool of the global elites to transition society into the next stage of the plan to establish the New World Order (see under Conspiracy and Apocalypse Programming).

Tyler Durden, like the Joker, is an instantiation of the dark self archetype—a collective shadow-god of 90s young males. (Similar union of opposites drawn from cultural archetypes is Marilyn Manson, whom Palahniuk interviewed once.)

A few copycat crimes and attempted crimes followed in the wake of the movie, including a 2009 attempted bombing of a Starbucks by a 17-year-old New York kid who started a “fight club.”

Note that Edward Norton called Fight Club Gen X’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Another feedback loop trope involves the appearance of Lauren Sanchez as a TV reporter covering the “smiley face” building bomb incident in the movie. Sanchez was a news anchor in real life, but her career looks to be about as staged as the event she’s covering in the movie (and she’s appeared in several other movies as a news anchor). She’s been involved with a slew of celebrities, athletes, and oligarchs, including Jeff Bezos. In Fight Club, when she appears on the TV screen, the Leto character says, blankly, “She’s hot.” Sanchez would go on to be voted onto multiple “most beautiful” lists. Remember that Leto himself is being predictively programmed to be a rock star in the movie (Tyler looks directly at him when he says “rock stars” during the “middle children of history” speech). The indication is that both Leto and Sanchez are industry creations. Sanchez is a fake news anchor playing a news anchor in a movie to cover a staged event. “All the world’s a stage.” According to Wikipedia, "In 2016, she founded Black Ops Aviation, the first female-owned aerial film and production company."

Cult programming and cultural engineering

Film as a study of the structure of cultsand how they program people? Which is really gesturing toward mass cultural engineering? See “subliminal imagery” under Method.

New Agey portico (outer court), self-help groups, as entry into a nihilistic anarchy cult with apocalyptic agenda driven by anarcho-primitivist political philosophy. But these types of ideologies—and cultural products like the film itself—as part of the nihilistic (dissolution) phase of the New World Order, the next phases involving demon-summoning antinomian Luciferian transhumanism.

“You are not special. …We are all part of the same compost heap”—anomic (hyper-individualistic) nihilism gives way to soulless collectivism (coagulation). Dialectics.

Consider the use of branding, which also comes up in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Story can be understood as a death ritual, or a death-and-rebirth ritual. Consider the special importance of suicide here, as ritualized cultural nihilism—90s as great cultural suicide ritual (Marilyn Manson, himself the image of rock music committing suicide: “I’d sell you suicide,” from “Irresponsible Hate Anthem”).

Tyler’s speech, during the lye ritual, about how our fathers were models for God and since they abandoned us, this tells us that God doesn’t care about us—this is a tipping of the hand that the interminable attacks by Hollywood on the image of the father are part of an overall assault on the image of God, which, as I’ve explained elsewhere, constitutes an attack on the human soul, since we are made in the image of God. Remember the slogan, “In Tyler we trust.” Tyler becomes the surrogate father and hence the surrogate God, a cult leader pretending to be anarcho-primitivist revolutionary but actually an agent of globalism (see below under Conspiracy and Apocalypse Programming). And then of course Tyler abandoned the narrator as well, revealing the emptiness of God—nihilism (see below under Buddhistic themes), the same existential nihilism by way of cultural nihilism that Fincher pushes heavily in Seven and indirectly in Aliens 3.

Buddhistic themes

The movie is aimed at especially at male spiritual seekers (“Our war is the spiritual war”), the numbers of which had by 1999 had multiplied considerably in the midst of advanced secularization and the general soullessness of post-industrial life. It might be said that the film attempts to elevate the underlying ethos of nihilism that was peaking in the 90s into a religion—and what better operating system for spiritualizing nihilism than Buddhism.

“In a Premiere profile from 1999, Norton talks about how he thinks his character's trajectory is grounded in Buddhism”:

In Buddhism there's Nirvana, and then there's Samsara, the world of confusion and disharmony. That world is our testing ground, where we have the experiences that help us become enlightened. I'm not saying "Fight Club" is The Book of Living and Dying, but it was kind of that idea: You're challenging yourself to break out of the world.

“Also, within a Film Comment interview, David Fincher talks about how the Narrator's journey through the movie is Buddhist (although he doesn't know which Buddhist school of thought the philosophy comes from):

I don't know if it's Buddhism, but there's the idea that on the path to enlightenment you have to kill your parents, your god, and your teacher ... The movie introduces [Norton's character] at the point when he's killed off his parents and he realizes that they're wrong. But he's still caught up, trapped in this world he's created for himself. And then he meets Tyler Durden, and they fly in the face of God - they do all these things that they're not supposed to do, all the things that you do in your twenties when you're no longer being watched over by your parents, and end up being, in hindsight, very dangerous. And then finally, he has to kill off this teacher, Tyler Durden. So the movie is really about that process of maturing.

Extremes of neoliberal soul death and Tyler’s anarcho-primitivism (“near-life experience”) are rejected for a middle path that for all intents and purposes amounts to inaction and resignation, anticipating the latest wave of Eastern religious influence on an increasingly powerless electorate in America.

Method

(Pseudo-)Subliminal imagery in a film that treats the subject of subliminal imagery (Revelation of the Method).

AC:

I always loved the idea…there was a book in the 70s called Subliminal Sex [actually, Subliminal Seduction]. It was supposed to be sort an expose into the advertising industry and the use of subliminal imagery. The idea of airbrushing skulls and crossbones and death imagery into ice for close-ups for Johnny Walker ads that would be in Sports Illustrated. I always loved that idea.

Note that the catalog in the film contains the message, visible for only a beat or so and not in the center of the frame, “Use your imagination,” i.e., dissociate into multiple identities, as the protagonist does.

From artofthetitle.com:

With Fight Club, the whole thing could have started with the sound of a gun being cocked, opening on Edward Norton — which is how it began in all the preview screenings — but I had this idea to begin with the electrical impulse of information between two synapses to cue the fear or panic receptors in Edward Norton’s character’s brain. Then we literally pull back, changing in scale all the way back, and we pull out through his forehead.

Fincher says (in AC) that he wanted to portray Jack as in a “manic, dissociative state.” Of course, Jack’s life is taken over progressively by an alter, who then starts a cult that involves constantly mind-fucking members (including when Jack doesn’t know he’s Tyler while others do).

Conspiracy stuff

Produced by Arnon Milchan, Mossad agent. Fincher says studio accepted his (Fincher’s) cut, gave him extra money and extra time, unsolicited. In the commentary, Fincher notes that Milchan’s name appears in the opening credit sequence at the moment when they enter Jack’s brain cavity: Milchan as “the brains behind the operation.”

“Waiter op” where they threaten police captain. Masonic checkerboard floor and deliberate reference to Clockwork Orange (AC). Mind control themes. Consider interest in subliminal messages and cults. Note that, at the end of this sequence, a kind of psychic “split” occurs through the (dissociated) narrative, where Tyler seems to have buddied up to Leto and Jack feels rejected—stage of initiation (alchemical “separation”)?

Thomas discusses the 9/11 predictive programming angle at some length in our episode. Note that Norton, in the opening scene, refers to the operation to take down the credit card company buildings as a “theater of mass destruction.”

At 121:07, the text of the newspaper article (which is unrelated to the headline), refers to “future plans…bearing on the situation as it now stands,” and says that the project “will take considerable time.” This sounds like a coded reference, not only to Tyler’s Project Mayhem, but to the real agenda behind the overarching psyop of which this film is a component, the long-term NWO agenda. The indication is that Fight Club is part of an intermediate phase in that agenda. (See below under Apocalypse Programming.)

Another line in the article refers to “pressure from the inside which will materially change the case.” Inside job. The establishment is the revolution.

Note that the Leto character becomes Tyler’s chief lieutenant after he allows himself to be beaten to the point of disfigurement. Remember here Alex’s story about the screenwriter for some of the Star Wars prequels explaining to him that the message behind the top figures in the Empire being disfigured is that one has to be maimed and disfigured, to sacrifice oneself, in order to rise to the top of the hierarchy (and presumably physical disfigurement is at least partly a metaphor for psychic disfigurement).

Ending

“Everything is going to be fine,” with buildings collapsing and a hole through his face following failed suicide attempt to wipe out dangerous alter—obvious irony implied though almost certainly not fully appreciated by target audience,[1]who wants to believe there’s light at the end of the nihilistic tunnel, even if that light is not Tyler Durden (but perhaps runs through Tyler Durden).

Apocalypse programming:

Cancelation of all debts. “If you erase the debt record, then we all go back to zero. It’ll create total chaos.” The Great Reset? Is this not part of an NWO plan to phase out private ownership? Movies like this and New Age streams of thought deplore “materialism” and “consumerism” as laying the groundwork for superclass agenda of what is now called “stakeholder capitalism,” involving austerity. In the lye ritual scene, Tyler’s injunction to embrace the pain can be read as an injunction to embrace austerity—and indeed, their whole lifestyle, in the midst of urban blight, can be seen as a prefiguration of this degraded austerity the NWO has in store for us. So again, anarcho-primitivism as a gateway to NWO hyper-technological slavery.

In subsequent years and decades, the “green revolution” brought the astroturf nature of much of this messaging into the open, with its absurd glamorization of tiny houses and other symptoms of the dying middle class. Fight Club was made by one of the chief image-makers and promoters of the very “consumerism” this and the green movement purport to critique. Now we’re being told that indeed there are designs to cancel all debt, but only after you surrender your right to own property…but that’s OK because property is so bourgeois and spiritually bankrupt and bad for the earth, etc.

The message is that the only hope is in destruction, a “Great Reset.” Tyler Durden, though revealed (by Fincher, at least) to be an unstable menace, is “necessary evil” (to quote Bane’s description of himself in Dark Knight Rises).

Odds and Ends

Propaganda aimed at young male audience; rather dated pop philosophy. Fincher claims he identified with the late-90s crisis-of-masculinity themes.

Movie is a bit dated, unlike Se7enand even The Game.

Palahniuk says the name “Tyler” comes from the Disney production Toby Tyler; or Ten Weeks with a Circus,” which Palahniuk called “Tyler Goes to the Circus.” Circus=clown=trickster.

Drew Barrymore seen on a magazine cover. From a Looper article titled “The Untold Truth of Fight Club”:

In 2009, a new edition of Fight Club found its way to Blu-ray for the movie's 10th anniversary. In Durden-esque style, it features a number of gags that had people trying to return their purchases, thinking they'd been sold the wrong movie. The Blu-ray opens with the title cards for another romantic comedy released in 1999, Never Been Kissed, a movie that also features dual identities. It's a perfect prank, and a tribute to all the fans who've brought Fight Club home over the years, making it into the cult classic it is today.

Barrymore is doing the one-eye sign on the poster for Never Been Kissed. (Remember that Fincher likes puzzles.)

[1]Classic unreliable narrator throughout.