Because of our tragic nature as human beings, there tends to be a destructive side to some of the things that we enjoy most. I’m not referring here to the things we claim to enjoy most, e.g. certain popular songs (‘Born in the USA’), baseball home runs, or cute dogs chasing after tennis balls.
No. I am referring here to many things that we enjoy on a particularly deep, visceral level, such as a particularly hard-fought boxing match, the 48-hour bender we went on the weekend before we graduated from college, or a movie we particularly love to watch with our closest friends – but wouldn’t dream of watching with our wife on a ‘date night’.
The troubling truth is that a lot of things that stir our deepest excitement, and in a lasting way at that, share an element of the outre’ or taboo, which is part of the reason we come back to them again and again: they fascinate. But not by appealing to the better side of our nature.
We assimilate these things into our minds on both a conscious and a subconscious level, and they effect our attitude, our posture, and even the way we carry ourselves.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF MALE ANGST
Meditating upon the events of the last year and the moments of political upheaval in particular (e.g. the occupation of several blocks of downtown Portland, Oregon by left-wing activists; the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 by a right-wing mob), I am struck by some underlying commonalities: both the antic atmosphere that attended the violence and the use of tactical gear and pseudo-military jargon by the participants.
I’m also struck by the use of similar jargon on the airwaves, cable TV, and social media these days, particularly on the political right. We keep hearing terms employed in military psychological operations (PsyOps), chiefly the terms “false flag” and “disinformation”. You would think we were all sitting in a briefing tent somewhere in Kandahar Province if we didn’t know better.
While it’s possible that military vets and people obsessed with the language of covert operations dominate blog-writing and programming efforts for news outlets such as ‘Zero Hedge’, Breitbart, and Newsmax, I tend to believe that the obsessive fixation with these terms mostly reflects a deep familiarity with one particular motion picture released in 1999. A film that the young men of Gen Y and Gen Z watched repeatedly as they came of age in the 2000s and 2010s — ‘Fight Club’.
It’s all there in the movie. Young men in their 20s bopping from city to city and job to job. Disgust and contempt for the consumer-oriented society in which they’ve been raised. Disconnect from male authority figures and an overwhelming sense of ennui. And then, a reawakening of some primal instinct through ritual combat, the formation of a secret society, and finally, a turn toward urban warfare and big, symbolic acts that read like performance art even if their content is vandalism (‘Project Mayhem’).
In the rundown squatter home that serves as headquarters for Tyler Durden’s unnamed, clandestine group, a file hanger nailed to the wall holds a manila folder marked with a single word: “Disinformation”.
THE RIGHT WORD CAN MOVE A MOUNTAIN
How that word has come to define the past five years!
We’ve heard ‘disinformation’ used quite a bit in the media since 2015, particularly in the context of the 2016 election, allegations of foreign interference with social media platforms, and Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian influence on the U.S. presidential election. Big newspaper outlets printed it. Talk radio repeated it. Cable TV amplified it. President Trump and his acolytes shouted it out loud.
Disinformation now appears to be all around us, infecting public discourse surrounding the coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 election, the Capitol ‘Riot’ (so-called), and vaccine efficacy. But when did most of us first hear the word ‘disinformation’, or see it in print?
I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, and I can’t remember hearing the word used in conversation by any adult. The term “psychological warfare” was vaguely familiar, but the acronym “PsyOps” I only first encountered in college in the early 1990s. The person who introduced me to it was a very left-leaning friend of mine from Minneapolis who belonged to a democratic socialist organization about 25 years before that became cool. If you had asked anyone I knew what a “false flag operation” was they would have probably said it had something to do with the advertising industry.
To the best of my recollection, the word “disinformation” first flashed across my eyes in a Washington, D.C. movie theatre where my then-fiancee and I had gone to see “Fight Club” on its opening night in 1999 with another couple. It was a compromise choice. Two of us wanted to see “The Matrix” and the other two “The Green Mile”.
I remember enjoying “Fight Club” quite a bit, partly for Edward Norton’s performance, partly for Brad Pitt’s (By golly, the man has range!), but largely for the main character’s manic slide from a dull office routine down into the bowels of an home-grown domestic terrorist cell. Not to mention the big twist near the end. How well-handled that was!
But no matter how much my future wife, Y., and I enjoyed ‘Fight Club’, for us it could only become a fond memory rather than a visceral, formative experience. We were just too old for it to have a big impact – in our late twenties and months away from settling into married life. We had jobs we liked and were in an optimistic frame of mind.
It was 1999, after all. The stock market was soaring, much of the world was at peace, Russia was a paper tiger, and on top of it all, we were in love. 9/11 had not happened. Our major existential worry was the Y2K bug.
EVERY GENERATION SEEKS A MISSION
Not so, Gen Y. I tend to believe that “Fight Club’ was experienced on a very different level by the 13 and 14-year old boys who watched it for the first time that same autumn on the eve of the Millennium’s. They were boys who would be 15 and 16 two years later when 9/11 happened. Boys who would enlist to fight in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the decade of the 2000s and come back profoundly changed by their service.
I also suspect that 13-year old boys who watched ‘Fight Club’ on DVD in the early 2010s in their parents’ basements, in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis, saw the film through a very different prism than we did. The societal context had been shifted by years of a slow slog back to full employment between 2009 and 2014. A time when prospects for many Americans grew narrower. When college debt soared and personal bankruptcies crept up.
For a lot of these kids, ‘Fight Club’ was probably the equivalent of what the early ‘Star Wars’ movies and ‘E.T.’ were to my generation in the 1980s. We hoped to become the next George Lucas or Steven Spielberg, or possibly a special effects wizard or computer programming expert if a goal that high seemed out of reach. For the kids of the early 20th century, I suspect the fantasy of belonging to an actual fight club or being part of some secret paramilitary organization churned somewhere in their thoughts. They could cast themselves in starring roles.
THEATRE OF THE ABSURD
These changes in the content of pop culture have not been positive. ‘Fight Club’ is, at its heart, a pretty nihilistic movie. It’s characters are sad and disconnected. It’s action is brutal and un-redemptive. The overall narrative celebrates the absurd and the grotesque.
‘Fight Club’ is a movie whose main character breaks into the dumpsters behind cosmetic surgery clinics to extract human fat for use as an ingredient for making bars of pink, perfumed soap. “We are going to sell these women back their own fat asses” Brad Pitt quips before strolling into a department store gripping a suitcase loaded with custom-wrapped bars of soap. He’s pretty funny — but utterly malign.
There is more going on beneath the surface, of course. It’s a bit too easy to write ‘Fight Club’ off as nothing more than a fantasy of extended adolescence and overwrought male angst.
Ed Norton’s character isn’t a killer or a terrorist. He’s a troubled young man who is searching for love and a healthier sense of himself. When pressured by his sinister alter ego to kill his girlfriend, he shoots himself through the mouth with a handgun instead, to silence his doppleganger and save his lover’s life. The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, an psychiatric association, has given the eponymous Chuck Palahniuk novel the film is based upon an award.
But it seems to me that most of these nuances get lost on impressionable youngsters who watch this movie for the first time and come away with the idea that it would be really cool to settle scores with ‘The Man’ by acting out a covert operation. Or by disrupting credit card companies and hacking into government servers. Or by ransacking offices and attacking cops to make a point. By ‘playing Revolutionary’ in general.
FROM ‘ASK TRAVIS’ TO PROJECT MAYHEM
Historians of the future will have to dig into whether Edward Snowden ever placed ‘Fight Club’ on a list of his favorite movies (assuming he ever had such a list) or how ‘Fight Club’ and dozens of other films figured in the formation of a generation of roustabouts.
For my own part, I would bet a cool six figures that many of our current crop of young radicals, regardless of whether they broke windows and occupied downtown Portland or stormed of the Capitol in full tactical gear, saw the word “disinformation” for the first time in the frames of ‘Fight Club’ and felt a prickly feeling along the backs of their necks. Some of them must have thought then and there: “I’ve got to find out what that means, because that word is calling out to me.”
Antifa and Proud Boys alike – they all seem to be auditioning for the role of Tyler Durden now.
Perhaps the cultural placement of ‘Fight Club’ in the 2000-2020 decades is analogous to the fascination that ‘single shooters’ of the 1970s and 80s had with the film ‘Tax Driver’, or the affinity a number of serial killers have reportedly professed for the film ‘The Collector’ based on a novel of the same name by John Fowles.
Watching these films and identifying with their main characters can’t by itself explain the actions of John Hinckley, Jr. (the attempted assassin of President Reagan), Mark David Chapman, or Ted Bundy. We’re dealing with deeply disturbed minds here – with men who are evil. But cinematic narratives can certainly serve as inspirations or guideposts for the actions of people who are already on the edge and intent on causing harm.
Popular art also serves as a reference point for all members of a society, both those in the mainstream as well as the inhabitants of its deepest fringes. Popular culture is the shared possession of a society – its shared mental and emotional space.
Motion pictures in the U.S. serve that role most especially, given America’s increasingly diverse and fractured nature. Travis Bickle, the protagonist of ‘Taxi Driver’, isn’t an appealing character to Americans, but he is a readily identifiable character whose motivations can be understood, even if his actions are condemned as unacceptable (at least by many).
When John Hinckley, Jr. was asked by the police officers who had taken him into custody why he had acted the way he did, Hinckley replied “Ask Travis”. The cops understood the reference immediately even as they were appalled by what Hinckley had just done. They were also provided with a mental picture of how Hinckley saw himself, of who he thought he was.
I suspect something similar is at work with our current crop of Tyler Durdens of the radical left and right. The only way to find out for sure would be to ask them directly if ‘Project Mayhem’ was an inspiration.
Fortunately, I don’t know any members of the Proud Boys.
Until next time…
