I’ll admit it: Like every other shitty teenage boy coming of age after 1999, I loved Fight Club. I was too young to see it when it came out in theaters, but by the time I reached high school in the mid-2000s, Fight Club had already become a cult favorite. Lord, how I longed to be one of those cool kids who could eloquently talk about our consumerist culture, who would shop at Hot Topic, who would listen to Black Flag, who would smoke in the church parking lot across from the school (no matter that both smoking and shopping at Hot Topic are the antithesis of anti-consumerism).

I wanted to look like Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden (reader, I did not and will not), I wanted to tear down the establishment like him (also didn’t do that). I had never been in a fight in my life, but I wanted to harness his sheer masculine power, inspiring anarchy and admiration in other men. I wanted to break the shackles of our sanitized, isolated society and feel something. I wanted freedom. These are all natural things for an angsty teenager who knows nothing of the real world to feel when growing up in a Middle American suburb. Hell, kids in my high school, bored out of their minds, literally started their own Fight Club in parents' basements.

Merrick Morton/20th Century Fox/Kobal/Shutterstock

For boys of my generation these stories were defining moments of manhood. And that is unfortunate, because, 20 years later, most of us have matured out of our infatuation with Fight Club, which, in hindsight, wasn’t a very good movie to begin with. Fight Club popularized a version of toxic machismo that has been co-opted by online trolls and the alt-right. It’s a film guilty of horrible misogyny. Worst of all, it doesn’t even do a very good job tackling its central theme of mass consumerism.

My interest in the film faded after high school, when the references, the admiration, the posters of Pitt’s sexy abs and the bar of soap had become a parody of themselves. I hadn’t watched it since then, but after doing so recently, as we hit its 20th anniversary, I realized how poorly it has aged. Plenty has been written about Fight Club not holding up in a society where we’re reckoning with how shitty white men bumble through the world, all dicks and aggression. I’ve even written about how the alt-right co-opted Palahniuk’s “snowflake” term. But, beyond that, is it an effective film? Is it worth any sort of lasting adoration, dated as it may be?

Considering how often we discuss Fight Club, it’s somewhat surprising to be reminded that the film was a box office flop. It only grossed $37 million in the U.S. on a $63 million budget, yet its unsubtle message of anti-consumerism caught on with restless pre-9/11 Americans. The movie was released a little over a month before the 1999 Seattle WTO protests—the Battle of Seattle—led by various anticapitalist groups. This was the time that Starbucks was exploding across the world and the early days of the internet. Twenty years later, we’ve realized the response to that—this Fight Club-like attitude of outrage—didn’t work. (In many ways, the largely peaceful Occupy Wall Street protests of the 2010s were idealistically opposite the violent anti-capitalist movement of Fight Club.) The fear of demasculinization turned into Trump-era toxic masculinity. That longing for a bygone era of the tough guy is an image being actively rejected by the youth of today—a myth and image that is now obsolete and regressive. That idea of placing the blame for our discontents on society rather than ourselves is exactly the type of attitude of basement-dwelling incels.

Fight Club was an easy outlet for frustrated Americans. It didn’t ask its viewers to think, as much as it stoked their anger. "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," Durden says at one point in the film. "And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

20th Century Fox/Kobal/Shutterstock

But what do they do with that anger? They smash in car headlights, they beat the shit out of each other, they demagnetize VHS tapes in a video store, they terrorize a liquor store clerk. It's all meaningless, pointless garbage masquerading as enlightenment in modern America. ("You're not your fucking khakis," is not a brilliant social critique as much as it is patronizing to the viewer) The problem is that this type of glorified anarchism was misunderstood by Americans who didn’t want to think any deeper than “we’re very, very pissed off.” And Fight Club doesn’t go any deeper than a high school essay on anti-consumerism. It spoon feeds easy soundbites that sound like wisdom about our sanitized society, but ends up saying nothing at all (if you really think about it for longer than it takes to give yourself a chemical burn).

Messaging aside, do we need to remember Fight Club for the movie-making itself? During my re-watch, I tried to reanalyze it as a film, politics aside. Since Fight Club, David Fincher has become one of the most well-regarded American directors—whose Oscar-winning The Social Network is often considered one of the best films of the 2010s. For what it’s worth, Fincher is able to eloquently pull off the film’s big twist (Tyler Durden and Edward Norton’s narrator are the same person!). But, beyond that, his talents are better showcased in his earlier work, like Seven, released four years prior.

Fight Club is a joyless two-hour mansplaining of modern capitalist America.

Stylistically, the film is, at times, very cool. But it’s this same cool factor that makes the film so often misunderstood. Is Tyler Durden a hero or a villain? The visual storytelling is misleading and the actual satire is confusing and ineffective. The style simply gives credence to Chuck Palahniuk’s undecipherable, condescending bullshit. Has anyone ever stopped to think about how, exactly, Norton's character framing his boss for beating him up would work? Wouldn't it be obvious his boss had zero signs of getting in a fight? Fight Club is also, most noticeably, miserable to look at. The house that Norton and Pitt are squatting in is a hilariously unbelievable shithole. The greenish filter over every drab scene, the aimless horror of corporate America, the dangers of conformity—these are all better represented in The Matrix, which was released seven months before Fight Club.

Perhaps it’s the clunky unsubtle source material, but Fight Club—for the most part—is a joyless two-hour mansplaining of modern capitalist America. It’s long stretches of a white dude moaning in self-pity punctuated by lengthy sequences of intense violence and abuse. You’ll understand the point of view in the first five minutes, and by the end, nothing has changed. Sure, it’s telling that we discuss the movie still today—but it remains an obtuse, ineffective satire. It’s like talking to a miserable college student home from their first semester out of their parent’s house. Perhaps that’s why to me, in 2019, Fight Club feels so hilariously juvenile.

So, perhaps it’s best to leave Fight Club back in 1999. We’ve matured as individuals, as a society (hopefully). America is in a different place, and as beloved as Fight Club is to most people still today, we just don’t need it anymore. Let’s just follow the first rule of Fight Club, and just never talk about Fight Club again.

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