Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

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Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby American Dream » Sun Mar 16, 2014 1:32 pm

http://visupview.blogspot.com/2014/03/f ... eties.html

Friday, March 14, 2014

Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies Part I

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The film Fight Club, which is just about to turn fifteen, has had a lasting influence on pop culture. Brad Pitt as the hipster revolutionary Tyler Durden is arguably the actor's most iconic role, and his-mug-as-Durden has found its way on to any number of internet images over the years. But beyond it's influence on mainstream culture, Fight Club has had an especially lasting impact on the patriot movement, the conspiratorial right and libertarian circles in general. For instance, the popular Austrian School-centric economic news website Zero Hedge is written by a group of editors who collectively use the pseudonym Tyler Durden when posting. What's more, Zero Hedge's name derives from the line "On a long enough timeline the survival rate of everyone drops to zero" uttered by Pitt's Durden inn the film.

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This is only scratching the surface of Fight Club's influence on such "grassroots" circles.Fight Club was one of several films released in 1999 (The Matrix, American Beauty,eXistenZ, Eyes Wide Shut, and so forth) that would go on to have an enormous influence on post-9/11 conspiracy culture. In hindsight this is hardly surprising. Fight Club, as well as The Matrix and American Beauty, feature burned out white yuppie protagonists who ultimately engage in one type of rebellion or another against their soulless consumerist existence. No doubt this has became the fantasy of any number of burned out white yuppies who are now convinced the presidency of Barack Obama is the most heinous personification of evil the nation (and possibly human kind) has ever confronted.

And while superficially Tyler Durden's anti-corporate/consumer monologues have a certain appeal in the New Normal, a closer examination of Fight Club reveals a picture deeply steeped in a certain type of revolution and one that would hardly lead to "freedom" as defined by most Americans. As best as Recluse can remember, the Chuck Palahniuk novel upon which the film is based took a dimer view towards the Durden figure and the revolution he attempts to incite. Conversely, director David Fincher depicts Durden as an MTV ready anti-hero bent upon wrecking the yuppie complacency with consumerism all the while maintaining an impeccable tan. Fincher and scribe Jim Uhls even go so far as including more expletive political overtones to Durden's musings so as to add meaning to what is ultimately rebellion seemingly inspired more by boredom than anything else.

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Fight Club is effectively the tale of a nameless corporate drone sometimes referred to as "Jack" (played by Edward Norton) who, in order to cope with the meaningless of his existence, develops an alternative personality: Tyler Durden (Pitt). Tyler is everything Jack wishes that he was, and "together" they begin founding a gentleman's clubs in which other emasculated men beat one another to pulp on certain nights of the week. Eventually Jack/Durden becomes enamored with the potential of these fight clubs and effectively turns the organization into a nation wide secret society. Thus Jack/Durden, the prototypical yuppie, possess himself as the leader of the "middle children of history" (who largely consist of waiters, bus boys, clerks, and other minor professions) in a revolt against their corporate overlords. And in the midst of all of this is Helene Bonham Carter as Marla Singer, a kind of stand-in for woman kind who becomes in a bizarre love "triangle" with Jack/Tyler.

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Norton as the Narrator


But despite this populist slant, Durden is seemingly little concerned with the woes of the ever growing ranks of American's working poor. Of this state of affairs Henry Giroux, professor, author and culture critic, notes:
"While Fight Club registers a form of resistance to the rampant commodification and alienation of contemporary neoliberal society, it ultimately has little to say about those diverse and related aspects of consumer culture and contemporary capitalism structured in iniquitous power relations, material wealth, or hierarchical social formations. Fight Club largely ignores issues surrounding the break up of labor unions, the slashing of the U.S. workforce, extensive plant closings, downsizing, outsourcing, the elimination of the welfare state, the attack on people of color, and the growing disparities between the rich and the poor. All of these issues get factored out of Fight Club’s analysis of consumerism and capitalist exploitation. Hence, it comes as no surprise that class as a critical category is non-existent in this film. When working class people do appear, they are represented primarily as brown shirts, part of the non-thinking herd looking for an opportunity to release their tensions and repressed masculine rage through forms of terrorist violence and self-abuse. Or they appear as people who willingly take up jobs that are dehumanizing, unskilled, and alienating. There is one particularly revealing scene in Fight Club that brings this message home while simultaneously signaling a crucial element of the film’s politics. At one point in the story, Tyler takes Jack into a convenience store. He pulls out a gun and forces the young Indian clerk to get on his knees. Putting the gun to the clerk’s head, Tyler tells him he is going to die. As a kind of parting gesture, he then asks Raymond, the clerk, what he really wanted to be in life. A vetinarian, Raymond replies, but he had to drop out of school for lack of money. Tyler tells him that if he isn’t on his way to becoming a vetinarian in six weeks he is going to come back and kill him. He then lets Raymond go and tells Jack that tomorrow morning will be the most important day in Raymond’s life because he will have to address what it means to do something about his future. Choice for Tyler appears to be an exclusively individual act, a simple matter of personal will that functions outside of existing relations of power, resources, and social formations. As Homi Bhabha points out, this notion of agency 'suggests that "free choice" is inherent in the individual [and]...is based on an unquestioned "egalitarianism" and a utopian notion of individualism that bears no relation to the history of the marginalized, the minoritized, the oppressed.'

"This privatized version of agency and politics is central to understanding Tyler’s character as emblematic of the very market forces he denounces. For Tyler, success is simply a matter of getting off one’s back and forging ahead; individual initiative and the sheer force of will magically cancels out institutional constraints, and critiques of the gravity of dominant relations of oppression are dismissed as either an act of bad faith or the unacceptable whine of victimization. Tyler hates consumerism but he values a 'Just Do It' ideology appropriated from the marketing strategists of the Nike corporation. It is not surprising that in linking freedom to the dynamics of individual choice, Fight Club offers up a notion of politics in which oppression breeds contempt rather than compassion, and social change is fueled by totalitarian visions rather than democratic struggles. By defining agency through such a limited (and, curiously republican party )notion of choice, Fight Club reinscribes freedom as an individual desire rather than the 'testing of boundaries and limits as part of a communal, collective process.' In the end, Fight Club removes choice as a 'public demand and duty'20 and in doing so restricts the public spaces people are allowed to inhabit as well as the range of subject positions they are allowed to take up. Hence, it is no wonder that in Fight Club it is not about working men and women who embody a sense of agency and empowerment but largely middle-class heterosexual, white men who are suffering from a blocked hyper-masculinity."


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Raymond the would-be veterinarian

Thus, Tyler's rejection of consumerism, and to some extent capitalism itself, can not be understood in anything resembling Marxist terms. Indeed, it is likely Tyler would have vehemently denounced Marxism had such concerns been relevant during the feel-good Clinton era. In point of fact, Durden's world view in this sense bears a striking similarity to the Evolan school of post-World War II fascism. The Baron Julius Evola (much more on Evola can be found here and here), the notorious occultist and philosopher, was of what this researcher likes to think of as the "revolutionary" wing of fascism, as opposed to the "traditionalist" wing (the historically dominate variety) that has sought close ties with the heads of industry and religion of a respective nation. Evola and his ilk saw capitalism, communism and monotheism alike as equally evil.
"Evola argued that it was absurd to identify the right with capitalism. Fascism, properly understood, was the antithesis of bourgeois society, not its avatar. Since fascist values like blood, sacrifice, and heroism were far more pagan than Christian, fascism was also in opposition to the Catholic Church. He was equally relentless in his condemnation of the Salo left. To Evola, Marxism, with the its stress on material issues, was merely a further extension of bourgeois ideology, not its negation. Any movement primarily inspired by economic concerns was intrinsically anti-heroic."

(Dreamer of the Day, Kevin Coogan, pg. 211)

Black, sacrifice, and heroism certainly play a crucial role in Durden's ideology. Nor is the only time Fight Club's philosophy crosses paths with Evola. Much of the ideology underpinning Tyler's revolt is centered around an obsession with the warrior ethos of old and a complete rejection of all things feminine. Indeed, Fight Club effectively blames the spiritual malaise of modern man at the end of the millennium on the stifling emasculation of the hyper-feminized society in which they inhabit. Continuing with Giroux:
"The pathology at issue, and one which is central to Fight Club, is its intensely misogynist representation of women, and its intimation that violence is the only means through which men can be cleansed of the dire affect women have on the shaping of their identities. From the first scene of Fight Club to the last, women are cast as the binary opposite of masculinity. Women are both the other and a form of pathology.

Jack begins his narrative by claiming that Marla is the cause of all of his problems. Tyler consistently tells Jack that men have lost their manhood because they have been feminized, they are a generation raised by women. And the critical commentary on consumerism presented throughout the film is really not a serious critique of capitalism as much as it is a criticism of the feminization and domestication of men in a society driven by relations of buying and selling. Consumerism is criticized because it is womanish stuff. Moreover, the only primary female character, Marla, appears to exist to simultaneously make men unhappy and to service their sexual needs. Marla has no identity outside of the needs of the warrior mentality, the chest-beating impulses of men who revel in patriarchy and enact all of the violence associated with such traditional, hyper-masculine stereotypes... But representations of masculinity in Fight Club do more than reinscribe forms of male identity within a warrior mentality and space of patriarchical relations. They also work to legitimate unequal relations of power and oppression while condoning 'a view of masculinity predicated on the need to wage violence against all that is feminine both within and outside of their lives...'"


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Marla

Evola's world view was shaped by what he perceived as a Manichean struggle between the forces of "absolute manhood" and the feminine, a war that has unfolded since the dawn of time and is one of both a spiritual and genetic nature.
"Evola's own mythmaking centered around Hyperborea, the original article homeland, also known as Thule, the sacred island. Evola's Hyperborea was as much a vision of being (or what he calls a 'framework of an ontology') as a historic fact. The sacred figure in Hyperborea was the king, conceived not simply as the ruler of a warrior aristocracy, but as a 'God/man' – a living link to the divine, much like the Japanese emperor or Egyptian pharaoh. King, not high priest, was the true pontifex, who united the natural and supernatural dimensions.

"From Hyperborea (or Ultima Thule), the sun-worshiping Boreal Race migrated in two directions. One group went to northern Europe, where it preserved its solar symbolism in the swastika. A second migration went first to Atlantis and then into the Americas and Western Europe. Remnants of the Hyperborean culture had also been preserved by the Aryans, who originally entered India from the far north.

"During their vast migrations, the Hyperboreans encountered many indigenous cultures. Although the northern European branch kept itself relatively pure, the 'Atlanteans' allowed intermarriage with the aboriginal races of the south. These encounters with 'inferior races, which were enslaved to the chthonic cult of demons and mixed with animal nature,' gave rise to 'memories of struggles that were eventually expressed in mythological form.' In these myths geography took on symbolic meaning. The chaotic, fertile sea was female. Mountains, as fixed 'elevated places' (and the traditional seat of the Gods), were the masculine opposite of the 'contingency of the "waters."' Another symbolic north/south dividing line involved burial ritual: In solar cults the dead are incinerated, while in the south the dead are placed in graves and returned to Mother Earth.

"The south's religions, the cults of Earth and Sea, were matriarchal. Out of them came pantheistic naturalism, sensuality, promiscuity, and a passive mystical and contemplative nature. The south also gave rise to egalitarianism by dethroning the original ruling warrior caste and replacing it with the sacerdotal or priests caste. Any society governed by such a priest caste was inherently 'feminine in its attitude to the spirit' because kingship had been reduced to a purely material function. Before the decay, the dominate warrior caste had followed the northern solar-worshiping religion without need of priestly mediation. The elevation of the Brahmans above the Kshatriyas therefore marked beginning of the Silver Age. Now the priests determined the divinity of the king.

"The north/south struggle was mythologically symbolized by the clash between the sun-god principle of the north that stood for 'the superior invisible realm of being' and the moon goddess of the south whose dominion was the 'inferior realm of becoming.' Evola believed that the Italian personality was split along a north/south archetypeal axis, where 'Nordic elements coexisting in perpetual anarchy with Africo-Mediterranean elements,' causing an absence of 'psychic equilibrium' critical to an understanding of Italy's complex, infuriating history. He rethought world history as well, declaring that the Mayans were a telluric race, while the Aztecs and Incas followed of the solar north. Japan was a model solar civilization whose aristocratic bushido warrior code best preserved Tradition. In Greece, the Eumenides symbolized the victory of the masculine north over matriarchy.

"With Heracles the West had its first great epic hero. In his book Metaphysics of Sex, Evola called Heracles the embodiment of solar masculinity who became legendary both as a conqueror of the Amazons, and as 'a foe of the Mother (of Hera, just as Roman Hercules was the foe of Bona Dea), from whose bonds he freed himself.' Heracles dominated the Tree/Female life force principle by obtaining 'Hebe, everlasting youth, as his wife in Olympus after attaining the way to the garden of Hesperides,' where he plucked the golden apple, 'itself a symbol link to the Mother (the apples have been given by Gea to Hera) and to the life force.'

"Dionysus, however, stood for a 'Chthonic-Poseidon form of manhood,' as he was linked to Poseidon, god of the waters, and also to Osiris, 'conceived as the stream of the Nile, which waters and fertilizes Isis, the black earth of Egypt.' Dionysus symbolizes 'the wet principle of generation related to the merely phallic concept of manhood; the god is the male considered only according to the aspect of the being who fecundates the female substance and, as such, is subordinate to her.' This was why Dionysus 'is always joined with female figures related to the archetype of the Great Goddess.' Even as a sun god, Dionysus was still viewed 'not in the aspect of pure, unchangeable light but as the star that dies and rises again.' Dionysus symbolized the sun only in an inferior way, the way 'the sun sets and rises again,' when its light 'is still not the steady, abstract light of being or of the pure Olympian principle.' As for Christianity, it was less a Jewish sect that another variant of Dionysianism from Asia Minor.

"Only in its 'Apollonian manifestation' does 'pure manhood' fully manifest itself. Here the god Apollo becomes:

"The embodiment of Olympian nous (perception) and of unchangeable uranic light, freed from the earthly element and also from his connection with goddesses in some spurious historical varieties of his warship. At this level Apollo, as the god of 'pure form,' was conceived without a mother and was born by himself, ametor (without a mother) and autophues (self-growing), being the Doric god who 'produced from geometrically.' (This determination of plastic matter is proper to the male and to form, whereas the indeterminate nature of plastic matter and the limitless apeiron, belongs to the female.)"

(Dreamer of the Day, Kevin Coogan, pgs. 304-306)



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the Baron Evola

Pitt's Tyler Durden, with his movie star looks, blond highlights and bronzed tan, is very much an Apollonian figure. He is also one of contradictions, being both rebel and authoritarian in equal measures. This is also true of Apollo.
"He first manifests himself as the image of violence and unbridled arrogance but, as he gathers to himself a range of Nordic, Asiatic and Aegean attributes, his divine personality becomes more and more complex. It synthesizes within itself so many warring elements which it finally reconciles into the ideal of wisdom which is regarded as the Greek miracle. Apollo embodies the balance and harmony of the passions, achieved not by suppressing instinctive impulses, but by directing them through the development of awareness towards an ever-increasing spiritualization..."

(Dictionary of Symbols, Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant, pg. 34)


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In a sense this is also the path Tyler and Jack take as well, though their "spiritualization" of their instinctive impulses is to form a cult geared toward carrying out a rather juvenile terror campaign. It is dubbed Project Mayhem. In the second installment I shall consider Project Mayhem and the curious overlap it and the fight club secret societies have with one of them ore compelling claims floating around conspiracy culture. Stay tuned.
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Mar 16, 2014 4:42 pm

Fight Club largely ignores issues surrounding the break up of labor unions, the slashing of the U.S. workforce, extensive plant closings, downsizing, outsourcing, the elimination of the welfare state, the attack on people of color, and the growing disparities between the rich and the poor. All of these issues get factored out of Fight Club’s analysis of consumerism and capitalist exploitation.


Sounds like Henry Giroux should make it a point to read Fight Club at some point.
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby Zombie Glenn Beck » Mon Mar 17, 2014 12:24 am

At one point in the story, Tyler takes Jack into a convenience store. He pulls out a gun and forces the young Indian clerk to get on his knees. Putting the gun to the clerk’s head, Tyler tells him he is going to die. As a kind of parting gesture, he then asks Raymond, the clerk, what he really wanted to be in life. A vetinarian, Raymond replies, but he had to drop out of school for lack of money. Tyler tells him that if he isn’t on his way to becoming a vetinarian in six weeks he is going to come back and kill him.


Stopped reading right here. Raymond was asian and the reason he dropped out of school was because "the classes were too hard". If the author didnt even watch the movie why should I read what they have to say.

EDIT:
Marla has no identity outside of the needs of the warrior mentality, the chest-beating impulses of men who revel in patriarchy and enact all of the violence associated with such traditional, hyper-masculine stereotypes...


Yeah, whoever wrote did not actually watch the movie.
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby BrandonD » Mon Mar 17, 2014 1:06 am

Zombie Glenn Beck » Sun Mar 16, 2014 11:24 pm wrote:
At one point in the story, Tyler takes Jack into a convenience store. He pulls out a gun and forces the young Indian clerk to get on his knees. Putting the gun to the clerk’s head, Tyler tells him he is going to die. As a kind of parting gesture, he then asks Raymond, the clerk, what he really wanted to be in life. A vetinarian, Raymond replies, but he had to drop out of school for lack of money. Tyler tells him that if he isn’t on his way to becoming a vetinarian in six weeks he is going to come back and kill him.


Stopped reading right here. Raymond was asian and the reason he dropped out of school was because "the classes were too hard". If the author didnt even watch the movie why should I read what they have to say.


True, but the point he makes is still 100% valid. The scene he described is the scene that made me notice the hypocrisy in this movie. The underlying mentality of this action is in no way a rebellion against the disgusting mentality of corporate oppression that exists today, it is in support of it.

The movie narrative asserts that through means of force, a certain group of enlightened ones can elevate the "stupid masses" to a better state, because the masses are unable to better themselves due to their own inherent weaknesses. In other words, the poor and miserable are in their current state not because of horrific imbalances intentionally built into our system, but rather because they deserve it.

This is exactly what our current ruling class believes. Or it is at least what they tell one another, in order to sleep at night.

I actually think this article is great, in that it gives me a much higher opinion of Fight Club when the differences between the book and the movie are taken into account.
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby Zombie Glenn Beck » Mon Mar 17, 2014 1:17 am

BrandonD » Mon Mar 17, 2014 1:06 am wrote:
Zombie Glenn Beck » Sun Mar 16, 2014 11:24 pm wrote:
At one point in the story, Tyler takes Jack into a convenience store. He pulls out a gun and forces the young Indian clerk to get on his knees. Putting the gun to the clerk’s head, Tyler tells him he is going to die. As a kind of parting gesture, he then asks Raymond, the clerk, what he really wanted to be in life. A vetinarian, Raymond replies, but he had to drop out of school for lack of money. Tyler tells him that if he isn’t on his way to becoming a vetinarian in six weeks he is going to come back and kill him.


Stopped reading right here. Raymond was asian and the reason he dropped out of school was because "the classes were too hard". If the author didnt even watch the movie why should I read what they have to say.


True, but the point he makes is still 100% valid. The scene he described is the scene that made me notice the hypocrisy in this movie. The underlying mentality of this action is in no way a rebellion against the disgusting mentality of corporate oppression that exists today, it is in support of it.

The movie narrative asserts that through means of force, a certain group of enlightened ones can elevate the "stupid masses" to a better state, because the masses are unable to better themselves due to their own inherent weaknesses. In other words, the poor and miserable are in their current state not because of horrific imbalances intentionally built into our system, but rather because they deserve it.

This is exactly what our current ruling class believes. Or it is at least what they tell one another, in order to sleep at night.

I actually think this article is great, in that it gives me a much higher opinion of Fight Club when the differences between the book and the movie are taken into account.


But that critique could be made of literally ANY political movement or even any religion. If Buddha thought you could figure this shit out on your own he wouldnt be preaching to you, if the Green Party didnt think the unwashed masses needed to be enlightened they wouldnt hand out fliers.

How can you honestly say that Tyler believes that the poor deserve to be poor when one of the major plot points of the movie is him trying to erase the global debt record? Tyler doesnt advocate some kind of bootstraps pulling libertarian bullshit, remember the scene in the car when he asked people what they wanted to do before they died? His point isnt that if you work at McDonalds its your own fault, his point is that you are going to die someday so stop wasting your life flipping burgers.

And no, this article is objectively terrible. Theres not getting the finer nuances of a film, and then theres literally not watching the movie you are talking about.
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby BrandonD » Mon Mar 17, 2014 3:13 am

Zombie Glenn Beck » Mon Mar 17, 2014 12:17 am wrote:But that critique could be made of literally ANY political movement or even any religion. If Buddha thought you could figure this shit out on your own he wouldnt be preaching to you, if the Green Party didnt think the unwashed masses needed to be enlightened they wouldnt hand out fliers.

How can you honestly say that Tyler believes that the poor deserve to be poor when one of the major plot points of the movie is him trying to erase the global debt record? Tyler doesnt advocate some kind of bootstraps pulling libertarian bullshit, remember the scene in the car when he asked people what they wanted to do before they died? His point isnt that if you work at McDonalds its your own fault, his point is that you are going to die someday so stop wasting your life flipping burgers.

And no, this article is objectively terrible. Theres not getting the finer nuances of a film, and then theres literally not watching the movie you are talking about.


I think you might have missed my point regarding that scene, which is my particular words "by force". Buddha did not put a gun to anyone's head, he did not believe that you could terrorize someone into enlightenment.

That scene impressed many of my friends, and I know it had a big impact on many people, and yet that was the scene that was disgusting to me.

Other than that, I do agree with your opinion that it's a poorly-written article. It was just pleasing to know that this other aspect of Tyler Durden was acknowledged in the book, his unconscious internalization of the very mentality that he was railing against. I think this is an enormous problem in today's culture, these problems have become so inherent that we cannot just remove them by being aware of their existence. What is required is an internal revolution.
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby 82_28 » Mon Mar 17, 2014 5:00 am

Fight Club was a thing as I remember it as "boys", males or whatever you want to call it "came around to" Brad Pitt. Myself and all my friends thought he was a cheese dick. But the girls just all looked at him as a heart throb. When I was a kid I thought he was a horrible actor and would go nowhere -- whatever that means. I just thought he would be a flop -- a flicker in the night -- flash in the pan. Because, look at it like this: you're an adolescent boy and all of your life the girls you knew were never into the shit we were into as far as what was a "good movie" then all of a sudden the "heart throb" of Pitt shows up in a movie simply called "Fight Club". Back then I was like

A:What a stupid fucking name for a movie or book
B: Pitt is a horrible actor that only the girls like -- he didn't appeal to dudes at all

But my girlfriend dragged me to go see it because she LOVED him in that western movie. What was it? Can't remember.

But what I am saying is that is when full on acceptance of MMA or whatever the fuck they call it came into currency. Literally beating someone to death for real.
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Mar 17, 2014 4:22 pm

So who says the movie approves of whatever Tyler does?

Marla has no identity outside of the needs of the warrior mentality, the chest-beating impulses of men who revel in patriarchy and enact all of the violence associated with such traditional, hyper-masculine stereotypes...


Zombie Glenn Beck » Sun Mar 16, 2014 11:24 pm wrote:
Yeah, whoever wrote did not actually watch the movie.


Indeed, Marla's the fucking real star afaiac. That her identity does not exist for satisfaction of the chest-thumper is not only there, it's central. One way of reading the end is that Protagonist had no identity outside of his need to impress her! Her initial rejection, or rather their shared feeling that what should have been a straightforward and loving relationship between them outside of their highly neurotic cages was rendered impossible from the start, was what he acknowledges originally set him off towards crazyland (though this is also his final act of projection/blaming the female). Right at the beginning, Protagonist is about to die in the building and he says, "it's all because of this woman Marla" and the whole movie occurs in flashback from there. The first 10 minutes are all about how he can't connect to her at the meetings even though they're obviously a perfect match (given why they're both there as fakers) and so they have to decide to hate each other. His original reason for becoming Tyler is to be someone who can just sweep her away with sexual magnetism, which of course is the opposite of what he projects at the beginning.

I also share many of the same critiques and have a problem generally with Anarchist Batman movies that offer revolution as a catharsis (other example, V for Vendetta), i.e., as a practically impossible spectacle led by a non-existent superhero. (Also because these movies are always pitched straight at me and I know it.) But this writer's need to discover the secretly encoded fascism and schematic over-simplification of a movie that's actually pretty simple annoy me. Part of the problem is that he seems to have no idea of there being a difference between characters and the authorial voice. In film, the author is always a camera frame and a soundtrack. Did the first-person narration get him to think otherwise? Does he understand the concept of an unreliable narrator? The very first image is INSIDE THIS GUY'S BRAIN, does he get that?

Haven't read the book. May do so after 2019. (Man, I gotta read Hegel now! Phuque!)

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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby Zombie Glenn Beck » Mon Mar 17, 2014 4:55 pm

One of my favorite interpretations of the movie is that Tyler doesnt even approve of what Tyler does. Hes intentionally taking Jacks anti-consumerism to its logical extreme to turn it on him, like a homicidally insane Zen master.
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Mar 17, 2014 7:57 pm

JackRiddler » Mon Mar 17, 2014 4:34 pm wrote:Further clue: Does everyone here know what Paper Street means?


This was meant for this thread, but I posted it in the Malaysia thread by mistake. So, anyone know?
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby ShinShinKid » Mon Mar 17, 2014 8:43 pm

Yeah, it's a movie you should probably watch more than once. Most don't realize he actually performs "brain surgery" on himself in the end.
Plus, this author, and most forget the first rule about fight club...you don't talk about it ( and now you guys got me doin' it...cut it out).
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Mon Mar 17, 2014 9:01 pm

Actually, it dawns on me that I would like to invert this completely, and rather than take an "apologist" track for a grown ass PDX guy who doesn't even know me, I'll re-state it like this:

Fight Club is a novel -- and much more influential movie -- which is despised by the social justice left because it states nakedly the uncomfortable fact that a successful revolution is going to look an awful lot like working class Fascism.

Do you want to defeat the power system or do you want to just feel like you're the better person?
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Mar 17, 2014 9:44 pm

Okay, "Paper Street" is a cartographers' term for streets that do not exist, but are marked and named by mistake on a map. So people go around looking for Paper Streets in vain. Paper Streets are often former real streets and tend to be very short and insignificant, and are often hard to find and extinguish from maps, often passing through several generations of maps. I've run into a few myself!

Anyway you slice it, Protagonist/Tyler is disassociated from reality. He is nuts, and he has been driven to it a specific way by a system that takes no account of his inner life and in which he cannot feel any fit. It manifests through insomnia. He enacts a fantasy of overthrowing this soul-crushing way of life, one he shares with many other soul-crushed men, at the same time projecting the causes for his life's misery (but only in part) on women, whom he cannot comprehend. Whether the events happen altogether in his mind (again the first image is inside his brain!) or in reality is unclear. You can't trust what he narrates, as the movie's big reveal to him is that he himself can't trust what he thinks he knows.

My own view is that the whole movie may be his fantasy (though this is too easy: all movies are fantasy throughout) or that it becomes so at the latest when even some of the cops turn out to be in on the conspiracy he initiated and try to cut off his balls on his own command, issued by him long ago in anticipation of his relapse. His balls, note. The irony is that his sanity is also victim to an impossible and false ideal of powerful manhood that he cannot live up to, which is also a product of the same system, though he believes it to be a life-force that the system has suppressed.

A friend of mine thought the same thing as this author, by the way: that Tyler Durden is the builder and leader, complete with cult-of-personality, of a fascist revolutionary movement. However, my friend therefore thinks of the movie as a brilliant deconstruction of fascist psychology. Because he, though wrong in my view, is at least able to distinguish between a movie's authorial statement (spoken through frames and sounds) and the actions of its characters (spoken through voice and body language). Unlike the writer of this silly piece in the OP.

Our argument centered on Marla's role. My friend (who is a real person, I'm not imagining him, why do you ask?) laughed at me for pointing out that the final image has the possibly dying man holding hands with her, thinking she is truly his girlfriend now, as he has her watch the gift he has delivered to her through his Tyler persona. The gift is an awesome display that proves he is not a helpless but a potent man: the literal demolition of the banking system, the world's most power single social beast ("egregore"). He has done this to impress her. He even says something personal to her, like, "I've had a strange time lately in my life." For the first time, he is asking for her forgiveness and emotional understanding, something to which he had not been open, having only desired her or kept her at a distance. What she thinks of this, or will think after the shock of the show wears off, is left open. It's true that this movie, like many, takes place in a man's mind, not in hers. Just to press the point home (I said this is actually a simple film, in my view), the refrain of the song over the closing credits is, "Where is my mind?"

.
Last edited by JackRiddler on Mon Mar 17, 2014 9:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby Zombie Glenn Beck » Mon Mar 17, 2014 9:44 pm

Wombaticus Rex » Mon Mar 17, 2014 9:01 pm wrote:Actually, it dawns on me that I would like to invert this completely, and rather than take an "apologist" track for a grown ass PDX guy who doesn't even know me, I'll re-state it like this:

Fight Club is a novel -- and much more influential movie -- which is despised by the social justice left because it states nakedly the uncomfortable fact that a successful revolution is going to look an awful lot like working class Fascism.

Do you want to defeat the power system or do you want to just feel like you're the better person?


But a real revolution would involve doing things. Why cant we just sit at home and tweet until the combined force of our self righteousness overthrows the power elite by osmosis?
barracuda wrote:The path from RI moderator to True Blood fangirl to Jehovah's Witness seems pretty straightforward to me. Perhaps even inevitable.
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby smiths » Mon Mar 17, 2014 9:47 pm

i'd never heard of Evola, and the intro to that line of thinking was appreciated,

its interesting because underneath a lot of bullshit ideology there does simply lurk a masculine drive to restore some lost warrior state,
too many of the men i have met over the last 25 years, whether political, apolitical, educated or uneducated, have exuded the sense that women have somehow robbed them of their former freedoms, and that if given the chance, they would 'restore' a state of male domination and women in their 'right' place

it is a persistent academic theme that 'weakness' and rot in society comes through pacifist Christian values, and true governance can only come through pagan style power and brutality, real politik

there is a brilliant essay by Isaiah Berlin on Machiavelli that gets to the heart of this point
after explaining how confused everyone is by Machiavelli, he starts getting to the point on page 39
and then the crux,


"The glories of antiquity can be revived if only men vigorous and gifted and realistic enough can be mobilised for the purpose. In order to cure degenerate populations of their diseases, these founders of new states or churches may be compelled to have recourse to ruthless measures, force and fraud, guile, cruelty, treachery, the slaughter of the innocent, surgical measures that are needed to restore a decayed body to a condition of health.
And, indeed, these qualities may be needed even after a society has been restored to health; for men are weak and foolish and are perpetually liable to lapse from the standards that alone can preserve them on the required height.
Hence they must be kept in proper condition by measures that will certainly offend against current morality.
But if they offend against this morality, in what sense can they be said to be justified?
This seems to me to be the nodal point of Machiavelli's entire conception. In one sense they can be justified, and in another not ...

It is commonly said … that Machiavelli divided politics from morals - that he recommended as politically necessary courses which common opinion morally condemns: e.g. treading over corpses for the benefit of the state.

What Machiavelli distinguishes is not specifically moral from specifically political values; what he achieves is not the emancipation of politics from ethics or religion, which Croce and many other commentators regard as his crowning achievement; what he institutes is something that cuts deeper still - a differentiation between two incompatible ideals of life, and therefore two moralities.

One is the morality of the pagan world : its values are courage, vigour, fortitude in adversity, public achievement, order, discipline, happiness, strength, justice, above all assertion of one's proper claims and the knowledge and power needed to secure their satisfaction; that which for a Renaissance reader Pericles had seen embodied in his ideal Athens, Livy had found in the old Roman Republic, that of which Tacitus and Juvenal lamented the decay and death in their own time. These seem to Machiavelli the best hours of mankind and, Renaissance humanist that he is, he wishes to restore them.

Against this moral universe (moral or ethical no less in Croce's than in the traditional sense, that is, embodying ultimate human ends however these are conceived) stands in the first and foremost place, Christian morality. The ideals of Christianity are charity, mercy, sacrifice, love of God, forgiveness of enemies, contempt for the goods of this world, faith in the life hereafter, belief in the salvation of the individual soul as being of incomparable value - higher than, indeed wholly incommensurable with, any social or political or other terrestrial goal, any economic or military or aesthetic consideration.

Machiavelli lays it down that out of men who believe in such ideals, and practice - them, no satisfactory human community, in his Roman sense, can in principle be constructed.
It is not simply a question of the unattainability of an ideal because of human imperfection, original sin, or bad luck, or ignorance, or insufficiency of material means. It is not, in other words, the inability in practice on the part of ordinary human beings to rise to a sufficiently high level of Christian virtue (which , indeed, be the inescapable lot of sinful men one earth) that makes it, for him, impracticable to establish, even to seek after, the good Christian state.
It is the very opposite: Machiavelli is convinced what are commonly thought of as the central Christian virtues, whatever their intrinsic value, are insuperable obstacles to the building of the kind of society that he wishes to see; a society which, moreover, he assumes that it is natural for all normal men to want - the kind of community that, in his view, satisfies men's permanent desires and interests.

If human beings were different from what they are, perhaps they could create an ideal Christian society.
But he is clear that human beings would in that event have to differ too greatly from men as they have always been; and it is surely idle to build for, or discuss the prospects of, beings who can never be on earth; such talk is beside the point, and only breeds dreams and fatal delusions.
What ought to be done must be defined in terms of what is practicable, not imaginary; statecraft is concerned with action within the limits of human possibility, however wide; men can be changed, but not to a fantastic degree. To advocate ideal measures, suitable only for angels, as previous political writers seem to him too often to have done, is visionary and irresponsible and leads to ruin. "

http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_w ... avelli.pdf
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