The Politics of Project Mayhem: Fight Club on Its Fifteenth Anniversary

by Dr. Gerard Emershaw

October 15, 2014 will mark the 15th anniversary of Fox 2000 Pictures’ release of the motion picture Fight Club. The film, directed by David Fincher, based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, and starring Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, and Helena Bonham Carter, debuted at number one at the box office, but fell off quickly, becoming a flop. The film had a $63 million budget but earned only $37 million domestically. However, a funny thing happened on the way to becoming the next Howard the Duck, Heaven’s Gate, or Cutthroat Island. In the decade and a half since its release, Fight Club became a cult classic on home video. Eventually, the cult grew. The film is currently ranked #10 all time by users on the Internet Movie Database’s Top 250 list.

Fight Club is a hilarious dark comedy, an unconventional rom com, a riveting thriller, and a disturbing psychological drama. It features groundbreaking direction by David Fincher, mind-blowing cinematography by Jeff Cronenweth, a pitch perfect pulsating score by the Dust Brothers, a script by Jim Uhls which surpasses the excellence of the source material, and tour de force performances by Norton, Pitt, and Carter. Unlike most films, which peak in popularity early on and gradually settle or decline, Fight Club continues to become more popular and more critically acclaimed over time.

Volumes of interesting material has been written about the countless compelling thematic elements of Fight Club—masculine alienation, the fragmented self and the possibility of self-actualization, father figures and God, the nihilism of modern culture, etc. The following will analyze some of the key economic and political themes present in the film.

The Narrator suffers from intense insomnia. He is so numb that he cannot feel anything and cannot sleep unless he attends support groups for maladies he does not have—lymphoma, tuberculosis, testicular cancer, blood parasites, brain parasites, etc. The reason that the Narrator is so deeply alienated from himself and from humanity is expressed in an anything but subtle manner by the omnipresent Starbucks coffee cups. His alienation is caused by consumerism:

Like everyone else, I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct. … If I saw something like clever coffee tables in the shape of a yin and yang, I had to have it. … I would flip through catalogs and wonder, “What kind of dining set defines me as a person?” We used to read pornography. Now it was the Horchow Collection. … I had it all.  Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of wherever.

Marxism is not the cure for this malady of the soul. If the Narrator’s clever coffee table were made by the government, it would not change a thing. If his coffee was brewed by Government Java instead of Starbucks, it would not change a thing. His unfulfilling job of de-prioritizing reports, working on primary action items, and deciding whether the major car company that he works for as a recall coordinator ought to recall defective automobiles would be just as unfulfilling if he were performing it for Government Motors. His annoying cornflower-blue loving boss would likely be even more incompetent and more annoying if he were middle management in some government bureaucratic agency. The alienation that results from empty consumerism is a consequence of corporatism and not capitalism:

When deep space exploration ramps up, it will be corporations that name everything.  The IBM Stellar Sphere. The Philip Morris Galaxy. Planet Starbucks.

The Narrator’s unnamed “major” car company employer, IBM, Philip Morris, Starbucks, IKEA, etc. are all large corporations. Under the corporatist system—a.k.a. “crony capitalism”—that has been in place and growing exponentially since the Progressive Era of the early 20th century, these large corporate entities have the ability to crush smaller rivals by lobbying the government not only for special benefits but also for costly regulations which will greatly harm these smaller businesses. By not truly having to compete on a level playing field in a free market and by forming fascistic partnerships with the government, large corporations are able to collectivize their employees into drones and collectivize the masses into slavish consumerists:

Advertisements have them chasing cars and clothes, working jobs they hate so they can buy shit they don't need.

The only small business entrepreneur in the film is the Narrator’s messianic anarchist alter ego Tyler Durden, who produces soap by rendering human fat “liberated” from the dumpsters of liposuction clinics. Durden strikes a blow against corporatism by performing small-scale acts of sabotage against them—urinating in soup, splicing frames of pornography into family films, etc.

Ultimately, the big target of Project Mayhem—the terrorist cell that Durden forms using the most zealous acolytes from the various fight clubs—is the monetary system. Project Mayhem seeks to blow up the headquarters of the major credit card companies to reset the debt record. In the era of central banks and fiat currency, money is not real. It is not backed with gold or any precious commodity. It is nothing but debt. As a result, the central banks are able to steal the value of money, and its partner the government is able to finance the warfare/welfare state. The people become mere collectivized slaves. In a sense, the credit card debt records are bogus and become a symbol of how morally bankrupt the corporatist system really is.

However, Tyler Durden does not turn out to be a libertarian savior. In many ways, he represents the hidden danger of anarchism. After dissolving the bonds between the members of Project Mayhem and society, he does not set them loose as free individuals. Instead, he collectivizes them into his own private army of “space monkeys.” He becomes the lost father/God figure to the men and instills in them his own unique collectivist worldview:

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We are all part of the same compost heap.

In Project Mayhem, nobody has a name. And nobody asks questions. All is selfless obedience.

Ultimately, Tyler Durden represents the fascistic collectivist danger that will inevitably threaten anarchy. Project Mayhem is nothing but a radical form of collectivism which initially masqueraded as a radical form of individualism. If a charismatic leader like Tyler Durden were successful in destroying the old corporatist order, he would simply replace it with a more primitive fascistic collectivism of his own. Despite Tyler’s insistence to the Narrator that they are not special and are not the leaders, this is disingenuous. Project Mayhem requires leadership. Perhaps some form of leadership is always necessary. Perhaps it is an inherent human trait. It seems as if most human beings ultimately desire or even need leadership. It may be that any form of anarchism would create a power vacuum that some Nietzschean wannabe would attempt to fill. If this is so, then one should strive for a minarchist state as the least of all possible evils.

What makes Tyler Durden into both the greatest and most terrifying of leaders is that he is not a hypocrite. Unlike the typical collectivist despot, he does not subscribe to the view that “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” The rules of Project Mayhem apply to Tyler Durden (in his physical embodiment as the Narrator) just as they do to any other “space monkey.” When Tyler/the Narrator violates the rules of Project Mayhem by trying to interfere with it, he faces castration like any other “space monkey” would.

In destroying Tyler Durden through a violent act of fearless and nearly suicidal self-mutilation, the Narrator overthrows the new collectivist despot who has apparently overthrown the old corporatist order. But to what end? Will the Narrator be able to steer an individualist course between the collectivist Scylla and Charybdis of corporatism and primitive fascism? Even if the Narrator is willing to view the “space monkeys” as individuals—as he did the late Robert Paulson—will this last? Will his successor feel the same way? It was this very worry that led Thomas Jefferson to warn: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Jefferson knew: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” Leaders—whether the American President, Tyler Durden, the Narrator, or anyone else—will naturally seek to increase their power. Even Thomas Jefferson could not always resist that temptation when he was Commander-in-Chief. As a result, we cannot worship power, political parties, or even the most charismatic and beloved leaders. We must be ready, willing, and able to stand up to any collectivist tyranny in the name of freedom and individualism and throw off the chains of any despotic government. Among everything else that it is, Fight Club is also a cautionary tale about revolutions. History has shown that revolutions often overthrow one form of collectivist tyranny to just install another. The paradigm case of this is the French Revolution which tore down the tyrannical monarchy just to replace it with the bloody Robespierre. And eventually tore down the Reign of Terror just to replace it with Napoleon. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

(For a much more detailed discussion of Individualism and Collectivism, read my new book The Real Culture War: Individualism vs. Collectivism & How Bill O’Reilly Got It All Wrong. Available now on Amazon in both print and Kindle.)