Like The Matrix and its incel-hijacked red pill, Fight Club occupies a very different space in today’s culture than it did upon its release in 1999. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the movie—which features a number of dissatisfied men beating the shit out of each other in order to feel something—has become a touchstone for a specific sect of the alt-right who’ve blindly chosen to side with its clear antagonist Tyler Durden, the violent alter-ego to Edward Norton’s downtrodden narrator.
Even when challenged by an interviewer from The Guardian, however, director David Fincher refuses to apologize or take credit for the ways people have used (or misused) his film. “I’m not responsible for how people interpret things,” he said, noting that, of course, the world looks a lot different now than it did when people were passing the film around dorm rooms in the early 2000s. “Language evolves. Symbols evolve,” he said.
At an additional prodding from the interviewer to address the film’s status as a “manosphere” darling, Fincher replied, “OK, fine,” in a tone that seemed “slightly exasperated,” per the article. “We didn’t make it for them, but people will see what they’re going to see in a Norman Rockwell painting, or [Picasso’s] Guernica.”
This isn’t to say that Fincher doesn’t understand the acute plight of not fitting into the larger mold. “I honestly believe that the high school quarterback who’s dating the homecoming queen cheerleader—even that guy thinks he’s an outsider. Who doesn’t think that they’re an outsider?” he said of the general impulse that’s drawn him to characters like Durden or Michael Fassbender’s solitary gun-for-hire in his latest film, The Killer.
But in the case of Fight Club, Fincher said, “It’s impossible for me to imagine that people don’t understand that Tyler Durden is a negative influence... People who can’t understand that, I don’t know how to respond and I don’t know how to help them.” Maybe Fincher’s next protagonist will be one campaigning for the return of basic media literacy.