This Is Your Life, and It's Ending One Minute At a Time

I’ve gone over this before, so I won’t belabor it, but Matt Yglesias is flat wrong about Fight Club when he writes:

What's interesting about [Fight Club] is that it's a rare explicitly anti-individualist work. "Self-improvement is masturbation," remarks Tyler after looking at a Calvin Klein ad (quotes here), while Jack earlier observes that he "had become a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct." The general idea of this is that "individualism" is a marketing ploy, designed to convince people to buy things like "the clever Njurunda coffee tables in the shape of a lime green ying and an orange yang" in order to express and create their identities.

[snip]

Rather then exhorting people to abjure fake, commercialized individuality in favor of a higher, truer individualism it exhorts people to abandon individualism. While doing something or other, the members of Project Mayhem are told: "You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake." Rather, "You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else."

Yglesias is right that the film satirizes the notion that individuality can be bought from lines of mass produced furniture and overpriced clothes—the film is relentless in its jabs at the emptiness of all-encompassing consumerism (though I don’t think it’s nearly as tough on capitalism as he seems to imagine). But Yglesias seems to miss that the film doesn’t actually present Project Mayhem as any better a solution than what it replaces. In fact, Project Mayhem is, if anything, far worse. It spirals out of control into a cascade of destruction in a way that the inwardly focused consumer culture never does. No, Fight Club isn’t just a merciless attack on consumerism, it’s a brutal satire of progressive groupthink in which Tyler's mindless, communo-terrorist enclave is portrayed as a dangerous, destructive group of insipid followers led by a power-hungry illusion of male perfection. Project Mayhem's members have been brainwashed and robbed of their humanity, all in service of their master and his lies.

The film isn’t anti-individualism; it’s ardently pro-individual, a call to take responsibility and not blame outside influences—whether they're radical political groups, parents, women, television, or corporate culture—for one’s own actions.