Fight Club

Fight Club Prophecy:

I didn't catch Fight Club back in 1999. In fact, I caught it for the first time earlier this fall, about ten years late. Man, is it wild in how well it predicted the world of our age. With one exception: in the movie, we were meant to be fighting on the other side.

Four people have been arrested in Peru on suspicion of killing dozens of people in order to sell their fat and tissue for cosmetic uses in Europe.

The gang allegedly targeted people on remote roads, luring them with fake job offers before killing them and extracting their fat.

The liquidised product fetched $15,000 (£9,000) a litre and police suspect it was sold on to companies in Europe.

That's not us. That's criminal gangs. Fight Club wondered whether we'd be the ones leading the charge to unmake the world.



Did you want to hold it together? We've, most of us, given ourselves to the task: we've sworn oaths to uphold the Constitution and try to preserve it. When I was a boy I used to wonder, reading the lives of Wyatt Earp and others of his kind, whether they knew that they were destroying themselves. If they built a final peace, who would need Wyatt Earp?

In Lonesome Dove, Texas Ranger Captain Gus McCrae asks the question explictly:

Woodrow Call: [riding in San Antonio] Things sure have changed since the last time I was here. It's all growed up.

Gus McCrae: Of course it's growed up, Woodrow. We killed all the Indians and bandits so the bankers could move in.

Woodrow Call: Only a fool would want the Indians back.

Gus McCrae: Has it ever occurred to you, Woodrow, that all the work we done was for the bankers?

It's an odd position to be in. The wages of victory are slander and the hatred of the protected, who believe in their clean hands. The wages of defeat are a world in which we are needed and valued.

Yet we are men of honor, and therefore we must try for a world that neither needs nor wants us. We must, because our wives and children will be safe there.

Until our sons try to become men, that is.

UPDATE:

From Japanese Death Poems, ed. Yoel Hoffmann:

In 1582 the samurai leader Oda Nobunaga (1534-82) captured a company of over a hundred Buddhist monks who were allies of his enemy. He ordered his men to pile dry branches around the prisoners and set fire to them all.... With flames licking at his body, Kaisen responded, "If you have vanquished your selfhood, coolness will rise even from the fire."

If you have seen the movie, confer with the scene captured here, of Tyler Durden looking on during the beating of the narrator:



Katsu.