From Julia Ebner's Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists:
Fight Club and The Matrix are also standard alt-right movies. Indeed, Hannibal Bateman, the managing editor of the white supremacist magazine Radix Journal, explained in an article entitled ‘Generation Alt-Right’ that ‘for many alienated young White men our credo could be summed up in that most angsty of films, Fight Club’, citing the following dialogue from the movie
We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war … our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
It is Bateman’s belief that whites have been brainwashed into forgetting that they are ‘the descendants of conquerors and settlers who brought a civilization to entire continents’. The migration crisis and Donald Trump, he thinks, may have led to ‘the nagging search for what’s been wrong since as long as we can remember’, a sudden awakening that he equates with that featured in Fight Club.
Here's the kicker from Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, interviewed in The Guardian in 2018:
“It’s fascinating that the group that can’t get laid is now adopting the same language. It shows how few options men have in terms of metaphors: a skimpy inventory of images. They have The Matrix – there’s a lot of red pill, blue pill stuff – and they have Fight Club. The only other thing is Dead Poets Society, where men go into a cavern and say poems to each other, and they’re not going to adopt that.” Women, he says, have more literature about female social structures, the likes of The Joy Luck Club or How to Make an American Quilt. “Those have a script and roles and determined ways of being, that women can adopt in order to be together long enough to share their lives.” Don’t men have sports or the pub, instead? “Those social groups don’t produce the memes and one-liners and metaphors.” Palahniuk doesn’t see Fight Club as particularly gendered anyway. “It was more about the terror that you were going to live or die without understanding anything important about yourself.”
Bonus: interview with Ebner in The Guardian.
Another bonus: Ebner speaks about Going Dark:
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://niklasblog.com/?p=24939