The 30th anniversary of Fight Club is coming up in a few days, and for the last 15 years we've been told that "if you like Tyler Durden, you don't get it." I always felt it was odd to give people an anti-hero then reprimand them for sympathizing with him.
The contempt is palpable in David Fincher's comments, in a 2023 Guardian interview:
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.
And in this example of the critical consensus from Gsnsp:
Many people idolize Tyler Durden. They hang posters of him in their dorm rooms and quote his speeches about reclaiming manhood. They completely miss the point. Tyler is the villain.
Even Chuck Palahniuk, the author himself, seems uncomfortable with how fans have embraced the character, in a conversation with MEL Magazine:
"Yes, they get red pilled and then they look at Tyler Durden as the platonic ideal." He goes on to say he has sympathy for these guys because he remembers being young and afraid his life wouldn't amount to anything — but he doesn't fully walk back the critique.
There's a sense as if something unholy was accidentally unleashed in the pursuit of healthy social critique, which allowed the story to be co-opted by the disturbed and weak.
The Trickster
But now, Chuck Palahniuk has a slightly different take in his recent article for UnHerd:
What the uncouth Sibling Society needed was… a trickster. We needed a Loki or Coyote or Hermes or Puck or Pan... what we needed was a reckless, wild, Dionysian Pan who could scare the pants off of you if you ventured into the forest at nighttime.
Enter Tyler Durden... Tyler was a buddy, not a father, and he acted on impulse. He spoke in memes, not the endless lectures of a Campbell or a Bly. Still, he nurtured without "mothering", and he lived without the world's approval and endless self-censoring.
Maybe trickster Tyler is still around 30 years later to show us we always have options. If you're reading this, you are still not dead.
I recommend reading the entire article, because Palahniuk reframes Tyler Durden away from the critique and toward being a door opener to help solve our current problems.
What stands out to me is that he frames Tyler as a "trickster," and we just watched, one month ago, what our culture does to tricksters: Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is a story which is supposed to feature Odysseus - the original, the ultimate, Trickster - but Nolan doesn't like him. He instead embeds the cultural critique of the Trickster into his own adaptation of a story about one, and the result is boring and heartless.
Odysseus is meant to be a wily, unconventional, and forceful leader. A leader with lightning fast wit, a romantic bent, hubris that would make a god blush, poor impulse control, and a mission that galvanizes people around him. He sounds a bit like Tyler Durden, to be honest.
What modern culture would like him to be is: melancholic, apologetic, muscular, conflicted, subdued, competent, and wise. That sounds like a chained and shamed, but somehow "healthy masculinity."
The Trickster in both The Odyssey and Fight Club isn't a paragon of virtue, or a blueprint for how we should behave. It's an avatar for our transgressive and romantic thoughts. Such thoughts are never about subduing ourselves, they're about unleashing ourselves on the world and reshaping it to serve us. What if we unleashed that energy and gave it something to come up against? Where would it succeed, and where would it fail? We can play with that in our daydreams and our art, and explore what would happen.
But now we find this energy to be repugnant and immoral. How dare you try to impose your will on the world, even as fantasy?
Maybe Tyler Durden, and Tricksters in general, aren't meant to be followed but appreciated and learned from? Not to be enacted literally, but used as an energy we can infuse in our daily lives.
The COVID zeitgeist
In April 2020, Arundhati Roy wrote in the Financial Times:
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world.
I remember during COVID when everyone started talking about how our pre-2020 lives were empty and hollow, stuck in a rat race of consumption and careerism. A kind of euphoric hope emerged that we could restructure society and remove the poison draining our spirits: we were going to build intentional communities, ecovillages, where we would love and care for each other - sharing our lives with people who would become our neighbors and family, off the grid and outside the treadmill of atomization.
We were going to reform the mainstream lifestyle itself! No more sitting at home in front of screens, we will embrace nature, and walk barefoot through green grass wet with morning dew. We were going to fix sensemaking, and fix the rift in partisan politics.
After a few years of that, instead of a better world, we drifted further into hyper-partisanship, online addiction, the gig economy, inflation, inequality, and an endless doom spiral of discourse that somehow keeps launching new podcasting and writing careers, but never actually ending the world - the latest being the whole "AI will kill us all soon" intellectual space.
The hope started dying some time in 2022, when we realized that after quarantine we all just kind of went back to it, albeit with more bitterness. The intentional communities revealed themselves to often be weird sex cults with constant bickering and politics, and in some cases I heard they developed black markets for things like chocolate - with people smuggling it in as a banned substance. This was not the revolution we were sold.
I think we're social animals, and we mostly just react to our environment, but we also wish we didn't. Our technology and the way we use it has created an incentive structure where we not only feel atomized, manipulated, and isolated, but in order to escape it we seem to have to force ourselves to become more atomized and isolated - ie. get off the internet, stop engaging, stop drinking, become disciplined.
Our rejection of the Trickster leaves us only impotent and conformist solutions that aren't solutions at all: they become commoditized and sold back to us, just like everything else - because we may embrace the aesthetics of rebellion, but we fear and hate the rebel.
Look at your Shadow
We should allow ourselves to express our "bad thoughts" in art and integrate the lessons to give fuel and power to our actual aim: improving our collective lives.
This isn't hypothetical. In 1970, Hunter S. Thompson ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado on the Freak Power ticket. He shaved his head so he could call the crew-cut incumbent "my long-haired opponent" and proposed renaming Aspen "Fat City" to wreck its brand and scare off developers. He lost, narrowly - the campaign imploded, but he influenced people to run and they started winning local races, and Freak Power's anti-development politics substantially became Aspen's actual politics.
Sure, leave the fantasy as fantasy, but the energy it liberates goes into real, and often positive, action. By rejecting it we've allowed that energy to seep into pathological outlets.
In Jungian terms, your Shadow is everything your ego refuses to include in its self-image - the traits you've disowned because they're incompatible with who you believe you are. Trickster myths serve a therapeutic function: they keep the disowned material in collective consciousness, where it can be laughed at, played with, and remembered. You don't act the Shadow out, but by relating to it you allow it to fuel you with clarity and sincerity. Suffocated Shadow desires emerge as insincere, toxic, and harmful means toward twisted and hidden ends.
In the West, progressive activists and Christian nationalists are two sides of the same coin: the collective Shadow returning in the mask of righteousness. They find belonging by sharing in a grand mission to save the world. They have totalizing visions of restructuring society to create utopia. Their means are dishonest weapons used to meet their disowned desires: belonging and power. They strictly police themselves not to ever actually deliver healthy transformation, but to more deeply integrate members into their respective ideologies. They are belonging-machines.
As Palahniuk clarifies in the UnHerd article:
The goal of Fight Club was never to depict an organisation that perpetuated its own power. Instead, I wanted to show how this little machine could create stronger individuals before the machine itself imploded... The book was always about helping the individual. The little machine of Project Mayhem would be the secondary father.
The difference between Tyler and the belonging-machines is that he's honest about what he wants (even if the narrator isn't), and Project Mayhem is set up to implode once it gives its members what they need, instead of perpetuating itself.
So, I'm sorry, but I like Tyler Durden. He had to die in the end, but his energy was infectious and his diagnosis rang true.
Sometimes we do need to blow up the fucking banks and mock the gods. Better on the page than in the streets - a culture that refuses to let its darkness speak in fiction doesn't escape that darkness, it just ends up performing it for real.