David Fincher Doesn’t Know “How to Help” the Incels Who Find Fight Club Aspirational
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The post David Fincher Doesn’t Know “How to Help” the Incels Who Find Fight Club Aspirational appeared first on Consequence.
From Patrick Bateman to Tyler Durden, Men’s Rights Activists, incels, and other misogynistic men have a tendency to idolize fictional characters that are meant to be cautionary tales. David Fincher — who brought Durden to the big screen with Fight Club — is as baffled by it as you and me.
Starring Edward Norton as the disaffected Narrator and Brad Pitt as Durden, Fight Club — Fincher’s 1999 adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel of the same name — tackled the same middle class ennui as Office Space, but took its characters’ frustrations to much more violent ends. Steve Rose of The Guardian asked Fincher about the film’s negative impact in a new interview, but Fincher was quick to avoid taking any personal responsibility for the rise of incel culture.
“I’m not responsible for how people interpret things,” Fincher said. “Language evolves. Symbols evolve.” Pressed on the number of male supremacists who view Durden as an idol, the filmmaker conceded, “It’s one of many touchstones in their lexicography.”
“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,” Fincher added. “It’s impossible for me to imagine that people don’t understand that Tyler Durden is a negative influence,” he says. “People who can’t understand that, I don’t know how to respond and I don’t know how to help them.”
Fight Club was suspected of inspiring several men who went on to carry out acts of terrorism in the years following the film’s release, including a college student who planted pipe bombs in mailboxes in 2002 and a 17-year-old who formed his own fight club and detonated a bomb outside a Starbucks in 2009. It’s one of many pieces of media people have blamed for youth violence — a trend that picked up following the Columbine massacre, which inspired debates about whether violent video games and music inspired the shooters to commit the crime.
Earlier this month, Fincher unveiled his latest film, The Killer.
David Fincher Doesn’t Know “How to Help” the Incels Who Find Fight Club Aspirational
Carys Anderson
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