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First Rule of Fight Club - No Geeks
The great thing about David Fincher’s 1999 cult classic, Fight Club - besides its anti-consumerist themes, Meat Loaf’s man-breasts, and Helena Bonham Carter holding a cigarette in various stages of undress - was its testosterone-fueled energy, its glorified machismo, and its view of violence as a sort of replacement therapy for Pottery Barn furniture and Martha Stewart’s line of dish towels (“Single-serving sugar, single-serving cream, single pat of butter. The microwave Cordon Bleu hobby kit. Shampoo-conditioner combos, sample-packaged mouthwash, tiny bars of soap.”). For law students and other young professional men of the time, Fight Club’s blood-drenched beat-downs, delivered at the hands of a glistening Brad Pitt and a subversively intelligent Ed Norton, provided a cinematic outlet for our pent-up yuppiefied aggression, which for so long had been tempered by the soul-destroying Socratic Method, complex accounting rules, or the unraveling of intricate tax loopholes. And, for as long as it remained purely theoretical, we could envision ourselves swapping blows, kicking ribs, and spitting out teeth with Bob in HR.
Unfortunately, this week my vision of bloody pummeling and human-based soap products has forever been altered after learning that a bunch of Silicon Valley hi-tech geeks have started their own version of Fight Club. Though police have broken up Fight Clubs involving teens in Jersey and Pennsylvania in recent months, apparently adult-based fight clubs are more likely to escape the attention of the 5-0.
And now, to my utter despair, I will never again be able to think about Fight Club without picturing a bunch of effete Simons and Poindexters chucking mouse pads at each other, pulling each other’s hair, and hurling pi-based epithets until some Microsoft geek starts weeping when he chips a tooth on another guy’s Cathode Corner Nixie Watch. In a world where Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin and their minions are already on the cusp of world domination, you’d think they could at least leave the ass-whippings to the lawyers, doctors, accountants, and other former frat boys. But no. Now they’ve co-opted one of our few remaining sacred vestiges.
I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.
