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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38810 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Tyler Durden was a terrorist, also showcasing how some portion of the ‘incels’ or whatever the term is will turn to violence.

When Brad Pitt is an incel, you know the word has no meaning whatsoever.

This seems like an inability to decouple. The story touched on modern alienation and how young men found some difficult to articulate lacking in modernity. The fighters were described not as incels but as "the middle children of history" with "no purpose or place".

Durden:

We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'll all be millionaires movie, gods and rock stars. But we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very very pissed off.

Incels:

We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'll all be fulfilled, happily married and useful. But we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And We're very very pissed off.

Do you see the parallel now? Of course the original expectations were always an unrealistic lie. Most men historically have not reproduced. But that realization itself is deranging, it is liable to get young men's blood boiling. If all they've been suffering for is a lie then why suffer? Some may even lash out and punish whoever they've convinced themselves are responsible in misplaced but not misfelt rage.

Yes, it's about disenfranchised men. I'm disputing the claim that it's about incels.

I guess I don't think anyone is claiming it was written about incels, it's just addressing the same root thing that incels also feel even though it presents differently.

Be more specific about what you take from the comment you're replying to?

Because if I take your comment literally... "a commenter on TheMotte used the word "incel" in relation to a character played by Brad Pitt [note - not Brad Pitt himself], and from this we see that the word "incel" is meaningless" seems difficult to justify.

Tyler Durden is played by Brad Pitt, an infamously sexually attractive man. He is the alter-ego of another man who, while less overwhelmingly sexy than Brad Pitt, is still a pretty good-looking dude. Both in-universe and out-of-universe, the men involved are not struggling sexually, nor suffering the world's disdain, nor would they even if they hit a rough patch.

That either one of them would be representative of "incel" culture, even in its early days, is ridiculous. Incel has become a catch-all term for "distressed and male", and that's really not a useful description. The concerns of the narrator are not the concerns of incels, as /u/FiveHourMarathon attempts to suggest. The narrator is influential, has status, has sexual success, and relative economic comfort. He's unhappy, but "incel" is not the same thing at all -- at least, it didn't used to be.

At this point, "incel" has become a new, fairly general insult. A socially acceptable replacement of calling someone "gay" in the old times. The literal meaning is different of course, but the underlying sting of the insult has a very similar source, namely that the person cannot fulfill the masculine role of seducing women and "obtaining" sex from them. When calling others "gay" (in the schoolyard sense) was not as taboo as today, it also referred to this: being passive, non-agentic, not being a go-getter.

Lame, loser etc. It doesn't mean "literally lives a zero-sex life involuntarily".

It's just part of the standard woke narrative. "Society's problems are caused by a group of men, and it just happens to be a group we despise."

Brad Pitt was the mental image projected by the schizophrenic narrator of what he would be like if only he could bring himself to actually just fuck Marla the way he wanted to all along. Brad Pitt, within the universe of the film, doesn't exist, he's an idealization of the chaotic masculinity the narrator wants to access. (I'm using the actor rather than the character name "Tyler Durden" because whether Tyler exists is kind of complicated, the narrator is also Tyler)

Which taking the visual symbolism of the film seriously, presents us with two explanations.

Either the incel imagines that he must transform himself into Brad Pitt at his absolute hottest in order to have sex with a woman. Or the incel thinks that if only he could have sex with a woman, the act of doing so would transform him into Brad Pitt at his absolute hottest.

I think it's one of the best commentaries on male sexuality in film. Probably alongside Eyes Wide Shut.

I prefer my third explanation: the movie is not about an incel.

Incel is kind of a loaded term, but the precipitating event of the narrator's split personality is presented pretty clearly as his meeting Marla, and being unable to fuck her as himself, needing to become free to have sex. So incel maybe not, but I don't think the work can carry a reading that isn't centered on sexual repression.

Repressed sexuality is absolutely one of the themes, as an expression of the broader repression of masculinity and purpose; the narrator is not an incel, he's a very traditional manosphere conception of a beta male. He has a comfortable job, and a comfortable life, but has no vitality or ambition or ways to really actualize and express himself as a man.

He's castrated by society and his own fear of rocking the boat. Tyler's an escape not simply because he has sex (the narrator isn't a sexual tyrannosaurus but there's also no indications I remember of him being an eternally blueballed virginal wreck), but because he's free in all ways -- he's free to fuck, he's free to fight, he's free to rebel and claw personal meaning out of a peaceful and atomized suppression of the self.

I definitely agree Fight Club's message puts it firmly in the manosphere wing of gender politics, but I reject wholeheartedly the idea it's about incels. Ennui with modern society firmly predates them. Uncle Ted's crazy, but he's not incel crazy.

Brad Pitt wasn't the incel; Edward Norton was. Which is still pretty unlikely, though that kind of thing is par for the course for Hollywood.

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