I’m a little late with this (and left a comment complaining about Pulp Fiction)…
It’s about boredom, another unappreciated and destructive human condition. The English punks of the mid-seventies, who, like Durden’s mischief-makers, embraced nihilism as a way to push back against modern life, were also spurred by “boredom.” The word litters their lyrics and art and interviews (read “England’s Dreaming” by Jon Savage). “Fight Club’s” narrative is not about the bleakness of living on the Dole but rather of living in a cubicle. The conservative theorist Robert Nisbet once argued that boredom was a weapon wielded by second-generation Communist regimes. Monotony was like authority, he notes, because the “worst of tyrannies exist within the intimacies of life, and the same holds for life’s boredoms.”
It’s scary to think that punk never would have happened if video games had been invented earlier.
