Fight club is all about the terrible consequences of not opening up emotionally
Yeah but that would require them to pay attention to the story and reflect on it so they understand the consequences. For a lot of people, they never make those connections, and anything on the screen being depicted is also being encouraged and glorified in their minds.
Ironically also the same problem as the book.
People think Heinlein was 110% onboard with the society he was writing about, yet he wrote many other novels where the protagonists fought back against authoritarianism and/or were communist economically. Beyond this Horizon, for example. Or “If this goes on-”
Assuming one of a writer’s works displays their exact like of thinking is reductionist and infantile unless they came out at some point and specifically stated that it’s how they believed.
Funny, I thought Fight Club was about the good guys winning the war against credit card companies with the power of domestic terrorism.
The book maybe but the movie definitely glorifies the violence without direct context for why it’s wrong. At least to a degree that can be easily understood by the target audience of teenage boys.
So, the director hid a swastika in one of the shadows to indicate that he thought the society was evil, among a ton of other things. He talked about it in the director’s commentary. But yeah, it’s actually super easy to miss unless you know it’s actually a warning (which, like you said, the teenage boys it’s marketed to wouldn’t understand)… Which is kind of the problem with a lot of media, like the entire genre of cyberpunk.
He also didn’t even bother to finish the book he was making a movie about, so it’s clear how he thought the story went.
