What’s l33t sp34k for “cry for help”?
Published by Kyso Kisaen May 29th, 2006 in Movies, HUH!?, AdviceOr, An Example of How Patriarchy Hurts Men As Well.
Hey, what’s cooler than pretending you’re Tyler Durden?
If you said, damn well nearly anything you derivative fuck, you’d be right. You also wouldn’t be these guys.
They may sport love handles and Ivy League degrees, but every two weeks, some Silicon Valley techies turn into vicious street brawlers in a real-life, underground fight club.
Kicking, punching and swinging every household object imaginable — from frying pans and tennis rackets to pillowcases stuffed with soda cans — they beat each other mercilessly in a garage in this bedroom community south of San Francisco.
Rule 1: Don’t talk about Fight Club.
Rule 1a: Talking to CNN.com fucking counts as talking about Fight Club.
And wasn’t there something about only using fists?
Inspired by the 1999 film “Fight Club,” starring Brad Pitt and Ed Norton, underground bare-knuckle brawling clubs have sprung up across the country as a way for desk jockeys and disgruntled youths to vent their frustrations and prove themselves.
“This is as close as you can get to a real fight, even though I’ve never been in one,” the soft-spoken Siou said.
OK, boys, but just remember that in real life, Project Mayhem will get you a lot of jail time, all right? And Silicon Valley employers no likie the programmer with the assault record. Or the one that admits things like this to reporters:
Despite his reserved demeanor, he daydreams about inflicting pain on an attacker. “I have fantasies about it,” he said.
Not that he has anything to prove, you see.
“But I don’t need this to prove I’m macho — I’m macho enough as it is.”
Note to this man’s employer: Sending him to company psychiatrist now will save you money, hassle, and bad PR later.
“You get to be a superhero for a night,” Klimanis said. “We have to go to work every day. We’re constantly told to buy things we don’t need, and just for a couple hours we have the freedom to do what we want to do.”
And what we want to do is what Brad Pitt in that kind-of-but-not-really underground but still mainstream movie tells us to do! Right down to the bullshit justification! Ok, guys, I agree, Fuck IKEA. But beating each other senseless does nothing about America’s overconsumption. Just don’t buy IKEA. If the hot chick in marketing is only impressed by expensive consumer goods, then fuck her as well, leave her to her own devices. Pounding yourselves into pasty white pulps in Joe-from-R&D’s garage is not doing anything for anyone, least of all your sorry selves.
Cry for help? The experts think so.
“Real-life fight clubs are the male version of the girls who cut themselves,” he said. “All day long these guys think they’re the captains of the universe, technical wizards. They’re brilliant but empty.
“They want to feel differently. They want to get hit, they want to feel something real.”
Get some fucking help. Talk to a friend. Change your meds. Get a hobby. Volunteer at the homeless shelter. Paint a picture. Join Habitat for Humanity-you get to build houses! How manly is that?
PS: The kind of girls (and you can’t tell me that on some level this is not about girls) who are not into that consumer bullshit also like original thought. Patterning your weekends after a 7-year-old movie will not score you any points. Besides, as much as I enjoy a Chuck Palanuck (ever heard of him? Look at the cover of your DVD of Fight Club. His name’s on it) novel, he is not subtle to the point of wearysome and enjoys an oversimplifed worldview in order to make his point. For example, you do not have to resort to hurting yourself in order to opt out of consumer culture. Really. I promise.
18 Responses to “What’s l33t sp34k for “cry for help”?”
- 1 Pingback on Jun 6th, 2006 at 8:40 pm
- 2 Pingback on Jun 6th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
“But I don’t need this to prove I’m macho — I’m macho enough as it is.”
Oh wow. Its just like that scene in Underworld where the 2 wolvies are fighting each other just for the hell of it while their friends look on…then comes in the wereking yelling something to the effect of “OMG what are you doing? you’re acting like a bunch of animals!”
Or it reminds me of this stupidity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ0VmEUcY7Y
“OK, boys, but just remember that in real life, Project Mayhem will get you a lot of jail time, all right?”
And remember that in the movie Tyler Durden was ultimately a destructive madman.
I can understand how you could watch the movie once and not realise that it doesn’t really endorse Project Mayhem or even really Fight Club itself, but if you see it twice, let alone like it enough to start your own club, you should figure this out.
Even before it turns into Project Mayhem, Fight Club is essentially about Norton’s character self-medicating himself. It’s not really different then binge drinking or using narcotics. Yes, eventually Norton’s character gets something good out of it, but first he has to kill Durden.
Yeah, it’s a real problem, but Fight Club isn’t the solution.
“You get to be a superhero for a night,” Klimanis said. “We have to go to work every day. We’re constantly told to buy things we don’t need, and just for a couple hours we have the freedom to do what we want to do.”
I wonder, do these people have any idea that they are coming across as huge dorks? Didn’t people who wanted to imagine that they were superheros used to just play Dungeons and Dragons? It was easier to respect the D&D crowd, too, because unlike anybody who would turn their lives into a copy of a movie, D&D actually took a little imagination.
-boggles-
Er.
Yeah.
I better tell my husband and his buddies that their rock climbing outings are a whole lot wussier than beating each other to a pulp with frying pans. Also, a whole lot stupider. And less bloody. Thus wussier.
HA! ^_^
No kiddin’.
This is probably the most precise and concise way to describe people like that. How un-macho…
Sadly, I know a crew of kids who do shit like this. Except first it was one-upmanship with drugs, then one-upmanship with fighting, now they’re all carrying guns and knives. Scary shit for their stupid sakes.
Kyso, I think (based on your discussion of that damn college paper editorial column about being pretty and having guys buy your drinks being the crowning achievements of feminism, not ’cause I’m stalking you) that you’re in the same city I live in, and out by the IKEA on the way to the airport there are, I shit you not even a little, posters for a local fight club. Two weeks after seeing them, my mind still boggles at the idea of a local fight club. What would it even be like?!
Yeah, and it’s Chuck Palahniuk.
The article, while new, is not news. Fight Club came out when I was in high school and a bunch of dudes immediately started copycat clubs. Nationwide.
I can never spell his damn name, even when I’m looking for his books in the library.
And the initial rash of copy catting I can kind of see, but it’s seven fucking years later. Surely we could have at least moved on to 2 Fast 2 Furious by now.
I hope you mean Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Coming soon to a
urinal caketheater near you.That would be more timely, wouldn’t it. And it would take all of 5 seconds of attempting to race cars in Tokyo for reality and these sad, sad men to collide in the most horrible way.
Erin, it’s possible, if you’re in Ohio. But there was an almost identical article published in a Pittsburgh student paper a while back, so I’m thinking there is one of those girls on every campus, probably more if there is one for every student paper.
Of course, now that you hold the key to my secret idenitity, I have to kill you. Of course, if we do live in the same city, a nice killing could be just the thing to liven up an otherwise dead summer. And I wouldn’t be caught and there won’t be any consequences, because I saw this movie once where this person killed someone and got away with is, so I’m just going to do what they did. It’s perfect.
Ah, I am indeed in Pittsburgh, but I used to live in Ohio, and I’d be willing to try to send someone across the border if you’re in need of some summertime boredom-reducing killin’. Though I think that girl’s probably graduated. No bother; I’m sure there are more of them at the mall, or Friday’s or something. Say the word. Oh, and I hear that a realy good way to do it is to stab them with an icicle. Or clobber them with a leg of lamb and then cook it and eat it. No evidence! Criminal genius.
If you were in the same city, I was going to suggest meeting up and kicking the shit out of each other. Because I hear that’s totally rad.
Aww, too bad. I used to date a guy in Pitt and was there like once a month at least. We could have punched each other in the face and spit out teeth and you know, really bonded.
To me, some of the central themes in fight club are the impossibility of escaping consumer culture, and a subtle indictment of ‘alternative’ culture. I mean, a bunch of guys decide to escape the mindless enslavement of Ikea and office jobs, and they do so by joining another society with strict rules. They replaced blind obedience to mindless consumerism with mindless adherence to THE WORD OF TYLER.
Reading Fight Club and then deciding to emulate the characters is a bit like taking Lolita as an endorsement for banging preteens.
Atrazine, please tell me you came up with that without having seen this, because that would be awesome.
Whoa. I do occasionally read pandagon, but I missed that.
This is amazing. I actually put some thought into coming up with the stupidest, most hyperbolically absurd possible interpretation of a novel, and there’s someone out there actually interpreting it that way.
Derbyshire is pretty much a walking joke anyway, I always have trouble believing that he didn’t spring, fully formed, from the collective forehead of the world’s parodists.