This week on MovieJawn, we are celebrating our favorite movies that turned 25 this year. All week long we are going to Party Like It’s 1999!

by Allie Lembo, Staff Writer

If you’ve never seen Fight Club, I’ll be spoiling the twist for you. For everybody else, it’s time to observe the legacy of Brad Pitt’s abs. 

Tyler Durden’s (Brad Pitt) abdominal wall is lean, chiseled with a six-pack that could cut glass, the topography of the muscles twisting and turning like snakes. We get to eyeball the washboard in shirtless fights, glistening with the sweat of other men and post-sex, in a sneaky shot that reveals the V-line that can only appear under a certain percentage of body fat, like a fairy that only deigns to grace this realm on the solstice, the contoured arrow pointing to what we can imagine is his hugely satisfying organ. 

I am part of the culture that sexualized those abs to death and is still ogling them as the pinnacle of the human form. In October of this year, 25 years after the film’s debut, Brad Pitt’s trainer, David Lindsay was interviewed for Men’s Journal on how he achieved the look. 

Aiming for a character who's “incredibly street smart, rough around the edges, full of energy, and ready to pounce at any moment,” Pitt was advised to eliminate carbs, alcohol, and oil, sustaining on a diet of egg whites, lean meat, grilled vegetables, and protein shakes, with 20-30 mg of protein ingested every 2-4 hours. He and co-star Edward Norton studied mixed martial arts, boxing, taekwondo, and grappling, along with a detailed regime, including 100 situps a day. You could do it, if you wanted to. There’s no evidence he used steroids or CGI, as rumored in the Marvel films. You could look like Fight Club Brad Pitt if you wanted to.

However, Brad Pitt’s abs do not exist. The blonde, shredded visage is an insomnia-induced altergo invented by Edward Norton’s character to serve as the leader of Fight Club and its eventual transformation into the anti-consumerist male militia, Project Mayhem. Tyler Durden (Edward Norton) dissatisfied and lonely, dreams up the ideal avatar who can lead other dissatisfied men to build a community based on beating the shit out of each other. Just to feel something.

Brad Pitt was the perfect casting for the ideal man in 1999. Prior to Fight Club, he lit up the decade with roles in movies like Thelma & Louise, Interview with the Vampire, and Se7en, with a dating history that reads like a top-paid list of Hollywood actresses. His performance in this film likely clinched his win for People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive Award in 2000. 

With abs that hypnotize, audiences may have glossed over–in a disturbing trend of misinterpreting satire on masculinity by the likes of Patrick Batemen, Scott Pilgrim, and others– is that Tyler Durden is a walking, talking Reddit conspiracy forum. He likes to give out recipes for napalm and lament being part of a generation raised by women; “I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.”

A 2022 MSNBC article reported on a “network of online ‘fascist fitness’ chat groups on the encrypted platform Telegram…recruiting and radicalizing young men with neo-Nazi and white supremacist extremist ideologies.” Soon, mixed martial arts and boxing gyms in the U.S., Ukraine, Canada, and France, were discovered as a breeding ground for far-right nationalism, focusing on street-fighting technique and hand-to-hand combat. Author Cynthia Miller-Idriss explains that through this intensive physical training, “fighters are trained to accept significant physical pain, to be ‘warriors,’ and to embrace messaging around solidarity, heroism, and brotherhood.”

This is the plot of Fight Club. 

The article was reshared by MSNBC to Twitter in 2023 to a legion of mocking from two celebrities who became some of the most recent far-right Trump campaign’s most outspoken supporters: Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. They sought to discredit the article, implying that linking physical fitness to far-right ideology is a pathetic stretch by liberals. Fitness trends can always be traced to the culture and to white supremacy, according to fitness expert Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession. The 1980’s fitness boom coincided with the Reagan-era “work-hard, play-hard” culture and a desire for gay men to be seen as healthy during the AIDS crisis. The CrossFit obsession materialized post-9/11 in a Mark Wahlberg-esque militarized readiness to “pounce” or act at any moment in the case of a terrorist attack. 

The research and the fictitious Fight Club posit that maybe men will follow other men to the ends of the Earth if they’re trauma-bonded by a shared faith of fitness, fighting, and striving for a physical perfection that elicits awe and doesn’t even exist. In the second stage of Fight Club, recruits are belittled for appearing outside of the Brad Pitt prototype, from being too old to too fat, a crude expression of fascist rhetoric. Edward Norton’s character never believed a lowly average-looking white-collar worker drone could be a leader, but his loneliness turned rage makes him more emblematic of right wing leaders than his hot imaginary friend.

So, a word of inspiration from Fight Club: you don’t have to possess a six-pack to start an alt-right cult! But like Edward Norton’s Tyler Durden, you have to want one, tossing aside all other fitness benefits like strength, disease prevention, mood improvement, and better sleep for the dream of abs, the dream of what “a real man looks like.”

And isn’t that worse? You don’t have to dedicate your time to creating that physique, but you must dedicate your innermost desires to it. And then even when you get what you want in life, it’s tainted by the lack of sexy, sexy abs.