Man Up: Tyler Durden 2014

For Arjay and Kev

     

Idol of the Inferior

Many men my age assess ourselves based on Fight Club. Not the book, the film. The book did its part but it was the movie that truly decided us for who we are as a generation. Or maybe just who we were, because the assessment has changed. 

                There are two sets of us now, we men who survived the non-war of the 1990s, that less than forgotten time: a period of brief bliss when our heroes were gangsters and our priests wore black ties, that period of ever so unbelievable peace yet war, hope yet genocide, progress yet status quo, between the Cold War and 9/11. To think about it recklessly you run the risk of painting it as a fiary tale it wasn't. But, hey, the music was pretty good. 

                We are two kinds of men. We tell ourselves the truth: we’re the unimportant unnamed narrator. Our other self is Tyler Durden. Naturally, Tyler is a superhuman. He’s the dad who left, he’s the man we adore and wish we were, he’s the us we wish we were if we could be who we are without all of these mortal trappings.              

                In 1999 he was the volatile hippy because we perhaps didn’t understand what he would be when we let ourselves open to the fascism that is the 21^stCentury. It’s not Tyler’s fault. He was created during a time when we needed something to be angry about and fight against because we couldn’t accept that life was possibly so damned good when we still had dads. So we made them leave even if it was just to upstairs.

                Men our age have gone one of these two ways, and there are a whole damn lot of them who think that they’re Tyler because they think he’s what a man should be. Tough, virile, uncompromising. A Man’s man. Well, there is a reason that when they’re on the bus looking at the underwear ad the unnamed narrator asks if that’s “what a real man looks like.” Because Tyler isn’t one. A real man is one who asks himself what he is, and daily doubts he is one. 

                These new men have convinced themselves that they are Tyler. They've missed the point, missed that he's a conception of grandeur, and archetype. Literally a figment of the imagination. These men have so deluded themselves that they could be this grand dream--and forgetting that it was a nightmare in the first place--that they believe their own lies. 

                Today, men are men because they reach further back to some uncompromising John Wayne, Johnny Cash wannabe sense of self. They define themselves by tobacco, whiskey, misogyny. Oil, money, and enjoying having no vulnerability. Let's not confuse that with a lack of weakness, though. 

               Who it means to be the man on the other side of Tyler Durden is too frightening so they have taken a gigantic, deliberate, pathetic step backwards.

                The man I am is the man I am now, not then. We are men because we move on, because we survive after the revelation, we don't pull the curtain back after the secret's revealed, pretending we never learned the truth.
                Man up.