I meant Clerks was the one where they enjoy bitching and don't really want things to change overmuch because, regardless of their faith or lack thereof, those dorks are some grim slacker predetermination loving motherfuckers (which I think is part of the point? It's been a while, but I'd swear in an interview Kevin Smith said all the friends he grew up with basically told him his dreams were stupid, so Clerks is maybe a loving portrayal of the kind of person who doesn't just think- but secretly enjoys- the idea of being a hopeless peasant, Clerks 2 is about the peasant discovering he can seize the means of peasanting... and I don't know what Clerks 3 is about because the last time I made it all the way through a new Kevin Smith movie was Yoga Hosers and the psychic wounds still haven't healed)

The movie Fight Club is interesting because you have a generation of materially comfortable men in an era way past the more overtly adversarial second wave feminism (that happened while they were kids and probably nowhere near them) who still feel pressure from women, not because women are actively demeaning or denying their identity, but because the GenX Holden Caulfield knee-jerk dismissal of "phony" identity has left unstructured beings who mistake lassitude that grew from passive denial and self-directed pleasure seeking behavior, for emasculation at the hands of a womanly society. Any woman asking for anything is like a mom saying to a baby "Ok, now it's my turn. You breastfeed me." <-it's not just demeaning; it's impossible. Any woman who even jokingly points out their sad sack condition is like a mom saying "You have no penis. Your father added your penis to the collective girth of his penis and left." A man with authority in their world of comfort who gives them any kind of instruction is an even more emasculated baby pretending to be mommy. They're starting from first principles, from the assumption that a core element of manhood is voluntarily hurting others and voluntarily being hurt- a model springing from a basic misunderstanding of how a core element of being human is suffering and, finding inspiration in suffering, using pattern recognition and collective effort to create systems which minimize future suffering and occasionally encourages violent threats or acts to maintain the system against competing entities- and from that flows a model for society where intimate ritualized violence (the titular Fight Club) is the seed from which a bloody tree of not so much stochastic terrorism, but rather nihilistic stochastic celebration (an untenable new world order where unpredictable large scale violence could erupt at any time, not as a tool to extort results from an unwilling party, but as the thing of inherent value itself) grows.

None of that has anything to do with the age we're living in now, definitely not. I don't know why you said that. You definitely said that, not me. I gotta go...