Fight Club - I want you to hit as hard as you can

Scritto il 17 Novembre 2005.

“You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need. We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.”“It was that morning Tyler invented Project Mayhem. Tyler asked what I was really fighting. What Tyler says being the crap and the slaves of history, that’s how I felt. I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn’t afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I’d never see. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom. Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up ran itself aground. Don’t think of this as extinction. Think of this as downsizing. For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born. (…)We wanted to blast the world free of history. (…)This was the goal of Project Mayhem, Tyler said, the complete and right away destruction of civilization.”Ho sentito molti dire che chi ha curato la prefazione nell’edizione italiana dev’essersi fermata al titolo e ad una lettura superficiale del romanzo perché ne ha distorto completamente il messaggio. Devo ricordarmi di darci uno sguardo la prossima volta che vado in libreria. Fight club non è, come ho sentito dire, affermazione della propria virilità attraverso il combattimento fisico. Tra incontri clandestini, sangue, gruppi di supporto per malati terminali, insonnia, saponette di grasso, istruzioni per preparare bombe in casa, distruzione di edifici, ecc. fight club è la ricerca esasperata di se stessi. È lo scrollarsi di dosso l’insensibilità e la superficialità che ci stanno zavorrando. È riprendere possesso di se stessi, della propria vita. Potere, controllo della storia. Una visione estremista del mondo moderno e una soluzione altrettanto radicale. Chi non ha visto il film faccia penitenza, chi non ha letto il libro corra ai ripari.