“Fight Club” is an icon of the alt-right. The director & out author say it’s not their fault.

Director David Fincher says he is not responsible for alt-right misogynists and anti-LGBTQ+ groups’ embrace of his 1999 film Fight Club.

“I’m not responsible for how people interpret things,” Fincher told The Guardian recently.

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“What happened last year, it was probably just a whiff of what we might see this year, after 12 months of organizing.”

In the film, based on out author Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 debut novel, the charismatic Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) leads a group of disaffected, primarily white men through working out their frustrations with modern life in secret underground brawls, escalating to acts of violence and terrorism.

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A failure at the box office, the movie has become a cult classic, particularly among young white men. As New Yorker’s Peter C. Baker wrote in 2018, the film is a favorite on message boards and online communities frequented by so-called “men’s rights” activists and incels. Baker wrote that within these communities, Fight Club had been misinterpreted as “a lesson in what you had to do to stop being a miserable beta,” and that the film’s ultimate critique of Tyler Durden’s anti-social nihilism was seen as “a thematic flaw.”

The film’s influence can be seen in violent, far-right hate groups like the Proud Boys. An essay by Meadhbh Park in the 2022 collection Male Supremacism in the United States: From Patriarchal Traditionalism to Misogynist Incels and the Alt-Right is literally titled “Fight Club: Gavin McInnes, the Proud Boys, and Male Supremacism.”

In his interview with Fincher, The Guardian’s Steve Rose pressed the director on the film’s legacy among what he termed the “manosphere”: “‘incels’; neo‑Nazi fitness clubs; the Proud Boys…; avowed misogynists and male supremacists in the Andrew Tate mould.”

Fincher argued that the film’s interpretation had evolved in the years since its release and that it is “one of many touchstones in their lexicography.”

“We didn’t make it for them,” he said, “but people will see what they’re going to see in a Norman Rockwell painting, or [Picasso’s] Guernica.”

“It’s impossible for me to imagine that people don’t understand that Tyler Durden is a negative influence,” Fincher added. “People who can’t understand that, I don’t know how to respond and I don’t know how to help them.”

Palahniuk has also dismissed the alt-right’s misinterpretation of his novel.

“It’s fascinating that the group that can’t get laid is now adopting the same language. It shows how few options men have in terms of metaphors,” he told The Guardian in 2018. The book, he said, “was more about the terror that you were going to live or die without understanding anything important about yourself,” than it was about gender.