Despite the code that mandates that one not talk about Fight Club, I'm going to do it anyway. Everybody else did/does so….

While I agree that Fight Club captures some sense of the GenXer (definitely not for Millennials) ethos, especially for males, I'm not so sure that I can agree that it is entirely cynical and nihilistic. It would certainly seem so on the surface, i.e. in a literal sense, but one could also argue that it represents one man's struggle to break free from the yolks of a mundane and materialistic life/world. Is his response extreme? Yes. But sometimes extreme is what is called for.

Such an idea is also present in and early Fincher film, Se7en, verbalized by John Doe when he says, "You can't just tap people on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer." That would certainly seem necessary today, in a society that seems so numb at times. And yet it would seem to me that society can be incredible raw at the same time.

Sometimes one has to fight brutally, even against one's self, in order to live a more authentic existence. Sometimes a little creative destruction is not only a good thing, it is necessary. How many of us wouldn't like to "blow up" CitiBank or some other lending institution that bilked taxpayer money and at the same time has decided to arbitrarily hike up APRs.

I submit that Fight Club is not only NOT cynical and nihilistic it is transformative. Besides, as the Ed Norton characters explains to Marla, it was a weird time in his life, and who of us hasn't experienced that?