So, Fight Club is about how masculinity within patriarchy destroys men. A man who is an isolated consumer isn't allowed to cry because he's confirming to masculinity, he has a mental breakdown and turns to expresses his sadness as violence. At the end of the book he gets in to every fight until his cheeks wear away and he's described as looking like a jack-o'-lantern. After he confronts Tyler and shoots himself, he becomes catatonic and lives in a mental hospital.

The fact that the plans wouldn't actually do anything are part of the point. It's just an unfocused attack on a system that dehumanizes. In the end, it just becomes part of the system he attacked. Which is also his critique of what became ecofascism.

The author is gay. A big element of masculinity is cisgendered heterosexual, as least in the US context and especially in the late 90's when he was writing. He was excluded in some ways from masculinity at that time, while socialized in it. So he has a lot of reasons to explore and decompose masculinity.

Brad Pitt, when playing Tyler, understood the critique as well and continued to push on the what masculinity means. While regularly playing an architypical man, he's often worn dresses. The fact that he can do both demonstrantes the malleability of the definition of masculinity (this is also called "queering" masculinity).

I know all this because that's one of my favorite movies/books. I was in highschool when it came out. I was studying AP English, so I decided to my final paper on absurdism and antiheroes in Fight Club, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Good Soldier Ŝvejk. But even after reading it and having a ton of context, I actually didn't really understand it. It wasn't until years later that I was able to revisit it through the lense of feminism that I understood how much of Fight Club is actually feminist.

Even though all the information was available to me, I still didn't get it. Fight Club, Starship Troopers, Rick and Morty, and other films and media that criticize masculinity, violence, and authoritarianism are so often misunderstood by their fans... Like the point of Nirvana's In Bloom. Could the fact that the majority of people who watch these movies completely miss the point make them, by definition, bad art? They fail, fundamentally, to relate their ideas. Isn't that a problem?

I don't think the fact that people don't understand a piece of art makes it bad, and I'm really careful about criticizing art without having context.. especially if I'm not the audience.

Context is super important. For example, a lot of people don't realize that the whole "modern art is shit" meme was super important to Hitler. He claimed that Jews were creating "degenerate art" that degraded German culture. They did art shows that were compilations of things they didn't like or didn't understand before burning them... Kind of like this compilation. So things like criticizing the concept of modern art (especially out of context) or taking about sterilizing people with disabilities that I always push back on. A lot of people don't know the connections with those.

I work in computer security now, and have for like 15 years or so. Almost every vulnerability is someone trying to solve a problem they don't fully understand. Occasionally someone will try to solve a problem that isn't a problem at all and make a problem in the process. Some problems people keep trying to solve when they really need to step away and let a professional handle it, like cryptography.

I've seen too many people make a huge mess trying to solve a problem they didn't totally understand or didn't comprehend the impact of a solution.I always ask myself if a problem needs to be solved before trying to solve it. In a world where people are making money off genocide, starving people, inciting terrorist attacks, and making life unlivable on the planet, is some people acting silly really a thing worth fighting against? It just feels a bit like punching down.