White Samurai in a fascistic house of mirrors: Fight Club, Zen and the art of (Re)constructing ethno-nationalism

ABSTRACT Included in the DVD package of David Fincher’s Fight Club are running commentaries that function as rebuttals to initial criticism. Presenting the narrative as a Buddhist parable was a means to counter critiques of the film’s treatment of fascism. This defence was dependent on an Orientalist understanding of Buddhism as a non-violent religion. However, this paper argues that Fight Club can be read as containing allusions to both ethnocentric Japanese Buddhist militarism and white supremacy. One pivotal scene portraying the formation of the paramilitary organisation Project Mayhem first depicts a Zen monastic ritual employed to accept new members before domesticating the militia with imagery familiar to US viewers that resonates closely with white nationalism. Paralleling this trajectory, the auteurs, in recent interviews have reversed their previous strategy to either simply ignore the narrative’s Buddhist connotations or validate the alt-right’s misappropriation of the term ‘snowflake,’ a Buddhist metaphor for impermanence.