I feel like 90% of the people sayin fight club is fighting and shit got that from just watching trailer and the deruving it from the name . The movie is really better than the name makes it out to be
Bingo! The movie completely passed by me since the title was not enticing. Eventually a friend bugged me so much I ended up watching it (years later). It's a great movie.
I have run into a number of people that had never seen it because they couldn't stand the very title. And then once I sit them down and make them watch it their mind is blown like they've just seen Requiem for a Dream or Trainspotting.
It's not a toxic masculinity movie. It's a movie about toxic masculinity.
The name is one aspect of the turn off from it. The other aspect is exactly what the meme brings up. Particularly in places like school, where a lot of nuance and subtlety is missed, the discourse around it comes across as toxic masculine. I know before I saw it, I assumed it was pretty much what it says on the box, just because of stuff I had heard growing up.
I always took it as improving yourself generally requires comparison to others and an almost "fake" push to appear better to others and that was a form of masturbation. It's something to make you feel good and stroke your ego. Abandoning who you "were" and destroying yourself, and in the case of the movie fighting amongst other things, was a kind of freedom to discover more about yourself or to become completely different and it would be more "real" in that the changes made to you simply happened in reaction to the self destruction. It wasn't something you aimed for because you see a goal as a reflection of society around you and how you think you should fit in.