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I have told you how I watched, albeit a year or so apart, both Mr. Robot and Fight Club. In that order. Having not seen Fight Club at the time I was unable to make the obvious connection. Mr. Robot is almost the exact same story, isn’t it?

Had I watched them in the order that they came out, it would felt very different. As reddit shows, the feeling that you were watching a story you already knew may well have quietly snuck up on you over the course of the show. Conversely, with each borrowed plot point, the new iteration would add details and twists to make its story its own. It was an evolving process of, “Am I watching Fight Club?” “I think I’m watching Fight Club?”

Ultimately, Mr. Robot‘s creator Sam Esmail was forthcoming about the major influence that Fight Club had on the development of his show. In fact, many of the clues that were discussed he had deliberately inserted into the script. His goal was for the audience to realize that Elliot and Mr. Robot were, in fact, the same before Elliot himself did. The shock of discovery was supposed to be on Elliot, not the audience. Hints were given throughout the season and then the final “reveal” was capped by the use of the same song that Fight Club ended with; The Pixies’ Where Is My Mind.

Come to think about it, none of my insights have much to do with either Fight Club, Mr. Robot, or the cultural impacts of all of this. My commentary results from having digested this stuff out of order. So while to the rest of the world, Pick Up Artist culture seems to have borrowed its style from Tyler Durden, to me it looks like Fight Club anticipated that movement by five or ten years. While the convergence of anti-mega-bank sentiment of the libertarian anti-government “right” and Occupy Wall St. “left” seems predicted by Durden’s Project Mayhem to me, that may well be in part because millennials already knew about Project Mayhem when they decided that they were going to occupy stuff. It’s like I’ve been trying to enjoy 22 years of Fight Club cosplay without knowing who the hell the Brad Pitt -like guy was supposed to be.

And while we’re at it, does anyone else think that Where Is My Mind was totally ripped off by Coldplay?

Yeah… I guess so.
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