Copy of a Copy of a Copy Club

How Robert Lewis Stevenson and Santacon gave us Fight Club (and far right self-actualization)

This piece was originally written for and read at a screening of Fight Club at Woodbine in Queens, York on September 11, 2024.

We can't talk about Fight Club — the book, the film, the enduring cultural imprint — without first talking about Suicide Club.

Taking its name from Robert Lewis Stevenson's 1878 short story collection, the San Francisco group formed almost a century later in 1977. And while the fictional Suicide Club was about a Bohemian prince infiltrating a London secret society dedicated to carefully-staged murders of members picked at random, the real-life version emerged as its own thrill-seeking, post-Hippie bohemian secret society.

Suicide Club's five year run included group pranks like riding the San Francisco cable cars naked in groups, pop-up theater in streets and elevators, climbing the city's famous bridges to throw dinner parties, and exploring the city's sewers and abandoned buildings. And true to their literary namesake, they infiltrated events thrown by extremist groups like The Reunification Church and the American Nazi Party.

Unlike it's future fictional grandchild that we'll get to later, Suicide Club had no hierarchies, and no real rules beyond whatever a particular stunt needed and the group's “12 Chaotic Principles” that can be summed up as “just commit to the bit”. There was also no one-on-one combat…though I'm sure at some point they pissed off the wrong person with the wrong prank.

Decades later, a founding member would tell Dazed magazine that Suicide Club took off in San Francisco because the city was — to quote Guy Debord — “a society of spectacle”. One where the real world had been transformed into an unrelenting assault of images, and where commodification had so totally colonized social life that it enforced conformity on every day behavior.

But for the most part, Suicide Club did not inspire any anti-spectacle revolution — or even revolutionary thought — in the way Debord and the Situationists did with the Paris student movement and occupations in May 1968.

One possible exception was a Suicide Club offshoot called the Billboard Liberation Front. For many years after the original club's demise, the BLF vandalized billboards to comedic effect and social commentary.

Take, for example, an Apple billboard with the Dalai Lama and the words “Think disillusioned”. “AT&T works in more places, like NSA HEADQUARTERS”. Or “Gordon's Gin: It fucks you up”.

The Situationists called this technique “détournement” – transforming “prefabricated aesthetic elements” into new messages to critique the original work and its intent. Or as it would later be called in English, “culture jamming”.

Accordingly, we can draw a line from the Situationists and their Dada and Surrealist predecessors to Suicide Club and BLF, as well as to later artists like Banksy and a Canadian anti-consumerist magazine called Adbusters, who are less known today for promoting the term “culture jamming” than the term “Occupy Wall Street”.

But the overall spirit and intent of Suicide Club can be quoted from their official membership card, which stated:

The bearer has agreed to get all worldly affairs in order, to enter into the world of chaos, cacophony and dark Saturnalia, to live each day as if it were the last, and is a member in good standing of “The Suicide Club”.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “cacophony” two ways: as “a harsh or jarring sound”, or as “an incongruous or chaotic mixture: a striking combination”.

Four years after the Suicide Club disbanded after a co-founder's death by heart attack — in a sense, fulfilling the promise of its fictional namesake — ex-members helped form the Cacophony Society in 1986. The society dropped the exclusivity and the extremist infiltrations to double-down on risky adventures, whimsical pranks, costume parties, and street theater.

An entire essay could be written about Cacophony's hijinks alone — and a full book-length oral history already has — but there are a few highlights worth mentioning.

A one-off Cacophony event called “Kill Your TV” involved a mass smashing of over 500 TVs in San Francisco with live industrial music performed in the background — and a pyramid of TV's playing factory training videos spliced with porn clips.

Santacon was started by Cacophony in 1994 where groups of people dressed in Santa costumes showed up in a particular city to run around, sing, and get unapologetically drunk in public. Santacon is still making New Yorkers cringe today, but it would wistfully remembered in a travelogue of Portland, Oregon published in 2003 by a certain successful author better known for his fiction.

Another idea that outgrew Cacophony itself started with a wooden effigy burning at a beach party in 1989. The next year, Cacophony took a mystery trip to the Black Rock Desert which ended with the incineration of this same wooden human figure, and the Burning Man festival has taken place there every year since.

Whatever the visceral reaction you get from hearing that name, the 90's version of Burning Man blended Cacophony pranksters, anarchists, ravers, and a growing contingent of tech-savvy geeks embracing the freedom and possibilities of the emerging, web-browser-based dial-up internet. On August 30, 1998, just a month after David Fincher began shooting a new film starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, the co-founders of a new search engine updated their homepage by superimposing the second O in their one-word Logo over a drawing of the wooden effigy to let their users know they'd be out of action for a while.

And now we need to talk about why we're really talking about Cacophony Society.

In the foreword to the 2012 book “Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society”, Chuck Palahniuk writes about his first time stumbling across one of their pranks. Intrigued by a flyer advertising “Free Voodoo Weddings” at a “Tiki-Con”, Palahniuk and his friends arrive at a Polynesian-themed bar in Portland, only to find a bunch of uninhibited dorks dancing to kitschy jungle-themed music in the corner. Just when the bar starts to fill up with one too many beautiful hipsters for his liking, one of the dorks — dressed as a voodoo doctor — throws something into the crowd. As Chuck so vividly recalls:

A bloody heart plopped into a Long Island Iced Tea. Real blood in our fake skulls. It was chicken guts. Giblets filled the air. It was that movie, “Carrie,” only in reverse. Instead of the cool kids putting the spastic on stage and pelting her with gore, this was the social reject delivering the offal.

Despite the stark contrast between the eventual tone of Fight Club and the annoying but benign revelry of drunk Santas and improvised mischief, Palahniuk has said that a lot of his real life and memories of his Cacophony co-conspirators are in Fight Club. In fact, he's claimed that watching the movie adaption of his own book made him feel sweet and nostalgic — memories of real-life support group crashing, co-workers ignoring his bashed-in face after a fight…and maybe more he can't legally admit to.

At this point, I'm tempted to not even talk about Fight Club anymore. I'm sure you're already connected the dots in your head between everything I've said and your lingering memories of quote-unquote Fight Club.

Still, for the sake of contextualizing a consequential debut novel, it's worth at least mentioning what Palahniuk tried to publish first instead. That work, Invisible Monsters, was a glossy women's fashion magazine-inspired book about a model who loses her jaw and is taught how to create new life and identity by a trans woman with multiple drag queen best friends funding her surgeries. Although it was eventually released as his third book, publishers rejected it for being too disturbing, and as Chuck likes to say, Fight Club was written in revenge as an even less publishable book.

This is also worth noting in light of one of Fight Club's enduring legacies, which is the notion that the problem of society – and it's conformist spectacles – is that its too feminizing.

And at this point, I probably don't need to make the case for Fight Club's influence on our present day frameworks of masculinity and politics. We all know Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden has joined the ranks of Al Pacino's Tony Montana and Leonardo DiCaprio's Jordan Belfort as inspirational cinematic male anti-heroes in spite of their authors' intent. Some of you, like myself, may have started a short-lived Fight Club with your teenage friends to varying degrees of humiliation or success.

What you may not know is how men forever associated with Fight Club see its influence now. In 2020, Edward Norton admitted to People magazine that the film could be seen as “proto-incel”. When asked by The Guardian about the film's popularity among the broader toxic manosphere, spanning from Neo-Nazi fight clubs to incels, Fincher said “It’s impossible for me to imagine that people don’t understand that Tyler Durden is a negative influence”. And when asked by the Huffington Post whether fans celebrating Durden or anarchy were misinterpreting the the story's intention, Palahniuk simply said “No, not really. Because they are kind of recognizing the phase where they discover their personal power through acting out against the world.”

One could argue that, to paraphrase the narrator of Fight Club, everything is a copy of a copy of a copy and this is how we ended up here. The modern American right-wing is a copy of Fight Club is a copy of Cacophony Society is a copy of Suicide Club is a copy of Stevenson (but more so Debord) is a copy of Marx is a copy of Hegel is a copy of Plato is probably a copy of Socrates (but really Pythagoras) is a copy of unknown words, names, and thoughts on papyrus lost to selectively written history in the chaos of war, apathy and relative humidity. Each surviving copy in this chain losing something — or a lot — along the way.

But altered copies aside, one could also argue that we have come full-circle. With social media continually-hijacking print and broadcast media with attention-grabbing gimmicks, trolling and shitposting, and mis- and disinformation, we are no longer simply in a society of the spectacle. Rather, we are effectively navigating a Cacophony Society.

And with the same unrelenting consumerism, environmental destruction, and pollution critiqued in Fight Club now being joined by climate derailment, microplastics, and fossil-fueled servers powering algorithmic-curated YouTube rabbit holes, cryptocurrency, and nonstop AI pictures of a triumphant Donald Trump without a fupa, our society is effectively a Suicide Club, both in the author of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde's sense and in the literal sense.

And what are AI and memes, but just two examples the spectacle and the détournement at the same time, effectively making the tools against the spectacle part of the spectacle itself, and jamming cultural critique and culture itself, all for the sake of planet-draining digital engagement at the expense of the real world?

Whether we are full circle or a feedback-looping cacophony of endless copies, the ultimate legacy of Fight Club may be that someday soon, there will be no society left to spectate or copies left to copy.