Fight Club was in this kind of cult category. I saw it maybe twenty years ago (I'm a huge Brad Pitt and Edward Norton fan as well). It's a hard movie to give a synopsis for but I'll try: The unnamed Narrator (Edward Norton) leads a life of emasculated, quiet desperation as a cog in the corporate wheel (essentially "a consumer," as he seeks to describe his existence and evidenced by his obsession with "completion" by way of his IKEA-manicured condo and soul-sucking business trips replete with "single serving" encounters). He's basically alive, but dead inside, not to mention suffering from insomnia.
The Narrator's alter-ego--the confident, virile, and violent hyper-masculine Tyler Durden--is everything the narrator is not. The Narrator likes control--Tyler tells him to "stop trying to control everything." He teaches him "rock bottom" lessons (like letting go of the steering wheel in the car and stepping on the gas, I presume to show him you can survive more than you think you can after they barrel roll over a median, blowing up the Narrator's condo (detachment) and pouring lye on his hands as a kind of pain-tolerance test).
Fight Club is the kind-of secret, underground after-hours movement that develops as a way for other emasculated men to come together and get out their repressed aggression--bare-knuckled fighting in basements. For the first time, they feel alive. This would be one thing, but Tyler sees it as a movement to free men from the drudgery of consumerism and founds Project Mayhem, a kind of domestic terror group spring from Fight Club with the ultimate goal of dismantling capitalism by blowing up the credit card companies. The movement grows; recruits stand outside the dilapidated mansion, which serves as home base in the sketchy outskirts of the city, without food or water and subject to hazing for three days to prove their meddle. Tyler becomes a kind of charismatic, fascist dictator in the process of taking things, well, a little too far.
What does any of this have to do with the Traditional Latin Mass and the growing movement towards traditionalism in the Church, especially among young men?
I'll grant that it might be an unorthodox way of developing parallelism, but I see a couple of cautionary points worth considering, if you're willing to think outside the box a little.
One: The post-conciliar Church is largely feminized and emasculated. This was my experience in the Novus Ordo, one I couldn't put my finger on for a long time. You can cite female lectors and EMs or overbearing Music Directors, or a ceding of paternal control to a largely female lay parish committee, or the hymns or the hand holding...the list goes on. What it boils down to is that, from my observations, the N.O. does not appeal to male sensibilities.
Two: The vacuum will be filled one way or another. Either people leave the Church, with men leading the way out, or they will be brought back in by what appeals to those primal sensibilities. The rise of figures like Jordan Peterson and Fr. Ripperger are mobilizers in a way, to bring things back into right order and out of the chaos of the rubble when the Natural Law has been eschewed and inverted for decades.
At the TLM, the focus is not anthropocentric, but theocentric. The physicality and precision with which the sacrifice (the immolation of the Lamb, not a 'shared meal') is offered has a kind of military precision to it. It is unapologetic and uncompromising. In essence: it's not about you. And that is, I think, appealing to men.
Three: It has the potential to go too far, when not tempered by virtue. When I attend monthly holy hour at the FSSP parish near us, fifty or sixty guys are praying the rosary and worshiping Christ. We gather in the basement afterwards for wings and beer, and a talk by the priest. It has a "Fight Club" type feel, without the Fighting. But this is because the priest is a sensible and level-headed shepherd that encourages virtue and discourages fringe-extremism. I think this is important. A charismatic but reckless priest has as much potential to lead men astray (by capitalizing on point #2, above) when his vision of the Church and holiness conflicts with the laws of the Church, prudence, temperance, and the other virtues, and/or ignores human freedom in favor of a kind of cult-like following.
I have a real aversion to cults and cult-like thinking. I think cultish-traditionalism is as dangerous as hyper-emasculation. Younger men, especially those without temperance, wisdom, or good formation from their fathers, may be more susceptible to extremism. One young man who attended the TLM at our parish (which had nothing to do with our holy priest at the time, who unfortunately passed away from cancer two years ago, or our particular parish), spray-painted DEUS VULT and hurled a molotov cocktail at the local Planned Parenthood in an attempt to burn it down. I don't know what motivated him, but I think this is a unstable kind of zeal when it's not tempered.
There's a way that men can get together and build one another up--even if it's in underground fashion in church basements in the sketchy part of town--without going completely Fight Club. Right Order=Right Worship, which is why I have hope that the traditionalist movement has potential to renew the Church, as long as it doesn't devolve into something antithetical to true Christian charity and the true nature of Christ as fully man, in all the best ways. We don't need Fight Clubs (nor do you need to watch the movie (please don't))--we need wisdom, prayer, and virtue, as well as priests to guide us without becoming cult-leaders--so that we can step into the roles we are called to as men, husbands, and fathers and lead our domestic churches in the home and renew the Church from the inside out and bottom up.
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