The Revolution Will Not Be Unfunded

Cinematic Dreams of Revolt in 1999

I. The Realism of Capital

There is no alternative. Any student of Margaret Thatcher will recognise the phrase. There was no alternative to privatisation, marketisation, emasculating trade unions, cutting the state and rejecting “collectivism” (by which she conflated Marxism and democratic socialism). Of course, there was sustained opposition to Thatcherism throughout. The Falklands, the Miners’ strike and the Westland scandal all might have brought her down, were it not for historical contingencies. But to the victor goes not only the spoils but the sense of historical determinism. Three general election victories made Thatcherism seem unanswerable. Similarly, Reaganism: three Republican presidential victories in 1980, 1984, and 1988 moved the window, necessitating “new Democrats”, Clintonian centrism and market fundamentalism.

There was no bucking the market, as Thatcher said. This sense of no alternatives being imaginable is what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism”. Capitalism is, of course, not inherent: it is a social relation, and as ethnologists can show, there are infinite types of social arrangements. Yet even despite the calamity of the 2008 Great Recession demonstrating the utter folly of capitalism’s supposed captains of industry, the grip capitalism has on popular discourse is, if anything, stronger today than ever.

It’s interesting to compare this current epoch to a previous high point of capitalism. One of the odd things about getting older is seeing periods you lived through being historicized, their contingencies becoming fixed and part of a historical narrative. I see younger people asking online about the 1990s in slightly awestruck tones - was it really that fun? Did people really hang around in malls? What did you do before the internet, social media and smartphones? The decade certainly benefited from a peace dividend so that any military conflagrations tended to be in previously obscure parts of the world, whether Mogadishu or East Timor. (Sarajevo might have been obscure to most Americans if not to anyone familiar with the First World War). Wages rose and prices for many consumer items fell, making households feel better off, while US stock markets went on incredible bull runs. That very fact implied that capital was arrogating the majority of profits - though not many thought it a major problem at the time.

But underneath all jollity this lay two linked anxieties. There seemed to be no area of life into which commerce could not penetrate. Many examples are cited by Naomi Klein in her book No Logo - adverts everywhere, schools signing “agreements” with soda companies, sponsorships and “partnerships” with everything from rock tours to gay rights parades. Secondly, with workers’ unions having been emasculated in the 1980s, corporations had more power over the individual than at any time since the 1930s. Business had previously been a rather patrician concern, with the owner having a near-feudal interest in his (it was always a man) staff. The 1990s accelerated the trend of cost-cutting, layoffs, outsourcing, and ultimately a rejection of the social contract. Business was no longer what was good for America. It served its own logic. Although wages were rising, industrialized nations were seeing a rapid hollowing of the workforce, factory jobs were going to China, and white-collar work was becoming digitized, deskilled and deprivileged. And all the while, to please the markets, corporations had to produce ever higher profits, so everyone still with a job had to work harder and harder. Fitter, happier, more productive.

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This is the backdrop of three critically and popularly acclaimed films from 1999 which embody these anxieties in their very different ways. All three share the leitmotif of a man trying to wake up from a dream: Lester Burnham in American Beauty, Neo in The Matrix, and the Narrator in Fight Club. It’s telling that two of them have almost identical scenes. In Fight Club, the Narrator assaults himself so that he can incriminate his boss and thereby keep drawing a salary and benefits. In American Beauty, Lester Burnham threatens to drop a sexual malpractice suit on his boss, and is also given a salary to walk away. These incidents immediately reveal a lot about the mindset of the 1990s. In Fight Club, the Narrator’s self-assault literalises the absurdity of a system that only responds to visible damage, his bruises standing for the moral injuries of white-collar work. In American Beauty, Lester Burnham performs the same trick, but with irony rather than pain: his blackmail is verbal, a self-aware parody of corporate procedure. In both cases, rebellion is simulated rather than revolutionary. These men have not escaped the system; they have simply learned to weaponise it. Both ultimately show a desire for revolution without being able to imagine living without corporate funding. The revolution will not be unfunded.

This was the culture of the 1990s: self-awareness without power and irony without exit. The culture could diagnose its sickness but not cure it. There is no alternative. Each film thus explores that paralysis differently - American Beauty turns it inward, into sexual fantasy and narcissism; Fight Club externalises it through violence and pseudo-spiritual brotherhood; and The Matrix reimagines it as metaphysical imprisonment. Together, they map the late-capitalist unconscious of 1999: three attempts to wake from the same dream, only to find there may be nowhere to go.

II. The Market As Mirage

If Reagan and Thatcher had dismantled the social contract, the 1990s replaced it with a fantasy of boundless choice. The consumer was promised liberation through consumption - a thousand brands for every taste, a lifestyle for every mood, infinite media options. Yet this apparent freedom, behind the corporate choreography of mergers and acquisitions, was remorseless economic power: fewer and fewer companies selling more and more differentiated goods. Monopoly economics disguised itself as postmodern pluralism. The market’s genius lay in merging Marx and Lyotard – in other words, total control through infinite micronarratives. Every brand offered a story of individuality, every act of purchase performed as an act of rebellion. Buying Nike or Apple was no longer an expression of conformity but of resistance. Think different. Just do it.

These three 1999 films are like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, discovering the limits of their narrative. Each movie focuses on a man who discovers that choice itself has become a trap, that their fantasies merely reflect the limits of their imagination. As Schopenhauer said: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” Lester Burnham, Neo, and the Narrator all begin by mistaking consumption for freedom and self-destruction for authenticity. (“I had it all. Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of... wherever”, the Narrator says.) Their “awakenings” are less acts of rebellion than glimpses of how deeply the market has colonised the self. And in this, the films of 1999 become the last true artefacts of the twentieth century’s dream of freedom, revealing its terminal condition: the realisation that even our fantasies of escape are mass-produced, simulated, and inescapable. There is no alternative.

III. Self-Help for the Terminal

Fight Club has become associated with a form of toxic masculinity, which is unfortunate as it is one of the numerous things the film critiques. The alt-right rejection of social progress, the “manosphere”, and political action through trolling all seem to take their cue from this film (or the online newsgroups which sprang up contemporaneously). Nonetheless, as an analysis and dramatisation of 1990s alienation, Fight Club remains extremely pertinent.

Like Josef K and Travis Bickle, The Narrator is a man alone in the city. He has no friends at all, and his work colleagues he views with contempt. He has the comforts of the young urban professional: “I would flip through catalogues and wonder, ‘What kind of dining set defines me as a person?’ We used to read pornography. Now it was the Horchow Collection.” But this merely highlights his emptiness. The Narrator’s encounter with Tyler Durden marks the moment when alienation takes form and the market’s language of self-improvement mutates into self-destruction. Tyler is not so much a friend as a psychic projection - the embodiment of the aggression and freedom the Narrator cannot live out in his IKEA-catalogue life.” Tyler’s gospel of pain and authenticity (“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything”) parodies the era’s self-help rhetoric - the cult of “empowerment” and “reinvention” that saturated 1990s management culture (and become warped into manosphere rhetoric). The men in Fight Club are not rebelling against capitalism but performing its latest upgrade: the therapeutic turn, where suffering becomes a form of brand renewal. The basement brawls, with their ritualised violence, resemble corporate bonding exercises stripped of HR oversight - a desperate attempt to rediscover meaning through the body once the spirit has been captured by commerce. Even Durden’s soap becomes rebellion literally rendered into consumable luxury (“selling their own fat asses back to them”). As a metaphor for 1990s capitalism, it is rarely bettered.

But the film’s genius lies in showing that this rebellion was always compromised. There is no escape. Tyler’s anti-consumer revolution quickly becomes a franchise; his devotees recite absurd slogans (“His name was Robert Paulson!”) and wear uniforms. Project Mayhem, ostensibly a war on capitalism, reproduces its hierarchies and command structures. What begins as an attempt to escape the system ends as its mirror image. In this sense, Fight Club is not an incitement to toxic masculinity but its autopsy - a portrait of men so thoroughly colonised by late capitalism that the only language left to them is self-annihilation. “We are the middle children of history, man,” Durden says. But they can conceive no way to grow up, so all they can do is throw their toys out of the pram.

Growing up is not just about accepting responsibility but entering into the world of symbolic order - the realm of language, law, and interdependence. (Has this ever been more beautifully outlined than at the end of The Jungle Book?) If Fight Club depicts the adolescent’s violent refusal of adulthood, American Beauty traces the same crisis from the opposite end - the middle-aged man’s belated attempt to recapture the freedom he never truly had.

IV. American Beauty - Humbert Learns

I do not propose to discuss Kevin Spacey’s sexual misconduct allegations and trial. I believe that art is not about its creators but exists as its own, a kind of Platonic essence or ideal. We must free art from its biography. The birth of the text is the death of the author, as Roland Barthes once said.

That aside, the movie is obviously about inappropriate sexual temptations as much as the desire to live freely. Lester Burnham is a descendant of Humbert Humbert from Lolita, another man in thrall to sexual fantasies and delusions. Like Humbert, he mistakes lust for liberation. Like Humbert, the object of his lust is a young girl who represents his own youth. But where Humbert gives in to his fantasies and inadvertently destroys himself, his Lolita Dolores, and her mother, American Beauty shows how Burnham wrestles with the sirens of youth, beauty, nostalgia, and freedom, yielding at some points but ultimately rejecting them. Lester Burnham is an anagram of Humbert learns.

Lester’s rebellion is a deeply compromised mid-life crisis. It depends on the very privileges he pretends he is rejecting. His revolt is not existential but aesthetic, a performance of authenticity funded by a severance package. He buys a sports car, smokes pot (“Things have changed since 1973!”), quits his job to flip burgers so that he can have “the least amount of responsibility possible”, and lifts weights in the garage. They are all gestures of adolescent fantasy masquerading as freedom. What he calls liberation is simply adolescent consumption rebranded as self-discovery. (“1970 Pontiac Firebird. The car I’ve always wanted and now I have it. I rule!”) Like the men in Fight Club, Lester mistakes regression for renewal. His rebellion is sanctioned because it flatters the very system he resents, by turning his defiance into a marketable narrative of “following your dreams”.

The film’s genius lies in how gently it exposes this delusion. The camera aestheticises Lester’s awakening just enough for us to feel its attractions, then quietly withdraws to reveal its emptiness. His fantasies of Angela are soft-lit, slow-motion, idealised to the point of absurdity: beauty as a narcotic. When he finally rejects her advances, it is less a moral triumph than an awakening to reality: the realisation that she is not a goddess but a frightened child, and that his own yearning is not for her but for the self he once was. That moment of understanding redeems him, briefly, from the culture of juvenile appetites that created him. His death, immediately following, seals the film’s structure: an American King Lear, who gains wisdom only as the curtain falls.

But what enables the film to be misread is that it is marketed as the very fantasy it reveals as fraudulent. The DVD cover with the girl’s naked stomach, the red rose between her fingers, shows a characteristic Hollywood equivocality: the art dramatises the fraudulence of sexual illusion even as the industry profits from it. American Beauty invites us to pity Lester’s delusion while packaging it for our own consumption. This double bind is the essence of late capitalism: the system thrives by aestheticising its own critique. You can’t buck the market. Or escape it.

If American Beauty turns captivity into a suburban cell, The Matrix literalises it. It takes the metaphor of ideological imprisonment and turns it into a stunning epistemological architecture. Neo’s awakening is the same impulse as Lester’s and the Narrator’s - to pierce the veil, to find authenticity beyond simulation - but here the simulation is total. The cubicle becomes the cell; the office tower, a hive; the city, a code. The difference is scale. Fight Club and American Beauty show men dimly aware that their lives are constructions, packages shaped by commerce; The Matrix imagines a world where construction itself is all there is.

V. The Desert of the Real

If American Beauty exposes the way fantasy and critique can coexist within the same image, The Matrix literalises that paradox. Its central conceit of reality as a simulation is drawn directly from Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, a copy of which appears in Neo’s apartment, hollowed out to conceal his illicit software. Baudrillard, of course, would have rejected the film’s reading of his ideas. For Baudrillard, late-capitalist society has entered what he calls hyperreality - a state where signs no longer point to any underlying truth but only to other signs. The copy precedes the original; Disneyland, CNN, and Hollywood all manufacture the feeling of reality rather than reality itself. What matters is not the event but its image. In that sense, the film’s premise of an authentic world hidden beneath illusion misunderstands the problem: there is no “real world” left to return to, only simulations nested within simulations. The very idea of escape becomes another product of the system’s imagination. This is why Baudrillard would have found The Matrix’s reading of his work naïve.

Yet it is precisely this misunderstanding that makes the film so resonant. It transforms the impossibility of escape into a spectacle of awakening. This may be why the film has endured. “Red-pilling” has entered the cultural lexicon as shorthand for political awakening, albeit usually in conspiratorial subcultures like incel forums, anti-woke echo chambers, and MAGA delusionists. That the film was written and directed by the Wachowskis, both of whom later came out as trans women, adds a further layer of irony: its central metaphor of “awakening” has an undeniable trans resonance. The Matrix is, in this sense, both an allegory of gender dysphoria and the longing to be reborn through consumption.

But what The Matrix ultimately dramatises is the impossibility of genuine escape. Neo’s rebellion culminates not in freedom but in a spectacular escalation of the system’s own aesthetics. The film’s final half hour is amplified into sheer spectacle, with bullet-time, CGI explosions and green code. Like the corporate revolution of Fight Club or Lester’s self-reinvention in American Beauty, Neo’s awakening is absorbed into the logic of the marketplace. The film can imagine transcendence only through visual excess. Its success as a blockbuster confirms the impossibility it mourns: there is no symbolic order outside consumption. The desert of the real turns out to be another movie set. The irony is that The Matrix begins as prophecy, but ends as just another product demonstration. (The flip phones used in the movie were very popular for a while. As were the black leather jackets, until Columbine).

VI. Conclusion — No Alternative, Only Awakening

Across these three films, late 90s dreams of freedom collapse into the same revelation: there is no outside. American Beauty, Fight Club, and The Matrix each begin with the fantasy of escape, only to reveal the impossibility of transcendence within a totalising system. They are ultimately variations on Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism: rebellion as product line, liberation as lifestyle choice, awakening as cinematic spectacle. The desire to break free only proves how thoroughly the mind has been colonised.

Each film translates the yearning for authenticity into a new form of consumption. The very idea of freedom has been branded, repackaged, and resold. Baudrillard warned that in a culture of simulation, every revolution risks becoming just another franchise. By 1999, Hollywood had made that prophecy literal. The dream of exit was now (as it always was) box-office material.

Despite that, these films remain invaluable documents of their moment. They register, almost involuntarily, the exhaustion of the twentieth century’s great narratives - progress, individuality, transcendence - and the birth of something colder and more permanent: a capitalism that no longer promises transcendence, only endurance. Their protagonists are not revolutionaries but dreamers trapped within the dream, dimly aware that awakening itself has become part of the program. So now, a quarter of a century later, we can look back, and with the right kind of eyes, see that their dreams look less like follies than elegies. They are the last sentient gasps of artistic and economic systems moving relentlessly towards the post-human.