IDK I think it's important to acknowledge a lot of these types of movies also significantly glamorize the protagonist. It's not typical that the film is 100% critical of the character and dumdums just completely misunderstand it, usually they're also given cool lines, cool music underscores their actions, cool aesthetics, they're shot in flattering ways, played by beautiful movie stars, etc.
definitely worth mentioning. fight club succumbs to this to the point of just being really bad satire. you gotta think if that many people missed the point it might be a problem with the nature of the work. still love american psycho though.
Honestly just the music probably makes all the difference. Is the protagonist walking down the hall getting upbeat 80s music? They're doing a cool thing, positive vibes. Some unsettling music, or unexpected silence? Uh-oh, this is bad. What a bsd guy.
nightcrawler was a fun example of a creepy guy doing creepy stuff creepily while upbeat inspirational music plays. almost feels like a parody of both this type of movie guy as well as bootstraps type movies
The tragedy of these movies is they are so good at reflecting back a critique of your existing social condition, a person can mistake that reflection as the only interpretation. I'll add The Matrix to this list too.
ummmm, he's literally the protagonist of the film which means he's the good guy. Like, hol'up isn't the point of every movie that the protagonist is a cool person, and the audience should act exactly like them to be cool too?
In the meme it's how the characters in these sorts of stories have become so alienated by capital that they need to resort to extreme violence to change their social relations (usually in a self-destructive way, because revolution is precluded by the material conditions in the imperial core in these narratives).
I don't read books that often, but I recently picked up book about quitting smoking that I saw mentioned by some guy on lemmy. I read it through in 11 hours straight no sleep and the effect was immediate, I quit smoking lmao. Idk what magic was that but now I fucking love books 🤩
Satire is popular under capitalism because it reinforces the system. The idea that we need to abstract our critiques instead of making them explicit serves no one but the ruling class.