@mechajutaro said:

The 20th Century gave us new kinds of (fictional) heroes.

These "new" heroes weren't so new. Open The Bible and read the stories of Abraham, The Judges, Moses, And David. The protagonists of Greek mythology, Norse myth, The Arabian Nights, Arthurian Legend, The Samurai Epics, etc etc were no less capable of questionable morality that the anti-heroes of 20th century-modern neonoir

There's truth in this. It does require the qualification however that what we today interpret as negative qualities or questionable morality might not have been the case when those stories were written. The Greeks and Israelites for example put great value on guile, and this sort of trickery doesn't resonate well with most of Western tradition. The Nobel laureate Peter Medawar famously forbade his children to read the Old Testament on account of its shocking values. I'm not sure we need to entertain the folk tales of barbarians here either.

So the anti hero might not have been new, but it was certainly a reversal or alteration of a very long Western literary tradition.

As for your comments on Peaky Blinders, while all fiction is a kind of deliberate lying; messing around with the truth of historical events is artistically and intellectually bankrupt. It's also lazy, because it takes ready made real characters audiences are more or less familiar with and then puts them into novel contexts. By analogy, an artist might paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa and claim this as new art. But not only is the creative addition minimal, it also insults what came before.

@mechajutaro said:

The Greeks and Israelites for example put great value on guile, and this sort of trickery doesn't resonate well with most of Western tradition.

Fairly certain that Ancient Greece is counted among the "Western tradition", as badly as this might stick in the craw of modern Greeks. If memory serves correctly, Odysseus suffers for his trickery of the cyclops, and David ultimately pays a pretty heavy price for much of his double-dealing. It doesn't resonate well with the Western tradition, in that we often depict such things as morally questionable and hazardous to the health of those who engage in them, it's true. But going back to your prior point, regarding anti-heroes: The evidence, when viewed in it's totality, would suggest that they've been with us long before the 20th century and cinema. If anything, the presence of such characters in movies from the 1920s forward is a CONTINUATION of a very long tradition, not a reversal

I'm not sure we need to entertain the folk tales of barbarians here either

You've embraced the notion of "toxic masculinity" as being a real thing, rather than the sort academic flakiness satirized by everyone from Nabokov to Mad Magazine, yet describe Norse Mythology, The Arabian Nights, and the samurai epics of Japan as the work of barbarians.... It would seem that us purveyors of toxic masculinity aren't the only ones guilty of harboring unconscious racism

My point overall is to stress the continuities in the Western tradition. Whether the anti hero of the late 20th century is an extension or a revisiting of particular themes, is neither here nor there. I was stressing that despite those changes certain particulars remained constant. Particulars not met in Fight Club.

The exclusion of cultural references outside of the Western tradition isn't 'racism'. It is merely stating the obvious: that these traditions are separate and distinct. It is also a question of ownership. It's not my place to say what Norse or Native American folks tales mean, or to deconstruct them. They are not a part of my culture, nor the culture depicted in Fight Club.

My reference to 'barbarian' wasn't meant to be diminutive. It was meant to point to the obvious fact that some of the references you made were to non literary cultures. I reject completely the idea that a reference to a culture that doesn't even have writing has some bearing on literary analysis in the 21st Century. If an Amazon tribe has an oral legend about a heroic ancestor who ate the babies of the tribe's enemies it is neither my place to comment on that, nor do I need to consider it for even a second in the current discourse.