Question for Discussion: Do you agree with the
Director, David Fincher that Fight Club is a
comedy? Why do so many of its fans take the
"fight clubs" so seriously?
Can Fight Club be
both a comedy and about paranoia, nihilism, and
despair?
Film: Fight Club (1999)
Reading: Giroux, "Fight Club and the Politics of Masculine
Violence"
; "Menace to Society: Interview with David Fincher" ; Smith, "
Interview with David Fincher, Fight Club Director" ; Ebert, "Review of Fight Club" ; O'Hehir, "Review of Fight Club" ; Edelstein, "Boys do Bleed: Review of Fight Club"
Critical Reviews of Fight Club
Fight Club Websites
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Fight Club mirrors the larger violence in the culture
in the 1990s: The culture is facinated with violence.
See MTV: Movies of the 1990s and Natural Born Killers.
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You could compare the characters in Silence of the Lamb, Natural Born Killers, Seven, Fight Club, and American Beauty. There is this strange connection
between impotence, frustration, and violence.
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I haven't seen Fight Club in a while now, but I think this is wrong. What's interesting about it is that it's a rare explicitly anti-individualist work. "Self-improvement is masturbation," remarks Tyler after looking at a Calvin Klein ad (quotes here ), while Jack earlier observes that he "had become a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct." The general idea of this is that "individualism" is a marketing ploy, designed to convince people to buy things like "the clever Njurunda coffee tables in the shape of a lime green ying and an orange yang" in order to express and create their identities.
The mere observation that individuality can be coopted by the corporate machine isn't unique -- see, e.g., Commodify Your Dissent -- but Fight Club takes this in an unusual direction. Rather then exhorting people to abjure fake, commercialized individuality in favor of a higher, truer individualism it exhorts people to abandon individualism. While doing something or other, the members of Project Mayhem are told: "You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake." Rather, "You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else." The ever-repeated theme is that what you need to do is not find yourself, but face The Truth: "This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time." Or, to put it another way, "First, you have to know that someday, you are going to die."
Matthew Iglesias on Fight Club
"Menace to Society: Interview with David Fincher"
Fincher wants you to know that Fight Club is meant to be a comedy. Yes, Ed Norton plays a jaded yuppie, a "misery vampire" who feeds his boredom by posing as a victim of several potientially fatal ailments and leeching off the pain and suffering to be found in their support groups. Yes, Brad Pitt plays the sado-masochistic Tyler Durden, a kind of Vampire Lestat figure who encourages Norton to believe that self-destruction is better than self-improvement. Yes, they go on to form the Fight Club of the title, an underground bare-knuckle boxing society where men gather by night to beat each other to a bloody pulp. And yes, it ends with Tyler taking it all too far, starting his own underground anarchist group ('Project Mayhem') and waging a surreal, dangerous war on corporate America.
But remember: this is a a comedy. True, it's savage, uncompromising and black as night, but it's a comedy all the same. "I want people to understand that they should laugh," explains Fincher. "We're not saying, 'Okay, everybody you're done seeing the movie - get out in the parking lot and start fighting."
"Sniffing the potential for media disaster, director David Fincher seized the high ground and declared that what made the bloodshed in "Fight Club" different from that in, say, "Blade," was this: "'Fight Club' puts violence in a context that is moral." He testified that he'd even experimented with deleting some of the violence, but found that it made the remaining graphic episodes seem more vicious. Having preempted all the ethical arguments against it, Fincher went on to say that he saw the film as the journey of the narrator to maturity, and that he hoped it would appeal to people who are not doing what they want to do and are tired of letting others define them. "
Interview with David Fincher
Smith, " Interview with David Fincher, Fight Club Director"
Adapted from Chuck Palaniuk's novel by Jim Uhls, Fight Club is ostensibly an anti-New Age satire on both the dehumanizing effects of corporate/consumer culture and the absurd excesses of the men's movement. Its main character is a twentysomething wage slave (Edward Norton) whose voiceover discloses a sardonic, dissenting, but impotent interior life beneath his subdued exterior conformity. Finding relief from chronic insomnia by attending multiple self-help group meetings under false pretenses, he leads a pallid, vampiric half-life, feeding vicariously on the catharsis and suffering of others. He reluctantly shares his perverse addiction with Marla, a despised fellow misery "tourist" (Helena Bonham Carter, whose damaged-goods-with-attitude turn is something of a revelation). In the course of his travels as a "recall coordinator" for a major car maufacturer (a job that deeply implicates him in the casual cynicism and corruption of corporate America), this unnamed protagonist encounters and falls in with an elusive, slightly outrageous trickster called Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt).
For all his ironic distance, the non-conformism of Norton's character pales in comparison. Durden, with his outlandish self-presentation and ersatz-Nietzchean pronouncements, is everything our narrator isn't. He answers to nobody, sees through the hypocrisies and agreed deceptions of modern life, given to casually mentioning, say, the recipe for making nitroglycerin out of soap, and in his part-time job as a movie projectionist amuses himself by splicing single frames of pornography into family movies. In his best work to date, Pitt, who's always good when he takes risks as an actor, relishes every juicy moment.
Fight Club belongs to a distinct moment of both dread and rupture in American mainstream cinema, also manifested in The Matrix and traceable at least as far back as Verhoeven's Starship Troopers . The acceleration and dissolution potentially ushered in by digital cinema are only a partial manifestation of this. There's a kind of dissociative hyperrealism operating in Fincher's film, and a mocking sense of flux and liminality in its attitudes and values both formally and conceptually. Its recourse to evident digital imagery has less to do with expanding the boundaries of what can be visualized than with a derangement of or insolence toward cinematic codes and conventions concerning authenticity and the narrative representation of space and time. (In an early, defining scene, Fincher's protagonist, ironically contemplating his consumerist lifestyle, moves through his condo as it transforms around him into a living Ikea catalog with prices floating in space.)
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What did you set out to do with this film?
I read the book and thought, How do you make a movie out of this? It seemed kind of a coming of age for people who are coming of age in their 30s instead of in their late teens or early 20s. In our society, kids are much more sophisticated at an earlier age and much less emotionally capable at a later age. Those two things are sort of moving against each other.
I don't know if it's Buddhism, but there's the idea that on the path to enlightenment you have to kill your parents, your god, and your teacher. So the story begins at the moment when the Edward Norton character is 29 years old. He's tried to do everything he was taught to do, tried to fit into the world by becoming the thing that he isn't. He's been told, "If you do this, get an education, get a good job, be responsible, present yourself in a certain way, your furniture and your car and your clothes, you'll find happiness." And he hasn't. And so the movie introduces him at the point when he's killed off his parents and he realizes that they're wrong. But he's still caught up, trapped in this world he's created for himself. And then he meets Tyler Durden, and they fly in the face of God - they do all these things that they're not supposed to do, all the things that you do in your 20s when you're no longer being watched over by your parents, and end up being, in hindsight, very dangerous. And then finally, he has to kill off this teacher, Tyler Durden. So the movie is really about that process of maturing.
Is the narrator a kind of everyman?
Yeah, definitely. Every young man. Again, The Graduate is a good parallel. It was talking about that moment in time when you have this world of possibilities, all these expectations, and you don't know who it is you're supposed to be. And you choose this one path, Mrs. Robinson, and it turns out to be bleak, but it's part of your initiation, your trial by fire. And then, by choosing the wrong path, you find your way onto the right path, but you've created this mess. Fight Club is the Nineties inverse of that: a guy who does not have a world of possibilities in front of him, he had no possibilities, he literally cannot imagine a way to change his life.
Like The Graduate it's also a satire.
A stylized version of our Ikea present. It is talking about very simple concepts. We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created.
I HAVE TO say I didn't see the twist coming.
.....It's not about tricking you, it's a metaphor, it's not about a real guy who really blows up buildings, it's about a guy who's led to feel this might be the answer based on all the confusion and rage that he's suffered and it's from that frustration and bottled rage that he creates Tyler. And he goes through a natural process of experimenting with notions that are complicated and have moral and ethical implications that the Nietzchean ubermensch doesn't have to answer to. That's why Nietzsche's really great with college freshman males, and unfortunately doesn't have much to say to somebody in their early thirties or early forties. And that's the conflict at the end - you have Tyler Durden, who is everything you would want to be, except real and empathetic. He's not living in our world, he's not governed by the same forces, he is an ideal. And he can deal with the concepts of our lives in an idealistic fashion, but it doesn't have anything to do with the compromises of real life as modern man knows it. Which is: You're not really necessary to a lot of what's going on. It's built, it just needs to run now.
O'Hehir, "Review of Fight Club"
You certainly can't say that Fincher or screenwriter Jim Uhls (who adapted Chuck Palahniuk's acclaimed novel) hold back on the film's psychological subtext -- "Fight Club" opens with our nameless narrator (Edward Norton) tied to a chair with Tyler's, uh, gun in his mouth. The narrator then begins to tell us how he and the willfully destructive Tyler wound up in this compromising position. Maybe 1999 is the year of the extended voice-over flashback -- like "American Beauty," "Fight Club" is narrated by a man in extremis, whose true fate is not revealed until the end of the movie. There are other similarities between "American Beauty's" Lester Burnham and the narrator of "Fight Club" -- both are white-collar ass-kissers who rebel against the emasculating conformity of their lives as minor cogs in the great engine of consumption. Throw in journalist Susan Faludi's new book about men, and it looks like the late-'90s crisis of masculinity has arrived in pop culture with a vengeance.
Like Fincher's highly influential "Seven," "Fight Club" is set in a nameless, unidentifiable American city -- there are some clues suggesting it may be Philadelphia or Wilmington, Del., -- that owes more to film noir, "Blade Runner" and the urban decay of the early '80s than to contemporary reality. Fincher's version of America is a dream world without suburbs, shopping malls, real women (for all Bonham Carter's actorly ability, Marla is a cartoon slut) or more than a handful of dark-skinned men. "Fight Club" is a distinctively dense and often hilarious film, but in the end it's nonsense. Tyler's scheme to liberate American manhood by destroying the credit-card companies -- although it's certainly not a bad idea -- is no more legitimate than the spectacle of the gym-buff Pitt critiquing the Tommy Hilfiger model of masculinity. There's a rich and familiar odor emanating from this movie, but it's not the smell of soap.
"The belief that there is no universal truth or underlying reality that undergirds moral values; that ultimately existence is meaningless.
As a doctrine of negation,
nihilism maintains that religious and moral truths are entirely irrational. It then follows, in the words of Ivan, from Dostoyevski's The Brothers Karamazov, "If God does not exist, then everything is permitted. ...
Nihillism can also be described as a revolutionary doctrine that advocates destruction of the social system for its own sake"
In her review, Janet Maslin argues that Fight Club warns against the dangers of male violence and nihilism:
Like Kevin Smith's ''Dogma,'' ''Fight Club'' sounds offensive from afar. If watched sufficiently mindlessly, it might be mistaken for a dangerous endorsement of totalitarian tactics and super-violent nihilism in an all-out assault on society. But this is a much less gruesome film than ''Seven'' and a notably more serious one. It means to explore the lure of violence in an even more dangerously regimented, dehumanized culture. That's a hard thing to illustrate this powerfully without, so to speak, stepping on a few toes.
Interview with Chuck Palahniuk
DC: You've previously said that you're not a nihilist and that your works are misinterpreted as nihilist. Why do you think that is, and do you think “Rant” will be received the same way?
CP: It will probably be received the same way, but my fallback is always, if you don't believe what other folks believe, if you don't buy into their value system, then they just write you off by calling you a nihilist. They don't care what you believe in—it's easy for them to say you don't believe in anything. I think that's why I get labeled a nihilist. But in fact, I'm totally a romantic. My books are about people destroying their own isolation and creating community. The nihilist label has kind of stuck now, 10 books, so I think it'll continue to be thrown out there. In Europe, instead of a nihilist they call you a fascist. It's more like a reflex that people really have very little understanding of. They just say it automatically.
Sragow, It Just Sort of Clicked: Review of Fight Club
"But after Tyler realizes what fighting can do for you, and that going back to a sterile, consumer-driven society is purposeless, he decides that society has to be dismantled, and he changes course. Basically, when Tyler forms an army to generate whatever the verb for anarchy is, he and the narrator separate.
"Everything happens in slow increments. But at one point the narrator says, This has gone too far. When you go out and blow up a building, you're not doing it in agreement with the people who own the building. Even if care is taken that no one is in the building, it's a destructive act to civilization as we know it. One way this might work for an audience, is: If you come a certain distance with Tyler, and continue to follow his logic, you realize at a certain point that he's going to have to tear everything down -- and you may not be ready to tear everything down. What should be done? What is the answer? In the end, the movie leaves the questions in the air."
Review by Michael Sragow
Ebert, "Review of Fight Club"
"Fight Club " is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since " Death Wish ," a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up.
Sometimes, for variety, they beat up themselves. It's macho porn -- the sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights. Women, who have had a lifetime of practice at dealing with little-boy posturing, will instinctively see through it; men may get off on the testosterone rush."
Roger Ebert
"Of course, " Fight Club " itself does not advocate Durden's philosophy. It is a warning against it, I guess; one critic I like says it makes "a telling point about the bestial nature of man and what can happen when the numbing effects of day-to-day drudgery cause people to go a little crazy." I think it's the numbing effects of movies like this that cause people go to a little crazy. Although sophisticates will be able to rationalize the movie as an argument against the behavior it shows, my guess is that audience will like the behavior but not the argument ."
Roger Ebert
Fight Club is silly stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. The film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth. How'd he get into this pickle? He's going to tell you, breezily, and the director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently. Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have a mouthful of blood.
The novel, the first by Chuck Palahniuk (the surname sounds like Eskimo for "palooka"--which somehow fits), walks a line between the straight and ironic--it isn't always clear if its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the ravings of a delusional mama's boy. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the assembled fighters that they are the "middle children of history" with "no purpose and no place"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis (a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. "We are a generation of men raised by women," Tyler announces, and adds, "If our fathers bail, what does that tell you about God?" (I give up: What?)
Maslin, Review of Fight Club
Of the two current films in which buttoned-down businessmen rebel against middle-class notions of masculinity, David Fincher's savage ''Fight Club'' is by far the more visionary and disturbing. Where ''American Beauty'' hinges on the subversive allure of a rose-covered blond cheerleader, Mr. Fincher has something a good deal tougher in mind. The director of ''Seven'' and ''The Game'' for the first time finds subject matter audacious enough to suit his lightning-fast visual sophistication, and puts that style to stunningly effective use. Lurid sensationalism and computer gamesmanship left this filmmaker's earlier work looking hollow and manipulative. But the sardonic, testosterone-fueled science fiction of ''Fight Club'' touches a raw nerve.
''Fight Club'' watches this form of escapism morph into something much more dangerous. Tyler somehow builds a bridge from the anti-materialist rhetoric of the 1960's (''It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything'') into the kind of paramilitary dream project that Ayn Rand might have admired. The group's rigorous training and subversive agenda are as deeply disturbing to Mr. Norton's mild-mannered character as Tyler's original wild streak was thrilling. But even when acts of terrorism are in the offing, he can't seem to tear himself away.
Like Kevin Smith's ''Dogma,'' ''Fight Club'' sounds offensive from afar. If watched sufficiently mindlessly, it might be mistaken for a dangerous endorsement of totalitarian tactics and super-violent nihilism in an all-out assault on society. But this is a much less gruesome film than ''Seven'' and a notably more serious one. It means to explore the lure of violence in an even more dangerously regimented, dehumanized culture. That's a hard thing to illustrate this powerfully without, so to speak, stepping on a few toes.
Giroux, "Fight Club and the Politics of Masculine Violence"
Totalitarianism no longer breeds a contempt for the virtues of individualism, all things private, and the dynamics of self-interest. On the contrary, totalitarianism now resides in a thorough dislike for all things social, public, and collective. Under the growing influence of the politics, ideology, and culture of neo-liberalism, "the individual has been set free to construe her or his own fears, to baptize them with privately chosen names and to come with them on her or his own." 2 Agency has now been privatized and personal liberty atomized and removed from broader considerations about the ethical and political responsibility of citizens to defend those vital institutions that expand the rights and services central to a meaningful democracy. Stripped of its political possibilities and social underpinnings, freedom finds few opportunities for translating private worries into public concerns or individual discontent into collective struggle. Utopia is now conjured up as the privatized space of the shopping mall, intellectual effort is reduced to an instrument of the entrepreneurial self, and social visions are dismissed as hopelessly out of date. Public space is portrayed exclusively as an investment opportunity, and the public good increasingly becomes a call for public order. As the public sphere is consistently removed from social consideration and notions of the public good are replaced by an utterly privatized model of citizenship and the good life, the collapse of public imagination and a vibrant political culture is celebrated by neo-liberal warriors rather than perceived as a dangerous state of affairs that Americans should be both contemptuous of and ashamed to support. 3
Within the discourse of neo-liberalism, issues regarding persistent poverty, inadequate health care, racial apartheid in the inner cities, and the growing inequalities between the rich and the poor have been either removed from the inventory of public discourse and public policy or factored into talk show spectacles that highlight private woes bearing little relationship either to public life or to potential remedies that demand collective action. Within this growing marketization and privatization of everyday life, democratic principles are either scorned as holdovers of an outmoded sixties radicalism or equated entirely with the imperatives of capitalism. 4 As Robert W. McChesney points out, Milton Friedman, the reigning guru of neoliberalism, both perfectly captures and legitimates this sentiment in Capitalism and Freedom arguing unabashedly that "because profit-making is the essence of democracy, any government that pursues antimarket policies is being antidemocratic, no matter how much informed popular support they might enjoy. Therefore it is best to restrict governments to the job of protecting private property and enforcing contracts, and to limit political debate to minor issues." 5 Within neo-liberal discourse, freedom is negatively reduced to the freedom from government restraint and the rights of citizenship translate into the freedom to consume as one chooses.
Ostensibly, Fight Club appears to offer a critique of late capitalist society and the misfortunes it generates out of its obsessive concern with profits, consumption, and the commercial values that underline its market driven ethos. But Fight Club is less interested in attacking the broader material relations of power and strategies of domination and exploitation associated with neo-liberal capitalism than it is in rebelling against a consumerist culture that dissolves the bonds of male sociality and puts into place an enervating notion of male identity and agency.
Fight Club, along with films such as American Beauty, inaugurates a new subgenre of cult-film that combines a fascination with the spectacle of violence, enlivened through tired narratives about the crisis of masculinity, along with a superficial gesture toward social critique designed to offer the tease of a serious independent/art film. While appearing to address important social issues, these films end up reproducing the very problems they attempt to address. Rather than turning a critical light on crucial social problems, such films often trivialize them within a stylized aesthetics that revels in irony, cynicism, and excessive violence. Violence in these films is reduced to acts of senseless brutality, pathology, and an indifference to human suffering.
A rampant culture of consumption, coupled with a loss of manufacturing and middle-management jobs presents white males with an identity crisis of unparalleled proportions. The male hero of the modern day work force is no longer defined in the image of the tightly hewn worker using his body and labor to create the necessities for everyday life. The new workforce hero is now modeled on the image of the young computer whiz yuppie who defines his life and goals around hot start-up e-commerce companies, day trading and other get rich before I'm twenty-one schemes as well as the conspicuous consumption of expensive products. Moreover, as white, heterosexual working-class and middle-class men face a life of increasing uncertainty and insecurity, they no longer have easy access to those communities in which they can inhabit a form of masculinity that defines itself in opposition to femininity. In simple terms, the new millennium offers white, heterosexual men nothing less than a life in which ennui and domestication define their everyday existence.
David Fincher's 1999 film, Fight Club , based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, attempts to critically engage the boredom, shallowness, and emptiness of a stifling consumer culture, redefine what it might mean for men to resist compromising their masculinity for the sofa or cappuccino maker that ‘speaks them', and explore the possibilities for creating a sense of community in which men can reclaim their virility and power. The film opens with an inside shot of Jack's (played by Edward Norton) brain, tracking a surge of adrenalin that quickly finds an opening in Jack's mouth and then exits up the barrel of a gun. Jack then proceeds to lead the audience into the nature of his predicament and in doing so narrates his journey out of corporate America and his evolving relationship with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who functions as Jack's alter-ego and significant other. The first section of the film functions primarily as a critique of contemporary consumerism and how corporate culture positions men in jobs and lifestyles that are both an affront to their manhood and male sociality, leaving them to seek refuge in communities of self help/support--portrayed as the dreaded cult of victimhood–which only accentuates the contemporary crisis of masculinity. As the film unfolds, Jack is portrayed as a neo-liberal Everyman–an emasculated, repressed corporate drone whose life is simply an extension of a reified and commodified culture.
When Jack returns home, he finds that his apartment has been mysteriously blown to bits. He calls Tyler who meets him at a local bar and tells him that things could be worse: "a woman could cut of your penis while you are sleeping and toss it out the window of a moving car." Tyler then launches into a five minute cliche ridden tirade against the pitfalls of bourgeois life, mixing critique with elements of his own philosophical ramblings about the fall of masculinity. He tells Jack that issues such as crime and poverty don't trouble him. According to Tyler, the real problem men confront is "celebrity magazines, television with five hundred channels, some guys name on my underwear, Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra." And as for the IKEA consumer hype of an idyllic domesticated existence, Tyler indignantly tells Jack "Things you own end up owning you....Fuck Martha Stewart....Fuck off with your sofa units....stop being perfect. Let's evolve."
." For Tyler, physical violence becomes the necessary foundation for masculinity and collective terrorism the basis for politics itself. In other words, the only way Tyler's followers can become agents in a society that has deadened them is to get in touch with the primal instincts for competition and violence, and the only way their masculine identity can be reclaimed is through the literal destruction of their present selves--beating each other senseless-- and their only recourse to community is to collectively engage in acts of militiainspired terrorism aimed at corporate strongholds.
. And Tyler ups the stakes of Fight Club by turning it into Project Mayhem, a nation wide organization of terrorists thugs whose aim is to wage war against the rich and powerful by defacing corporate subsidized art, yuppie coffee bars, and blowing up credit-card companies. Here, the line between giving pain and risking death as part of the redeeming power of "masculine recovery" and the performance of barbaric fantasies worthy of the most ruthless right wing militia movements becomes blurred. Before long one of Operation Mayhem's terrorist forays is botched and one of their members is killed by the police. The victim is Bob, the oversized testicular cancer survivor who has recently reaffirmed his own manliness by joining Fight Club. Jack is shocked by the killing, which in turn enables him to recognize that Tyler has become a demagogue and that Fight Club has evolved into a fascist para-military group more dangerous than the social order it has set out to destroy.
As I have attempted to demonstrate, central to Fight Club is the interrelated critique of late capitalism and the politics of masculinity. The central protagonists, Jack and Tyler, represent two opposing registers that link consumerism and masculinity. Jack is representative of a generation of men condemned to corporate peonage whose emotional lives and investments are mediated through the allure of commodities and goods. No longer a producer of goods, Jack exemplifies a form of domesticated masculinity – passive, alienated, and without ambition. On the other hand, Tyler represents an embodied masculinity that refuses the seductions of consumerism, while fetishizing forms production-- from soaps to explosives--the ultimate negative expression of which is chaos and destruction.. Tyler represents the magnetism of the isolated, dauntless anti-hero whose public appeal is based on the attractions of the cult-personality rather than on the strengths of an articulated, democratic notion of political reform. Politics for Tyler is about doing, not thinking. As the embodiment of authoritarian masculinity and hyper-individualism, Tyler cannot imagine a politics that connects to democratic movements, and is less a symbol of vision and leadership for the next millennium than a holdover of early-twentieth century fascism.
Fight Club largely ignores issues surrounding the break up of labor unions, the slashing of the U.S. workforce, extensive plant closings, downsizing, outsourcing, the elimination of the welfare state, the attack on people of color, and the growing disparities between the rich and the poor. All of these issues get factored out of Fight Club's analysis of consumerism and capitalist exploitation. Hence, it comes as no surprise that class as a critical category is non-existent in this film. When working class people do appear, they are represented primarily as brown shirts, part of the non-thinking herd looking for an opportunity to release their tensions and repressed masculine rage through forms of terrorist violence and self-abuse. Or they appear as people who willingly take up jobs that are dehumanizing, unskilled, and alienating. There is one particularly revealing scene in Fight Club that brings this message home while simultaneously signaling a crucial element of the film's politics. At one point in the story, Tyler takes Jack into a convenience store. He pulls out a gun and forces the young Indian clerk to get on his knees. Putting the gun to the clerk's head, Tyler tells him he is going to die. As a kind of parting gesture, he then asks Raymond, the clerk, what he really wanted to be in life. A vetinarian, Raymond replies, but he had to drop out of school for lack of money. Tyler tells him that if he isn't on his way to becoming a vetinarian in six weeks he is going to come back and kill him. He then lets Raymond go and tells Jack that tomorrow morning will be the most important day in Raymond's life because he will have to address what it means to do something about his future. Choice for Tyler appears to be an exclusively individual act, a simple matter of personal will that functions outside of existing relations of power, resources, and social formations. As Homi Bhabha points out, this notion of agency "suggests that ‘free choice' is inherent in the individual [and]...is based on an unquestioned ‘egalitarianism' and a utopian notion of individualism that bears no relation to the history of the marginalized, the minoritized, the oppressed." 19
Consumerism in Fight Club is criticized primarily as an ideological force and existential experience that weakens and domesticates men, robbing them of their primary role as producers whose bodies affirm and legitimate their sense of agency and control. The importance of agency is not lost on director David Fincher, but it is restricted to a narrowly defined notion of masculinity that is as self-absorbed as it is patriarchal. 21 Fincher is less interested in fighting oppressive forms of power than he is in exploring the ways in which men yield to it. Freedom in Fight Club is not simply preoccupied with the depoliticized self, it also lacks a language for translating private troubles into public rage, and as such succumbs to the cult of immediate sensations in which freedom degenerates into collective impotence. Given Fincher's suggestion that men have no enduring qualities outside of their physicality, resistance and affirmation are primarily taken up as part of a politics of embodiment that has little concern for critical consciousness, social critique, or democratic social relations as part of a broader strategy of resistance and struggle. In Fight Club , the body is no longer the privileged space of social citizenship or political agency, but becomes "the location of violence, crime, and [aggression]."22 What changes in Fight Club is the context enabling men to assault each other, but the outside world remains the same, unaffected by the celebration of a hyper masculinity and violence that provides the only basis for solidarity. 23
. Violence in Fight Club is treated as a sport, a crucial component that lets men connect with each other through the overcoming of fear, pain, and fatigue, while reveling in the illusions of a paramilitary culture. For example, in one vivid scene, Tyler initiates Jack into the higher reaches of homoerotically charged sadism by pouring corrosive lye on his hand, watching as the skin bubbles and curls. Violence in this instance signals its crucial function in both affirming the natural "fierceness" of men and in providing them with a concrete experience that allows them to connect at some primal level. As grotesque as this act appears, Fincher does not engage it--or similar representations in the film--as expressions of pathology. 25 On the contrary, such senseless brutality becomes crucial to a form of male bonding, glorified for its cathartic and cleansing properties. 26 By maximizing the pleasures of bodies, pain, and violence, Fight Club comes dangerously close to giving violence a glamorous and fascist edge.
....Fight Club as a morally bankrupt and politically reactionary film. 30 Representations of violence, masculinity, and gender in Fight Club seem all too willing to mirror the pathology of individual and institutional violence that informs the American landscape, extending from all manner of hate crimes to the far right's celebration of paramilitary and proto fascist subcultures.
While Jack renounces Tyler's militia-like terrorism at the end of Fight Club , it appears as a meaningless gesture of resistance, as all he can do is stand by and watch as various buildings explode all around him. The message here is entirely consistent with the cynical politics that inform the film--violence is the ultimate language, referent, and state of affairs through which to understand all human events and there is no way of stopping it. This ideology becomes even more disheartening given the film's attempt to homogenize violence under the mutually determining forces of pleasure and masculine identity formation, as it strategically restricts not only our understanding of the complexity of violence, but also, as Susan Sontag has suggested in another context, "dissolves politics into pathology." 32
Jack begins his narrative by claiming that Marla is the cause of all of his problems. Tyler consistently tells Jack that men have lost their manhood because they have been feminized, they are a generation raised by women. And the critical commentary on consumerism presented throughout the film is really not a serious critique of capitalism as much as it is a criticism of the feminization and domestication of men in a society driven by relations of buying and selling. Consumerism is criticized because it is womanish stuff. Moreover, the only primary female character, Marla, appears to exist to simultaneously make men unhappy and to service their sexual needs. Marla has no identity outside of the needs of the warrior mentality, the chest-beating impulses of men who revel in patriarchy and enact all of the violence associated with such traditional, hyper-masculine stereotypes. 33 Iron John : a book about men (Reading, Mass. Addison-Wesley, 1990); For a sustained critique of this position, see James William Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994). But representations of masculinity in Fight Club do more than reinscribe forms of male identity within a warrior mentality and space of patriarchical relations. They also work to legitimate unequal relations of power and oppression while condoning "a view of masculinity predicated on the need to wage violence against all that is feminine both within and outside of their lives." 34
Given the enormous violence, misogyny, aggression, and political indifference that permeates contemporary daily life, it is crucial to understand how representations of male violence, scorn for everything that is feminine, and a proto-fascist politics in a film such as Fight Club resonate with a broader assemblage of historical and contemporary forces to reproduce rather than challenge some of the more oppressive forces in American society. Clearly, many critics of Fight Club as well as Fincher, and the film's stars appear completely indifferent to the kind of ideological work Fight Club performs in linking masculinity, violence, and politics at a historical moment when public politics is collapsing into privatized discourses and pleasures, and the crisis of masculinity is widely perceived as the most important manifestation of changing economic conditions.
Such a pedagogy would raise questions about how Fight Club , for instance, resonates with the ongoing social locations and conditions of fear, uncertainty, sexism, and political despair through which many people now live their lives. More specifically, a pedagogy of disruption would engage a film's attempts to shift the discourse of politics away from issues of justice and equality to a focus on violence and individual freedom as part of a broader neo-liberal backlash against equity, social citizenship, and human rights. Such an approach would not only critically engage the dominant ideologies of masculinity, violence, and sexism that give Fight Club so much power in the public imagination, but also work to expose the ideological contradictions and political absences that characterize the film by challenging it as symptomatic of the growing reaction against feminism, the right-wing assault on the welfare state, and the increasing use of violence to keep in check marginalized groups such as young black males who are now viewed as a threat to order and stability.
Tyler Durden : Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.
Narrator : I felt like destroying something beautiful.
Tyler Durden : You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.
Narrator : When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep... and you're never really awake.
Tyler Durden : Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
Tyler Durden : It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything.
Tyler Durden : The things you own end up owning you
Narrator : A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Business woman on plane : Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?
Narrator : You wouldn't believe.
Business woman on plane : Which car company do you work for?
Narrator : A major one
Tyler Durden : Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing.
Narrator : And then, something happened. I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.
Narrator : I am Jack's broken heart.
Narrator : Is Tyler my bad dream? Or am I Tyler's?
Tyler Durden : We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.
Narrator : Martha Stewart.
Tyler Durden : Fuck Martha Stewart. Martha's polishing the brass on the Titanic. It's all going down, man. So fuck off with your sofa units and Strine green stripe patterns.
Narrator : [ pauses ] Well, I gotta tell you: I'd be very, very careful who you talk to about that, because the person who wrote that... is dangerous.
[ Gets up from the chair ]
Narrator : [ Talking slowly ] And this button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho might just snap, and then stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers. This might be someone you've known for years. Someone very, very close to you.
Narrator : [ Voice-over ] Tyler's words coming out of my mouth.
[ Snatches the piece of paper from boss' hands ]
Narrator : [ Voice-over ] And I used to be such a nice guy.
Marla Singer : You're Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jackass!
Narrator : I flipped through catalogs and wondered: "What kind of dining set defines me as a person?"
Narrator : You're insane.
Tyler Durden : No. YOU ARE!
Tyler Durden : Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.
Marla Singer : You fuck me, then snub me. You love me,
you hate me. You show me a sensitive side, then you turn into a total asshole. Is this a pretty accurate description of our relationship, Tyler?
Narrator : It's called a "changeover." The movie goes on, and nobody in the audience has any idea.
Tyler Durden : Now why would you want to put a gun to
your head?
Narrator : Not my head, Tyler. Our head.
Narrator : Tyler's not here. Tyler went away. Tyler's gone.
Narrator : Fuck you! Fuck Fight Club! Fuck Marla! I am sick of all your shit!
Narrator : You're fucking Marla, Tyler.
Tyler Durden : Uh, technically, you're fucking Marla, but it's all the same to her
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© 2002 by Chris H. Lewis, Ph.D.
Sewall Academic Program; University of Colorado at Boulder
Created 7 August 2002: Last Modified:
17 April, 2009
E-mail: cclewis@spot.colorado.edu
URL: http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/film/club.htm
