Question for Discussion: What causes Jack/Tyler Dearden
to slowly lose his mind? Why are so many other men
atrracted to Fight Club and Project Mayhem?
Film: Fight Club (1999)
Reading: Taubin, So Good it Hurts: Fight Club ;
Sragow, It Just Sort of Clicked: Review of Fight Club ;
Blackwelder, "Beaten to Pulp Fiction" ; Fuller, "Fighting Talk, an interview with Ed Norton" ; Freed, "Postmodernism
and Violence
Video: Scene from Network on the Global Economic System" ; The Corporation: Chapters 21 ; "Monster.com: When I Grow Up Jobs Ad" ; MTV: Movies of the 1990s
Critical Reviews of Fight Club
Fight Club Websites
Corporations and the Struggle for Global Democracy
-
MTV: Movies of the 1990s:The New
Horror films of the 1990s
- Obama Statement of Working Class Bitterness
-
Monster.com Jobs Ad
- U.S. Inequality Gap Widest since 1929
- Michael Moore, Bowling for Columbine (2002)
- Roger Ebert's Review of Bowling for Columbine
- A Generation of Men without History: Fight Club
- Global Corporations and the Concentration of Wealth
-
See Chapters 3, 4, and 21 from The Corporation
- WTO Protests in Seattle in Nov. 1999 (in-class)
- The Dumb and Dumber Movies of the 1990s
are a reflection of this growing sense of
Impotence
- Freed, Postmodernism and Violence
-
So What is the Answer to growing frustration,
anger, impotence, and rage?
Quote from No Country for Old Men
Ed Tom Bell : I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five years old. Hard to believe. My grandfather was a lawman; father too. Me and him was sheriff's at the same time; him up in Plano and me out here. I think he's pretty proud of that. I know I was. Some of the old time sheriffs never even wore a gun. A lotta folks find that hard to believe. Jim Scarborough'd never carry one; that's the younger Jim. Gaston Borkins wouldn't wear one up in Camanche County. I always liked to hear about the oldtimers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can't help but compare yourself gainst the oldtimers. Can't help but wonder how theyd've operated these times. There was this boy I sent to the 'lectric chair at Huntsville here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He killt a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn't any passion to it. Told me that he'd been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. "Be there in about fifteen minutes". I don't know what to make of that. I surely don't. The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, "O.K., I'll be part of this world."
Obama Statement on Working-Class Bitterness (April 6, 2008)
In a San Francisco fundraiser on April 6, Obama uttered his now-famous remark about white working-class Pennsylvanians:
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years, and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
In Sorrow and Disbelief:
Inside the Columbine High Investigation
The story of the slaughter at Columbine High School opened a sad national conversation about what turned two boys' souls into poison. It promises to be a long, hard talk, in public and in private, about why smart, privileged kids rot inside. Do we blame the parents, blame the savage music they listened to, blame the ease of stockpiling an arsenal, blame the chemistry of cruelty and cliques that has always been a part of high school life but has never been so deadly? Among the many things that did not survive the week was the hymn all parents unconsciously sing as they send their children out in the morning, past the headlines, to their schools: It can't happen here, Lord, no, it could never happen here...
And it was also, as we now know too well, Adolf Hitler's birthday. In the handwritten diary of one of the suspects, the anniversary, say the police, was clearly marked as a time to "rock and roll." Some members of Harris' and Klebold's clique, tagged in derision a few years before as the Trench Coat Mafia, had embraced enough Nazi mythology to spook their classmates. They reportedly wore swastikas on black shirts, spoke German in the halls, re-enacted World War II battles, played the most vicious video games, talked about whom they hated, whom they would like to kill. Harris and Klebold liked to bowl: when Harris made a good shot, he would throw his arm up, "Heil Hitler!"
But they were not really dangerous, right? Every school has its rebels, its Goths in black nail polish and lipstick, its stoners and deadbeats, sometimes, as in this case, the very brightest techie kids who found solidarity in exclusion. "We hung out. We listened to music," says Alejandra Marsh, 16. "We went over to someone's house and watched cartoons. We loved Pinky and the Brain and Animaniacs." Fellow students described them as discarded, unwanted "stereotype geeks," who, like the jocks and preppies, had their own table in the cafeteria, their group picture in the yearbook with the caption, "'Who says we're different? Insanity's healthy. Stay alive, stay different, stay crazy."
Marilyn Manson, Columbine: Whose Fault is It?
A lot of people forget or never realize that I started my band as a criticism of these very issues of despair and hypocrisy. The name Marilyn Manson has never celebrated the sad fact that America puts killers on the cover of Time magazine, giving them as much notoriety as our favorite movie stars. From Jesse James to Charles Manson, the media, since their inception, have turned criminals into folk heroes. They just created two new ones when they plastered those dipshits Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris' pictures on the front of every newspaper. Don't be surprised if every kid who gets pushed around has two new idols.
We applaud the creation of a bomb whose sole purpose is to destroy all of mankind, and we grow up watching our president's brains splattered all over Texas. Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised. Does anyone think the Civil War was the least bit civil? If television had existed, you could be sure they would have been there to cover it, or maybe even participate in it, like their violent car chase of Princess Di. Disgusting vultures looking for corpses, exploiting, fucking, filming and serving it up for our hungry appetites in a gluttonous display of endless human stupidity.
When it comes down to who's to blame for the high school murders in Littleton, Colorado, throw a rock and you'll hit someone who's guilty. We're the people who sit back and tolerate children owning guns, and we're the ones who tune in and watch the up-to-the-minute details of what they do with them. I think it's terrible when anyone dies, especially if it is someone you know and love. But what is more offensive is that when these tragedies happen, most people don't really care any more than they would about the season finale of Friends or The Real World . I was dumbfounded as I watched the media snake right in, not missing a teardrop, interviewing the parents of dead children, televising the funerals. Then came the witch hunt.
It is no wonder that kids are growing up more cynical; they have a lot of information in front of them. They can see that they are living in a world that's made of bullshit. In the past, there was always the idea that you could turn and run and start something better. But now America has become one big mall, and because of the Internet and all of the technology we have, there's nowhere to run. People are the same everywhere. Sometimes music, movies and books are the only things that let us feel like someone else feels like we do. I've always tried to let people know it's OK, or better, if you don't fit into the program. Use your imagination -- if some geek from Ohio can become something, why can't anyone else with the willpower and creativity?
Roger Ebert's Review of Bowling for Columbine
Here he asks questions he can't answer, such as why we as a nation seem so afraid, so in need of the reassurance of guns. Noting that we treasure urban legends designed to make us fearful of strangers, Moore notices how TV news focuses on local violence ("If it bleeds, it leads") and says that while the murder rate is down 20 percent in America, TV coverage of violent crime is up 600 percent. Despite paranoia that has all but sidetracked the childhood custom of trick or treat, Moore points out that in fact no razor blades have ever been found in Halloween apples.
"Bowling for Columbine" thinks we have way too many guns, don't need them, and are shooting each other at an unreasonable rate. Moore cannot single out a villain to blame for this fact, because it seems to emerge from a national desire to be armed. ("If you're not armed, you're not responsible," a member of the Michigan militia tells him.) At one point, he visits a bank that is giving away guns to people who open new accounts. He asks a banker if it isn't a little dangerous to have all these guns in a bank. Not at all. The bank, Moore learns, is a licensed gun dealership.
Roger Ebert's Review of Natural Born Killers
Oliver Stone 's " Natural Born Killers " might have played even more like a demented nightmare if it hadn't been for the O.J. Simpson case. Maybe Stone meant his movie as a warning about where we were headed, but because of Simpson it plays as an indictment of the way we are now. We are becoming a society more interested in crime and scandal than in anything else - more than in politics and the arts, certainly, and maybe even more than sports, unless crime is our new national sport.
" Natural Born Killers " is not so much about the killers, however, as about the feeding frenzy they inspire. During the period of their rampage, they are the most famous people in America, and the media goes nuts. There are Mickey and Mallory fan clubs and T-shirts; tabloid TV is represented by a bloodthirsty journalist played by Robert Downey Jr., who is so thrilled by their fame he almost wants to embrace them. The people Mickey and Mallory touch in the law industry are elated to be handling the case; it gives them a brush with celebrity, and a tantalizing whiff of the brimstone that fascinates some cops.
Stone's basic strategy is to find the current buzzwords and buzz ideas of crime and violence, and project them through the looking glass into a wonderland of murderous satire. It is a commonplace, for example, that many violent criminals were abused as children. All right, then, Stone will give us abuse: We see Mallory's childhood, shot in the style of a lurid TV sitcom, with Rodney Dangerfield as her drunken, piggish father. As he shouts and threatens violence, as he ridicules Mallory's thoroughly cowed mother, as he grabs his daughter and makes lewd suggestions, we hear a sitcom laugh track that grinds out mechanical hilarity. Everything is funny to the "live studio audience," because Dangerfield's timing is right for the punchlines. Never mind how frightening the words are. Who really listens to sitcoms, anyway? Everything is grist for Stone's mill. Look at Tommy Lee Jones, as Warden McClusky of Batongaville State Prison. He's seen too many prison movies, and he's intoxicated by the experience of being on TV. He rants, he raves, he curses, he runs his prison like a deranged slave plantation. And then here comes Downey, as Wayne Gale, who hosts a clone of "Hard Copy" or "America's Most Wanted." Using a Robin Leach accent that makes the whole thing into showbiz, he's so thrilled to be in the same frame with these famous killers that he hardly cares what happens to him. Watch his reaction in the final bloody showdown, when he believes he is immune because, after all, he has the camera.
Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man
Faludi arrives at a different conclusion by dint of spending time with men -- laid-off industrial workers, bewildered Vietnam vets, sports fans, media executives, Promise Keepers, porn stars, ex-cons, movie stars and others -- chronicling their thoughts, aspirations, explanations and exasperations, finding that men are not to blame for their current predicament, nor on the whole is some sinister other. Rather, culture and society has betrayed American men of the post-World War II world, this being documented in meticulous detail with extensive notes and bibliography.
Faludi shows how men were taught by their fathers to assume inheritance of a world they would firmly control -- it turns out they don't control it at all and there is an overwhelming sense of parental abandonment. Meaningful work that both established and existed within a wider social purpose is gone for all but a few. The virtues of trust and loyalty are now laughable anachronisms, all that is left of masculinity being an ornamental facade of what Faludi terms individual male "superdominance."
The author depicts how we have changed fundamentally from a society that produced a culture to a culture rooted in no real society at all, global corporatism sweeping away institutions on which men felt some sense of belonging and replacing them with visual spectacles that they can only watch while constantly being bombarded by advertisements to buy consumer goods to fill the void. Loss of economic authority, devaluation of loyalty, their fathers' silence and the elevation of the ornamental as the standard of personal worth lie at the heart of men's discontent and men have not rebelled because no simple enemy is responsible.
But that, for Faludi, offers hope in a conclusion that men and women have an opportunity to move beyond an adversarial relationship to create change together, to create a new paradigm for human progress that will open doors for both sexes as they fight the dilemma of mutually being powerless in a modern, corporate-dominated society.
Faludi, Scenes from the Betrayal of the American Man
"I started my search drawn to the most visible layers of troubled masculinity: Tailhook, the Citadel, the Spur Posse (those high school boys in Lakewood, California, who gained notoriety in the early '90s in their sex for points contest). I went to the media hotspots where the stories seemed to be about men accosting women. These eruptions of toxic masculinity began to show me what was wrong not so much between men and women, as between men and the changed world that they inhabited. As Billy Shehan, the Spur Posse member with the most points, asked me, "We have to be products of our society somehow, don't we?"
What could the Spur Posse or the Citadel cadets or the gun-toting kids at Columbine High School for that matter, teach us about pressures on men more generally? So many of the men spotlit by the media cameras in the '90s seem to be men on the margins, and their stories surely too out there to offer revelations useful to the average man. But, it turned out they had plenty to show us. They were a bit like the canaries in the mine; the first to feel the effects of a kind of social poisoning. What they experienced as catastrophe, many other men sense as pressure, as a distorting force in their lives. "
Susan Faludi
Susan Faludi Coaches Fight Club author
"Recently, the "Fight Club" author had himself become a poster child for Faludi's argument. Her observations on the male condition -- that ratings, rankings and salaries have become the main measure of success for men, that men have become just as victimized by consumerism as women, and that our society is imprisoned by the notion that victory is everything -- all zinged home for Palahniuk."
Susan Faludi: The Mother Jones Interview
Why are men so angry when the economy is booming? Didn't white man's rage come to the surface at the end of the '80s, when unemployment was high and we were shifting to the so-called service economy?
I started the book when the economy was in a recession, which seemed to support the conventional wisdom that the economy and masculinity are related -- that men feel emasculated when their lives as wage earners are threatened. But I found that as the economy improved, the men I was talking to were still stricken with a sense that they had been betrayed, and that the betrayal went much deeper than a paycheck. It had to do with loyalty and a social pact that they had been led to believe was bedrock and part of being a man. It had to do with work, with the relationship between men and their community, and even with the sense that they could count on their hometown sports team rewarding their loyalty by staying put. Instead, they saw those teams leave town to chase the biggest money offers somewhere, anywhere, else. And buried much deeper down, it also had to do with the loyalty between fathers and sons.
Given men's current preoccupation with their looks, does feminism have things to teach men?
The feminist diagnosis, especially from second-wave feminists like Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique , has remarkable relevance to the male dilemma. The truth is that what feminism is asking for is exactly what men want in their own lives, which is not to be judged according to superficial and ephemeral and impossible-to-attain objectives. Men don't want to live in a world run on retail values any more than women do. Like women, they want to be needed and useful participants in society. They want to have real utility and to be engaged in meaningful work.
Your feminism has always seemed to come from an analysis of political and economic factors in the culture at large. This seems very different from the feminism of younger women, who focus more on being able to express themselves and achieve individual fulfillment and pleasure.
Younger women were born into a world driven by consumer, ornamental, celebrity values. Even if they don't espouse those values, they're caught up in a world where they are being told that they have to do these star turns -- where they have to appear on the cover of a book with their shirt off, for instance. It's easy to attack women who do that. I didn't grow up with that. The difference between older and younger feminists is how we respond to consumer culture. If you're caught up in it, you're probably not thinking about changing it.
Taubin, So Good it Hurts
"It's not Marla who causes Jack to have second thoughts about Tyler; rather, it's that Tyler's tendency to megalomania spins out of control. Without Jack registering what's happening, Tyler transforms Fight Club into Project Mayhem, a guerilla network that blows up building in order to undermine the economic foundations of our credit-card society. When a soldier in Project Mayhem is killed, Jack realises he must break up with the person he's as close to as he is to himself. But Tyler is not easy to get rid of. Which is how Jack winds up where we came in - with a gun in his mouth in an office building that has been targeted for demolition by Project Mayhem. Since Tyler's bombs are as reliable as Jack is as narrator, this is what you might call, if you think about it carefully, an open ending."
"Like all Fincher's previous films (Alien3, Se7en, The Game) Fight Club sets up a conflict with a violent, potentially murderous being who is, as the id is to the ego, the doppelganger of the protagonist. Weakened by a toxic and perverse society, the protagonist is barely able to hold on to some shred of moral consciousness in the face of this anarchic force. ( The Game, Fincher's least convincing film, doesn't quite fit this pattern.) Thus Tyler's nihilism and incipient fascism are not the values Fight Club espouses, though Fincher complicates the issue by making Tyler so alluring and charismatic. Tyler is posed as an object of desire and of identification - and Pitt, who has never been as exquisite as he is with a broken nose and blood streaming down his cut body, emerges as an actor of economy and control who can rivet attention merely by turning his head."
"Fight Club is an action film that's all about interiority. It pushes the concepts of subjectivity and identification to extremes to suggest a male identity that's not only fragile but frangible. Jack is so filled with self-loathing and repressed rage he's desparate to get out of his own skin and into someone else's. And Fight Club is not the only recent Hollywood movie to place us inside someone's brain. Being John Malkovich, in which the sad-sack protagonist discovers a secret tunnel that leads into Malkovich's brain, is a comic, gender-bent spin on Fight Club, though its creepy denouncement is more grim than anything Fincher envisions. You also don't have to be a psychoanalyst to deduce from the depiction that the route into Malkovich's brain is through his asshole. "
"After the shooting of teenagers by teenagers last spring at Littleton [Columbine] High School Fox became nervous about Fight Club. The release was postponed; the marketing campaign made the movie look like a goofy comedy [Flatbroke's note: it was actually Columbine High in Littleton, CO and a hurried post-production was stated as the reason for the delay in release]. "Although the book was written five years ago I think the movie is about Littleton [Columbine] in more ways than anyone would care to address. Do I think that people who are frustrated and disenfranchaised should blow up buildings? No. Do I care if people who are consenting adults have this Fight Club? I have no problem with that. I'm no sado-masochist, but it seems more responsible than bottling up all their rage about how unfulfilled their lives are. I think the movie is moral and it's responsible. But the scariest thing about Littleton [ Columbine] is that two 18-year-olds would think, 'OK. We're going in and we're not coming out. In order to make this statement, we have to give up our lives.' They haven't had a life yet - how can they know they're prepared to give it up? That people would die for such trivial frustrations is scary. And no one wants to look at that."
Sragow, "It Just Sort of Clicked: Review of Fight Club"
"Fight Club" tells the story of a representative Gen X-er, billed in the movie as "the narrator" (Edward Norton), who suffers from insomnia, depression and terminal consumerism. (The film contains an uproarious attack on advertising for the IKEA home-furnishings chain.) For a while he derives comfort from enrolling in support meetings for critical diseases. But he finds long-lasting relief only when he teams up with a mysterious new friend, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), to organize a counterculture that's not about peace and love.
In Tyler Durden's fight club, alienated guys get in touch with their inner primates via bare-knuckled scraps that leave them scarred and happy. To Palahniuk, these sessions are like "a Pentecostal Church meeting, or a mosh pit. Some very gestalt expression of rage to the point of exhaustion."
"I think the result is often potent: a cautionary parody of unhappy individualists sliding into fascism. (One critic has already dubbed the movie fascist, period.) When Tyler's black-shirted legions fund their activities with luxury soap made from human fat, it's difficult not to think of Nazis. But when I asked Palahniuk if the soap was meant to refer to the concentration camps, the short answer was no."
"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."
"Also from another planet -- Planet Gen X? -- is the consistently brilliant Norton. The high point of his Q&A came early, when he characterized "Fight Club" as "this weird millennial 'Catcher in the Rye .'" When asked the dangerous "What's the message?" question, Norton gamely talked about the tangle of complaints and themes in the book, and how they called for a director capable of handling "dialectic" and "moral ambiguity" -- as he thought Fincher had done triumphantly in "Seven." He explained the dialectics of "Fight Club": "Tyler 's practical execution of this idea of self-liberation through a kind of anarchism: Is that negative? Did that become negative in its own right? Did people who were surrounding him lose their identity as much as they had been before they got into this whole thing? Or was this narrator afraid to go the final mile?" Norton praised Fincher for leaving the audience "without essentially a pat theme or a glib conclusion; it doesn't get wrapped up in a neat package for you so you can walk out and go, 'Oh, the message of that film was this.'"
"So far, so eloquent. However, when Norton spoke about chortling with recognition over Palahniuk's book, he conveyed a Gen X tunnel-vision. Reading it, he said, "You instantaneously remember little passages, like: 'We're the first generation raised on television, and we've been raised to believe that we should all be millionaires and rock stars and everything, and we're discovering that most of us aren't, and we're getting very upset about that.'" Norton turned 30 in August. He accepted the book's notion that his generation is "having its value system largely dictated to it by advertising culture." He agreed with Palahniuk that many of his peers thought they could achieve "spiritual happiness through home furnishing," only to wake up to the emptiness of "acquisitions" and a "received value system."
"Norton keeps touting this movie as "The Graduate" for the '90s. To a lot of us who saw "The Graduate" in the '60s, what limited it was precisely its youthcentric self-absorption. Norton was particularly proud that Fincher had let him and Brad Pitt add a bit about bashing a new Volkswagen beetle with baseball bats. "There's the perfect example of the baby-boomer generation marketing its youth culture to us as if our happiness is going to come by buying the symbol of their own youth movement." But isn't the VW bug the perfect example of boomers peddling their youth to themselves?"
"Working on "Fight Club," Uhls found Fincher to be a "terrific" writer's director, "focusing in on the story and the philosophy of it, and the tone." Uhls and Fincher wouldn't touch some of Tyler 's misdeeds -- not because they were too extreme, but because they muddied the issues. "We thought Tyler wanted to get rid of the construction of society, but not kill people; we wanted him to have a clear philosophy, and it was not about killing people but about creating a world to leave behind for people."
"Adapting Palahniuk's powder-keg of a novel, Uhls had to be sure where to place the detonations. "I think that fight club begins as a simple empowerment of the individual. People who have elected to do this with each other get together in basements and fight. It starts out as a natural magnet, picking up people however they happen to hear about it. 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."
"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."
Blackwelder, Beaten to Pulp Fiction
"Fight Club" quite literally doesn't pull any punches.
An angry, violent, testosterone-saturated,darkly comic allegory on consumer culture and the reality of personal freedom, it's a film that dares to question American values in the most inventive ways since "Dr. Strangelove" -- although the comparison ends there."
"Edward Norton -- the wildly talented, incredibly versatile Kevin Spacey of Generation X -- stars as the film's self-destructive and deliberately unnamed narrator. The ultimate American corporate stooge, he is a recall coordinator for a major car manufacturer. It's his job to preserve the bottom line by debunking his company's culpability when cars catch fire or crash due to design flaws."
"A charismatic, wannabe nihilist and borderline psychotic, Durden thrives on chaos and defiance of civilization. He's subversive in any way he can devise -- for instance, working as a projectionist at a movie theater, he splices single frames of pornography into kiddie movies (Fincher does something similar in the first reel, flashing nearly subliminal images of Pitt on the screen to illustrate how the character is haunting Norton's narrator)."
"Before long Fight Club has become Project Mayhem -- for all intents and purposes a terrorist organization bent on nothing less than tossing a monkey wrench in the spokes of Western civilization."
"But it's extraordinarily subversive for a studio picture -- anti-establishment in both theory and practice -- and Fincher must have had to fight off all kinds of nervous studio suits to keep it this undiluted."
Fuller, "Fighting Talk, an interview with Ed Norton"
Fuller: "David Fincher's Fight Club, which unfolds at warp speed on a dank American cityscape and in skyways frought with plane crashes waiting to happen, takes the shape of a confessional: that of a yuppie (Edward Norton) who has invested so deeply into brand-name consumerism that his apartment is an Ikea showroom and his co-opted life a swamp of soulless despair. Unable to connect, unable to sleep, he becomes a support group junkie and meets Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), a walking mess with a death wish from which she needs saving, and, crucially, the Mephistophelian Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), with whom he forms an underground society for men who seek to shake themselves out of spiritual torpidity by beating each other up. For Tyler, the logical conclusion to this project is the wholesale destruction of corporate America. Rather late in the day, Norton's narrator realizes that Tyler's anarchic solution is no solution at all."
EDWARD NORTON: Fincher sent me the novel, and I read it in one sitting. It's obviously a surreal piece that operates at an almost allegorical level within someone's madness, and I felt immediately that it was on the pulse of a zeitgeist I recognized. It speaks to my generation's conflict with the American material values system at its worst. I guess I've felt for a long time that a lot of the films that were aimed at my generation were some baby boomer perception of what Gen-X was about. They seemed to be tailored to a kind of reductive image of us as slackers and to have a banal, glib, low-energy, angst-ridden realism, none of which I or anyone I know relates to. They didn't speak to the deeper and darker underlying sense of despair and paralysis and numbness in the face of the overwhelming onslaught of media information that we've received from the cradle.
EN: Whether or not it's an easy target, it's certainly the source of a common complaint, and I personally find it to be very pernicious. I think there is a serious corruption in the idea sold through advertising that you can attain spiritual peace through lifestyle, and the notion of building your happiness from the outside-in by acquiring things - which, if you think about it, is the essence of advertising. This is where I completely agree with Tyler Durden - it's a recipe for spiritual disaster. We tried to set up a mournful, almost Holden Caulfield-like inner narrative in the film as my character talks about his life of travel and hotel rooms with mouthwash and toothbrushes and single servings and mini-everythings. Tyler, of course, is very quick to bust him for sidestepping the pain he feels about the textures of his life by being smug and cynical. Tyler is, in effect, the reassertion of the purer self. He has a moral certainty, and he's willing to name hypocrisy when he sees it. He's willing to do whatever he has to do to explore what might be right, whereas my character acknowledges what's wrong but holds back from completely stripping himself of those things because they are still a security blanket for him.
EN: A lot of people have been responding to Tyler as a sort of Nietzschean ubermensch in the sense that he's advocating liberation of the human individual through the rejection and destruction of the institutions and value systems that are enslaving us. Now, that's certainly correct. But the tension in the film comes from my character asking, What are the limitations of a nihilistic attitude? It can be enthralling, it can be seductive, it can feel liberating on certain levels. But at what point do the practical applications of it start to become exactly the things they're critiquing, and at what point do Tyler's initiatives start to dehumanize people just as much? I like that the film raises those questions, but then it dumps them in your lap and leaves you to sort it all out instead of supplying you an easy answer.
EN: It will be very easy for people to take potshots at Fight Club, to reduce it to a film that espouses violence or anarchy, but that's too superficial a way to look at it. It would be extremely lazy, for example, to tie the film directly to the climate around the bombings and shootings that have occurred in the last few years just because, on a brisk, superficial viewing, you could draw that connection. I don't actually think that's what this film is about. I don't even think it's about the exploration of the idea that frustration should be manifested as aggression toward other people. It's much more about people who are exploring modes of self-liberation through aggression that's directed at the self, and the idea of stripping away one's presumptions and fears until you're free of them.
EN: Well, they won't be able to make bombs that work [laughs]. The film's not a demolition handbook. I think people are responsible for their actions, and that their pathologoes find an outlet through the things around them. Was A Clockwork Orange responsible for all the subsequent British hooliganism? I don't think so. There are times when people don't want to make a complicated examination of the things that are disturbing in the culture. They'd rather dismiss those things as evil or aberrant rather than figure out what's causing them.
EN: One of the most disturbing things about my generation is its lack of engagement with the culture. It's not just a dysfunction - it's a crisis that's growing out of a very unhealthy dynamic. And I don't think you can examine that in a film and leave people feeling safe or OK. If Fight Club wasn't disturbing, if we didn't piss a few people off, we wouldn't have done our job properly.
Freed, Postmodernism and Violence
Since its 1999 release, Fight Club has solidified its place among American pop culture iconography. Understanding why so many people have embraced such a violent and disturbing film requires a discussion of how violence functions within a postmodern paradigm. Within the "extraordinary preeminence of violence in the extreme alienation of late twentieth-century America" there has been "an acceptance of violent imagery and narrative in postmodernity" (Grant 10).
"Fight Club is just one of many recent films that treats violence in an ironically humorous manner. A quintessential example of the banal treatment of violence occurs in the 1994 cult favorite Pulp Fiction in the scene where two hitmen, Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), accidently shoot their backseat passenger, Marvin. The conversation that ensues is concerned with how to clean up the backseat of the car. Violence and murder become events that produce a comic affect as Vincent and Jules are characterized as two regular guys who just happen to make their living as hitmen. "
"The cultural context surrounding the release of Fight Club was anything but "unexceptional." Released in October of 1999, Fight Club entered the American cultural circuit during a year when violence had become a heavily discussed topic. The film's release was delayed because of the spring shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. The prevalence of violence in the 1990's has been a subject of fascination for cultural critics like Nicolaus Mills who asserts that "In the 1990's meanness is not just a political response we make periodically in our weaker moments. Meanness today is a state of mind, the product of a culture of spite and cruelty that has had an enormous impact on us" (Triumph 2). Mills continues, "Central to the new meanness, as well as distinguishing it from the confident Reaganism of the 1980's, is our feeling that we are no longer a coherent nation bound together by our past" (19). With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 "our enemies are no longer clearly defined by the Cold War," and "the result has been an opportunity, seemingly boundless in its possibilities, for turning inward" (19)"
"The "new savagery" as Mills refers to it "is not simply the reflection of an underclass frustrated by hard times. It is also part of a middle-class culture that in recent years has seemed more and more at home with violence" (45). Joseph Natoli expands this argument in Speeding to the Millenium by contending "We are violent because violence is at the heart of our notions of competing, winning, progressing" although now "our violence is no longer part and parcel of our frontier spirit but a cancer on it" (156).
(3) Mzaer commenting accurately on what occurs in Fight Club. Similar to the apocalyptic sentiment in Fight Club "the state of professional wrestling today thus provides clues as to what living at the end of history means. It suggests how a large segment of American society is trying to cope with the emotional letdown that followed upon the triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy" (Cantor 17). Just as the men in Fight Club attempt to reclaim their masculinity through violence, "the contemporary wrestler exemplifies the thoroughly postmodern idea that human identity is purely a construction, a matter of choice, not nature" (Cantor 20).
The "authenticiy" of the fighting in Fight Club leads the men to believe that they can transcend their ordinariness through their ability to endure a violent beating. While professional wrestling embodies a "cooperative rather than competitive exchanges of apparent power between men" (Mazer 4), in Fight Club the power exchange is purely competitive. Despite the differences, the appeal of a movie like Fight Club makes sense in a culture that is attracted to the theatrics of professional wrestling which is a postmodern pastiche of ritualized fighting.
"It is the very conventionality of the characters that makes Fight Club such a powerful movie because what it suggests is that there is a population of men out there who are ticking time bombs, thoroughly frustrated with their current conditions. As Harry Knowles writes for Ain't-It-Cool-News "If you leave this movie afraid that this could happen here, GOOD. YOU SHOULD BE AFRAID. That is the whole point. To scare you. To make you not want to be a space monkey. Another mindless, thoughtless follower. Another brick in the wall. A goosestepper. A fool."
"Coincidently, Faludi's book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, was published in 1999 prior to Fight Club's release, a fact that did not go unnoticed by movie reviewers. Richard Schickel's review for Newsweek correlates the male angst of the film with Faludi's book: "Fight Club can't be ignored. It is working American Beauty -- Susan Faludi territory, that illiberal, impious, inarticulate fringe that threatens the smug American center with an anger that cannot explain itself, can act out its frustrations only in inexplicable violence."
"In these clips Edward Norton speaks directly to the camera and espouses the apocalyptic attitude promoted by Tyler Durden. In the first clip the narrator says, "I know you. You're a young guy...too young to have fought in any wars and if your parents weren't divorced then your father probably was never at home." In the second internet spot the narrator advocates a Nietchzean philosophy and asks, "If you could be God's worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose? Unless we get God's attention we have no hope of damnation or redemption." These clips seem to cut more deeply to the heart of the matter in Fight Club as they tout the Tyler Durden philosophy of destruction as a means to reclaim lost history. Other promotional pieces reinforced the film's blatant testosterone driven theme by demonizing femininity, urging film goers to "wash your feminine side clean off."
Given the fact that 1999 was also the year of the Columbine High School shooting, it is understandable that a film like Fight Club would have its share of conscientious objectors. The film defies the expectations of the audience who are accustomed to seeing violence within a certain context like Saving Private Ryan or Full Metal Jacket. When violence in a film is devoid of any particular historical context the public's reaction tends to be objectional.
"All in all Fight Club remains a product that is distinctly attached to its cultural moment. By reworking the myth of regeneration through violence, Fight Club emerges as a contestation of the lengths that men will go to in order to truly feel alive in a society that has dulled their senses. Violence is posited as a solution or redemption, but ultimately violence is not the answer. I believe the film can be read as strongly anti-violent. Violence does not get the protagonist anywhere nor does it earn him anything other than a gunshot wound to the neck that was necessary to destroy his doppelganger. Although the film explores ways in which to reclaim masculinity, the film's ending suggests that masculinity has already been lost in the postmodern quagmire and even primitive and typically masculine-affirming activities like bare-knuckled fighting cannot provide salvation."
It is our own fascination with these spectacles of violence that contributes to the mythologization of violence in American culture. The John Wayne western is too far in the past to have widespread appeal to the media-crazed youth generation of the late 1990s and into the 21st century. Fight Club then provides an alternative vision for the postmodern generation. Critic David Ansen sums it up best:
[T]his is not a movie that can be easily dismissed--or forgotten. An outrageous mixture of brilliant technique, puerile philosophizing, trenchant satire, and sensory overload, Fight Club is the most incendiary movie to come out of Hollywood in a long time. It's a mess but one worth fighting about. (77)
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."
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 Strinne 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 materiel 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:
16 April, 2008
E-mail: cclewis@spot.colorado.edu
URL: http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/film/fight.htm
