Talking About Fight Club
I watched Fight Club recently. Don't think I'd seen it all the way through since it was released.
It ends (no spoiler warning for such an old film) with Edward Norton's character killing Brad Pitt's character--after he realizes Pitt is actually a creation of his own mind--followed by Pitt's plan of taking down a bunch of skyscrapers coming to fruition. It plays pretty weird after 9/11. Pitt even calls the area "ground zero."
Fight Club is what I'd call an interesting failure--the story doesn't quite work, but it's got a great look and intriguing scenes. At its ideological center is a critique of consumerism and how it separates us (especially males) from our true feelings. Overall, it's kind of half-baked, plot-wise and idea-wise. Still, I can understand how it's become a huge cult item. What I don't get is why people have been inspired to set up actual fight clubs.
posted by LAGuy @ 1:01 AM
7 Comments:
When I saw the trailer for the film, I thought it was a great idea: Middle-aged guys who've become robotic via the routine of their daily lives getting back in touch with their testosterone-filled male-ness by beating the snot out of each other. When it got bigger than that (the terrorist stuff you mention) it seemed stupid. But the idea of fight clubs themselves still seemed great - both as a movie and as an idea. Nothing like taking a punch to remind you that you're alive and that you're a guy.
I haven't read the novel, but it seemed to me a continuation, or perhaps a parody, of all that Iron John stuff that had been so big about 20 years ago.
Some have complained this is essentialism, reducing masculinity to a simple formula.
I've often wondered what would be the woman's version of fight club?
As someone who saw Fight Club three or four times the year it was out, and who still considers it a great movie (although, admittedly, I know much less about movies than L.A. Guy), I would have to disagree that "consumerism" is the critique.
A huge number of movies today owe a debt to some watered-down form of Rousseau or Marx. The rich are evil, the poor are virtuous, money (and perhaps also power) are the great sources of corruption.
Fight Club, on the other hand, draws on a very different philosophical strain: the strain that gave the world German Romanticism, the German "youth movements" of the early 20th century, and of course Nazism. I mean specifically Nazism: this philosophical trend was absent from Mussolini or Franco's regimes.
Since most of these folks were anti-intellectual, there doesn't seem to be a good philosophical treatise on this strain of thought (or maybe "inchoate semi-thought" would be more accurate). If I tried to summarize it, I would say: It is civilization -- specifically, the comforts of civilization, including comfy chairs, anaesthetics, and coddling mothers and wives -- who have sapped the savage essence out of Men. This essence cannot be recovered by a change in social or economic structure (as Rousseau and Marx thought). Nor can it be recovered by a willingness to inflict pain (as the Nazi S.S. thought). Rather, it can be recovered by a willingness to receive pain (as the 1920s Freikorps, the early S.A., and the anarchist Bakhunin thought).
A man who does not fear pain will not mind living in a world controlled by the powers-that-be, because all they can do is hurt him, and he doesn't care. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.
Now, I admit that the attempt to destroy the credit agencies in this film doesn't fit that template. However, I think to analyze the film's message you have to ask, who is right -- Tyler Durden or the protagonist? For the first two-thirds of the movie, TD and the protagonist are on the same side, and their message is the romantic savage ideal I outlined above. In the last third of the movie, TD and the protagonist are at odds, and TD goes on his anti-capitalist rampage. I would argue that the movie's message is that the protagonist is right, and therefore TD's crusade at the end is a corruption of the philosophy it endorses.
Disclaimer: I don't support this philosophy myself!
In today's world, the savage romanticism of FC and the message of Iron John have certain points in common: men have had their masculinity sapped from them by a female-dominated society.
However, their conclusions are different. FC (or at least, the message of the protagonist in FC) wants to return to a savage state. In my opinion, this is the explanation for the apparent inconsistency at the end: the protagonist has tried vehemently to stop TD's anti-corporate crusade, so why does he watch the destruction of the skyscrapers so complacently? I think it is because he objects to the crusade per se, but the actual destruction he still finds enjoyable to watch. This fits in perfectly with the Freikorps' philosophy: war is fun, and it's more important to have a war than to have the right war.
Iron John, on the other hand, ultimately has no conclusion, because the author is unwilling to actually break with the liberal worldview. He wants to empower men as if they were yet another minority group, and he will occasionally point out that liberal egalitarian society is based on female values. But he refuses to follow this to its logical conclusion: that true male empowerment cannot take place unless the fundamental liberal sex-neutral worldview is called into question. (He peppers his book with disclaimers about how he supports all the goals of feminism, etc.)
Finally, I think that in most of the world today, including much of America, society remains more dominated by males than females. It is only in certain social circles and families (especially in the suburbs of the "blue states") that the new feminized world has dawned. I myself know many men who were raised by strong feminist women, who do seem to lack certain traits that would have been seen as "masculine" until recently. In my opinion, only these guys can "get" Iron John. Many women I know hate the book and what they think its message is, because they cannot comprehend that there are social worlds, however tiny, that are no longer patriarchical at all.
The movie sucked!
Would you care to elaborate?
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