For my final essay of the paper, I decided to look at perennial favourite 'Fight Club', not only a popular film but a defining expression of the thematic focus of the novel's author, Chuck Palahniuk. Specifically, the sense of directionless in American culture that came from the unmooring of the masculine identity with the loss of overarching social narrative in the '90s.
The essay is not particularly well-written, it's a clear example that the old adage 'measure twice, cut once' should be modified for academic writing as 'Write twice, submit once'. Most of the statements or references made are only really meaningful or fleshed out sufficiently if one reads the source material footnoted for it, a massive oversight on my part. It's all in the bibliography, so any lost soul stumbling upon this essay with an abundance of time on their hands and at least a half-way decent internet connection should have little trouble ferreting it all out. So I may as well go ahead and present the actual article now:
Hollywood’s America - Research Essay - “I am Jack’s desperate search for meaning”
With vibrant
cynicism, Fight Club presents the 1990s
as a period defined by paranoia and alienation; the entire film exhibits an
undercurrent of uncertainty and ambiguity not only in the subject matter but
also the portrayal, described in a review by Bob Graham of the San Francisco Chronicle as a film that
“delivers a sucker punch to the audience and then pulls the rug out from under
it.”[1]
The narrative centers on an emotionally alienated corporate drone,
disillusioned with the corrupt and superficial commercial existence painted as
the American Dream, who responds to his sense of powerlessness and
disconnection by using violence and counter-cultural rebellion in a bid to
construct his own identity and find something genuine in his life. The
narrator’s sense of powerlessness and alienation is portrayed as a symptom of
consumer culture and the corporate world, and the social emasculation of the
working men that comprise the Fight Club branches taps into a working-class
resentment of globalization. The central themes of the film, namely
dissatisfaction with the commercialized American Dream and corporate culture,
and an uneasy sense of directionless and surreal or nearly illusory ambiguity, are
echoed in other popular films of the time; Office
Space and American Beauty offer
critiques of corporate culture and the increasingly plastic American Dream, The Matrix and The Big Lebowski exhibit complex worlds where the line between
reality and fantasy blur, and Three Kings
explores directionless ambiguity in regards to military geopolitics in a world
where America is the sole remaining Superpower.[2]
“We’re
the middle children of history, man, no purpose or place. We have no Great War,
no Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is
our lives.” The fundamental defining element of the 90s that sets the
context for the film Fight Club is
the lack of a framing narrative for the era; the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and
Communism collapsed in the years immediately following, and the conflict of
global scope that had dominated international politics and economics
disappeared abruptly, in the wake of the collapse of Communism where America
was left without an opponent or a mission, the socio-political landscape was
rendered uncharted territory.[3]
Without the Cold War binary to define it, the central presence of the State waned
somewhat and gave way to corporatization and globalization, accelerated by the
Clinton Administration’s pursuit of a Free Trade agenda and its post-healthcare
reform capitulation to the Republican mantra of ‘small government’.[4]
Without a defining global conflict and the central importance of the state such
conflict entails, with multinational corporations influencing or driving
domestic and international affairs, and particularly the increasingly mobile
international population facilitated by ‘global network capitalism’, the myth
of collective ‘national identity’ that had always been important for male
self-identification since its inception in the French Revolution, began to
falter and fade.[5]
Prior to the end of the Cold War, socialism and nationalism provided citizens
with collective identities; the ‘90s was a decade situated between defining wars
and in the absence of those conflicts that necessitated state endorsement of
robust national identities, cultural pluralism filled the void.[6]
For the urban middle-class white male, this replacing of a strong binary identity
contrasted with the ‘other’ (be it American/Foreign, Capitalist/Communist, or
the more recent Terrorist/Free Citizen espoused by G. W. Bush’s ‘You’re with us
or you’re with the Terrorists’ political rhetoric) with a state of cultural
pluralism left him vulnerable and anxious; the strong presence of the
nation-state in the country’s conscience as a source of identity was suddenly
gone, much like the absentee father figure that serves as one of the central
motifs of Fight Club, and lacking the
strong ethnic background or common victim-experience of more marginalized
groups, the formerly mainstream male identity was left with a vacuous, secular
consumer-culture to identify with.[7]
“Advertising
has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs that we hate so we can buy shit
we don’t need… We’ve all been raised on television to believe 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.” The death of Communism
ushered in an era of capitalist expansion throughout the world, where people,
production and wealth crossed borders with blinding speed, and money steered
the project of globalization.[8]
The decade of Globalization was one where lifestyle advertising formed
identities to an unprecedented degree, where consumerism was so pervasive that
it comprised our identities, environment, and public discourse entirely; the
omnipotence and omnipresence of Corporate America is signposted by Fight Club’s Narrator’s weary, deadpan
assertion that “when deep space exploration ramps up, it’ll be the corporations
that name everything: The IBM stellar-sphere, the Microsoft galaxy, the planet
Starbucks.”[9]
Globalization and the strengthening hold of corporate entities on national and
global culture in the ‘90s had enormous socio-economic repercussions, not only
increasing economic disparity both within America and globally, but changing
the nature of the American working class as production work was moved to
foreign countries and America entered a service economy that was both less
secure and more emasculating for the working class American male.[10]
Tyler Durden’s “entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves in white
collars” form the angry mass of disempowered and emasculated men who purge
their frustration with their empty vocational identities by embracing violence
and counter-cultural rebellion. Just as Tyler’s Fight Club graduates to the
subversive Project Mayhem, attacking the corporate commercial culture the West
had become with a combination of anarchic vandalism and culture-jamming (such
as blowing out windows in the shape of a smiley face in the side of an office
building or replacing air safety instruction booklets with ones depicting
terrified passengers chaotically scrambling to save themselves and ignore or
hinder those around them), so too did Globalization’s critics and opponents, as
notably explored in Naomi Klein’s ‘No Logo’.[11]
The most emblematic episode displaying the pervasiveness of consumerism and the
protagonists’ rejection of it shows Tyler and the Narrator enthusiastically
beating a new Volkswagen Beetle, the former symbol of hippie counter-culture
revamped and sold back to the ageing consumerist Baby-Boomer generation, appropriating
an anti-consumer culture for commercial gain. The corporate culture is exposed
as corrupt in the film through the vehicle of the Narrator’s job as a recall
coordinator, someone who assesses whether it will be more expensive to initiate
a recall order on unsafe car models or to pay out compensation to the victims,
and toward the end of the ‘90s the rampant corruption and self-interest of
corporations and their executive officers became more widely known, taking
advantage of deregulation to exploit financial systems without producing much
tangible good for society.[12]
The advertising-dominating public discourse presented the American Dream in
commercial and consumerist terms, and the uneven nature of the booming economy
and increased economic stratification of society created resentment towards the
Horatio Alger style ‘American Dream’ of self-made men.
“With
insomnia, nothing’s real. Everything’s far away. Everything’s a copy of a copy
of a copy.” At the most fundamental level, Fight Club is a story of
uncertainty, unease, and paranoid fear. The fact that the focal protagonist is
a deliberately unnamed narrator, the story largely taking place in an
unidentified and generic city, the structure
of the film as a flashback outside of strict chronological sequence
occurring as a sort of conversational ‘stream of consciousness’, and Fincher’s
direction frequently drawing attention to the fact that this is a film through
internal referencing such as the conspicuous ‘cigarette burn’ mark that
indicates a film-reel changeover at the point where the narrator specifically
states the plot twist has been revealed, all draw attention to the post-modern
nature of this production, the unashamed unreality it exists in. The fact that
the Narrator is essentially his own enemy, who builds his own invisible
guerilla army that he is as powerless against as the corporate system he fled,
mirrors the fear of the insidious other undermining contemporary society, the
enemy within.[13]
The system of false needs created by advertising, the loss of hegemonic
national authority in forming America’s cultural identity, the growing distrust
of corporate entities and the project of globalization, and most particularly
the post-modern nature of modern socio-political discourse as identified by
Jean Baudrillard’s essay collection The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place, left American life with a worrying sense of
uncertainty.[14]
Hard to pinpoint with specific events, the ‘spirit’ or ‘mood’ of an era is more
easily signaled by popular media, and in this case it would be ‘blank fiction’,
defined by “decadence, violence, and emotional dissociation steeped in
mass-cultural references”, responding to the instability of identification,
meaning and cultural positionality, subject to the control of “dispersed,
impersonal networks of power” that reigned in the absence of the strong,
proactive Fatherland.[15]
“You
are not your bank account. You are not the clothes you wear. You are not the
contents of your wallet. You are not your bowel cancer. You are not your grande
latte. You are not the car you drive. You are not your fucking khakis.”
In the absence of a defining Fatherland/father figure, in the lack of an ethnic
or marginal identity, in the profound absence of solid meaning in the shallow
secular consumer society of Globalized capitalism, and disadvantaged and
disempowered by the increasingly unequal society it was creating, the frustrated
white male was faced with a crisis of identity. The Narrator, alienated and
disillusioned in his personal and professional life, undergoes a process of
self-destruction in order to find meaning and identity, and this process
touches upon many developments of the 1990s. The overwhelming sense of
emasculation in the film, from the support group Remaining Men Together,
through Tyler’s reference to Lorena Bobbit dismembering her husband’s penis and
throwing the severed half out the window of her car, to the attempt to castrate
the Narrator after he acts against Project Mayhem, marks a theme of masculine
despair and loss of identity. The Narrator attends support groups in order to
experience some form of genuine emotion, despite being a faker himself;
connecting with the misery of others and talking to people who really listen
rather than simply wait for their turn to speak is a form of cathartic release
for him, an attempt to assume an absolutely raw and authentic identity by
empathy and proximity that is rendered impossible with the arrival of another
whose ‘lie’ reflects his own.[16]
At Tyler’s urging, the Narrator seeks to ‘hit bottom’ and destroy himself so
that he can create a new identity once he is rid of the vestigial traces of the
identity that had been dictated to him by his distant father and commercial
culture; in a sense this crises of identity spurned by the loss of Nationalist
identity loosely associated with a distant father-figure is a close parallel to
the crisis of nihilism Nietzschean philosophy explores, a lack of meaning that
necessitates a process of self-destruction to make way for a stronger sense of
self, specifically the Ubermensch/Superman.[17]
The lack of identity, and the mistrust and paranoia regarding the contemporary
society, and the ‘passion for abolition’ that describes the disenfranchised
modern male caught in a seemingly hollow and meaningless existence, evolves
into a violent motivation to rebel, acting out violently, as did Timothy
McVeigh, or retreating into a new marginal identity of a ‘survivalist’ or
‘militia’ man, or in Fight Club’s
case, ‘Space Monkey’.[18]
The film, released in the wake of the Columbine Shooting, was vilified by
numerous critics for this glamorization of violence and paramilitary actions,
but the paramilitary order that Tyler Durden creates is the enemy that the
Narrator ends up rebelling against, and director David Fincher defended his
work by critiquing violence and the way it is often portrayed as a way to solve
problems, whereas in Fight Club the
Narrator specifically states that after fighting, “nothing is solved”, it is
not an answer or way to resolve problems.[19]
Edward Norton, the actor who plays the unnamed narrator in the film, argues in
reference to Fight Club that “art has
always reflected society, art doesn’t invent violence.”[20]
Fight Club highlights the
emotions of discontent and distrust of corporate capitalism and the unequal
world that laissez-faire globalization was creating, that run counter to the
positive impression the economic boom of the ‘90s offered. The sense of
paranoia and disempowerment of mainstream heteronormative white culture
experienced during the ‘90s is paralleled here in acts of violent political
subversion and an attempt to destroy the financial credit system to return
America to a primitive machismo honour-society. In a broader historical sense,
the retreat of the Federal Government from active participation in the lives of
Americans in the ‘90s, through dismantling of the welfare safety-nets and
financial regulations put in place to protect against the corruption and
destructive economic practices of the ‘20s and ‘30s, gave rise to a new generation
of disadvantaged ‘Forgotten Men’ disguised by apparent affluence and
prosperity. Tyler Durden’s Fight Club and Project Mayhem movements are an
outlet and identity for these Forgotten Men to reclaim their masculinity, and
in the case of the Narrator, to escape his ‘bourgeois’ identity through a
flirtation with danger made possible and desirable by his comfortable
affluence, in much the same way as the ‘cultural revolution’ of the ‘60s has
been seen by some as the natural result of capitalism’s success.[21]
Inheriting the past, the new ‘Forgotten Men’ and those rebelling against the
new ‘establishment’ global corporate capitalism represented resorted to the
protest, culture-jamming and terrorist tactics of ‘60s rebels such as the
Weather Underground and the Situationists, mirrored in Fight Club by Project Mayhem’s assault on corporate America. Although
the vast conspiracy the film narrates is a comic exaggeration, Fight Club touches a broad range of
social anxieties of both left and right wing America, from left-wing
anti-corporate/anti-globalization protests and anarchist movements, to
right-wing reaction to the loss of hegemonic national character that a nation
at war provides.
Bibliography
Film
‘Fight
Club’, dir. David Fincher (Regency Enterprises, 1999)
‘Office
Space’, dir. Mike Judge (20th Century Fox, 1999)
‘American
Beauty’, dir. Sam Mendes (DreamWorks SKG, 1999)
‘The
Matrix’, dirs. Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski (Village Roadshow
Pictures/Silver Pictures, 1999)
‘The
Big Lebowski’, dir. Joel Coen (Working Title Films/Bitter Creek Productions
Inc., 1998)
‘Three
Kings’, dir. David O. Russell (Village Roadshow, 1999)
Literature
Baudrillard,
J., The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,
Bloomington, 1995
Dussere,
E., ‘Out of the Past, into the Supermarket: Consuming Film Noir’, Film Quarterly, 60, 1, 2006, pp.16-27
Foner,
E., Give Me Liberty!, 2nd
edn., New York, 2009
Graham,
B., ‘Prize ‘Fight’ – Brad Pitt and Edward Norton go the distance in a brutal
and funny world’, The San Francisco
Chronicle (15 October, 1999)
Kimball, R., The Long March:
How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, San Francisco,
2000.
Klein,
N., No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand
Bullies, New York, 2000
Moses,
M., Fighting Words: An interview with Fight Club director David Fincher, 1999,
available at: http://web.archive.org/web/20071211235459/http://www.drdrew.com/article.asp?id=198
Nietzsche,
F., Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans.
Graham Parkes, New York, 2005
Quiney,
R., ‘”Mr Xerox,” the Domestic Terrorist, and the Victim-Citizen: Masculine and
National Anxiety in Fight Club and
Anti-Terror Law’, Law and Literature
19, 2, 2007, pp.327-56.
[1]
‘Fight Club’, dir. David Fincher (Regency Enterprises, 1999)
Bob Graham, ‘Prize ‘Fight’ – Brad Pitt and Edward
Norton go the distance in a brutal and funny world’, The San Francisco Chronicle (15 October, 1999)
[2]
‘Office Space’, dir. Mike Judge (20th Century Fox, 1999)
‘American Beauty’, dir. Sam Mendes (DreamWorks SKG,
1999)
‘The Matrix’, dirs. Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski
(Village Roadshow Pictures/Silver Pictures, 1999)
‘The Big Lebowski’, dir. Joel Coen (Working Title
Films/Bitter Creek Productions Inc., 1998)
‘Three Kings’, dir. David O. Russell (Village
Roadshow, 1999)
[3]
Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty!, 2nd
edn., New York, 2009, pp.998-1001.
[4]
Ibid, pp.1004-6
[5]
Ruth Quiney, ‘”Mr Xerox,” the Domestic Terrorist, and the Victim-Citizen:
Masculine and National Anxiety in Fight
Club and Anti-Terror Law’, Law and
Literature 19, 2, 2007, pp.333-5.
[6]
Foner, p.1015
Quiney, pp.334-6
[7]
Foner, pp.1015, 1027
Quiney, p.335
[8]
Foner, pp.996-8
[9]
Erik Dussere, ‘Out of the Past, into the Supermarket: Consuming Film Noir’, Film Quarterly, 60, 1, 2006, p.24
[10]
Foner, pp.998, 1014-5
Dussere, p.24
[11]
Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the
Brand Bullies, New York, 2000.
[12]
Foner, pp.1012-3
[13]
Quiney, p.334
[14]
Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not
Take Place, Bloomington, 1995.
[15]
Quiney, pp.342-3
[16]
Quiney, pp.337-8
[17]
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes, New York, 2005, pp.9-17.
[18]
Quiney, 331-2
Foner, p.1030
[19]
Michael Moses, Fighting Words: An interview with Fight Club director David
Fincher, 1999, available at: http://web.archive.org/web/20071211235459/http://www.drdrew.com/article.asp?id=198
[20]
Ibid., p.1
[21]
Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the
Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, San Francisco, 2000,
pp.248-9
