December 10th, 2009
Belated movie review: Fight Club
Kill the corporations!
One of my favorite places to visit between writing essays in community college was www.tylerandjacks.com, inspired by the movie Fight Club. It was the first place I was able to see something cherished the way I cherished it. I was enthralled by the way the website brought the movie to life outside the theatre; it listed the eight rules to fight club, giving them an air of legitimacy by listing them in public, so they can be read and re-read and referenced in forgetful moments. It spoke in terms of individualism and freedom, which obviously appeals to my deepest instincts. I can’t overstate how much I loved the movie; I didn’t just print the screenplay to it; I corrected sections in my hard copy where the on-page dialogue didn’t match what was said on the big screen.
Perhaps it was just a matter of time that I would return to Tyler and Jack’s bloodstained basement out of sheer boredom. Surprisingly, the page is still going. The movie was released in 1999, and it’s 2009 as I’m writing this. Yet much like the run-down house Brad Pitt and Ed Norton lived in throughout most of the film, it’s been neglected. The last entry was posted in May 2005. The next to last entry was done in February 2002. Most of the images won’t load correctly. One internal link leads to a page which bluntly states, “Page not finished yet. Look somewhere else.” I believe it was that way a decade ago.
When I returned to it, I didn’t expect to be assailed with juvenile populism. The 2005 post rants about how urbanization has destroyed the habitats of animals and how the world is overcrowded, as if human beings were alien locusts preying on a peaceful planet. It drones on about greed. It even presumes to judge what size home two people should live in. I thought “come on, if Tyler Durden was anything, he wasn’t a whiny, progressive activist.” Fight Club’s anti-consumerism was proud and anarchistic, not derivative and political. Right?
Next I perused the 2002 post. Again, a webmaster I was once impressed by made me both giggle and shake my head in disappointment. He rants about people in business suits avoiding those whose clothing been “dirtied through an actual day of work.” He presumes that the upper class is inherently hostile to the lower class, while the lower class “hates the upper class for having it all.” Especially silly is a section where Tyler, the webmaster, moans about SUVs and the “oversized penises” that drive them. Seriously, dude.
But maybe that’s just what happens to Fight Club fans after the novelty of the movie wears off. They become insufferable political commentators. Look at me. So I mosey on down the page to his older entries, which span from October 2000 To February 2001, hoping to see something other than the fetal stages of some guy’s stale anti-capitalist philosophy.
Nope. Tyler is a luddite. After reading his earliest posts, it dawned on me that the bulk of his actual commentary used Fight Club as a vehicle for anti-consumerism. Looking at it though a more mature perspective than I once had, it quickly became apparent to me that evil smokestacks, evil cell phones, evil shopping, evil Styrofoam, evil Starbucks, and evil (insert common symbol of consumerism here) has haunted this writer for a long time. Perhaps it still does.
The Marxist sensibilities run deeper. Tyler imagines that people who drive luxury cars think they own the road. He talks about a war between the poor and the rich (envious at all?). He posts a “homework assignment” to all of his readers to write things such as “do you know how many hungry mouths this bill can feed” on large denominations. In a particularly dramatic moment, he argues that the internet is the anti-Christ.
His Thanksgiving 2000 post? “In a few days it will be the time of year when all the families get together to eat turkey, get fat, and watch football, in order to celebrate the white man trying to make good with the Indians after they raped their land. How convenient that we always forget that part?” Oh please. That’s the only part some of us know.
Amazingly, after telling the “rich” how they should behave, dictating the proper size home for couples, and shoving anti-consumerist propaganda down his reader’s throats, the webmaster proclaims that no one should tell him how to run his life.
After digesting what was in front of me, I had a scary thought. Had I been asleep all this time? When I found out that my favorite old website had been sullied with tedious political b.s., I rationalized that it was an anomaly. When I saw that the two most recent posts were quite silly, I told myself that Tyler’s energies had just steered off course after the movie hype had died. When I found out that most of what the guy wrote was immature anti-capitalism, I told myself that he had misread the film, which obviously was about bucking norms and radical individualism. Or perhaps not so obviously. I had to watch the movie again.
To greatly simplify the plot, the protagonist, “Jack,” can’t sleep—at all. His life is dreary and predictable. He spends his days going through the motions, hopping from city to city, fulfilling his job duties as recall coordination for a car company. He copes with his insomnia by attending support groups for people suffering from life-threatening conditions such as bowel cancer. One night he comes home to see that his apartment has exploded in a freak accident. This leads him to living in a run-down, possibly abandoned home with Tyler Durden, an eccentric soap salesman he met on one of his flights. They beat each other up to find meaning. Other men see this and join in. This starts a nationwide trend where all kinds of men gather in basements to beat each other up to find meaning. These groups are called “fight clubs.” Eventually Tyler uses these men to form an army. His plan is to liberate society from emasculating commercialism by blowing up credit card buildings. Eventually Jack finds out he actually is Tyler, a split personality which developed because “Jack” doesn’t have what it takes to lead men like “Tyler” does. Jack struggles with this until he blows out the back of his cheek. Then the credit card buildings are blown up and the credits roll. Oh yeah, Helena Bonham Carter plays a supporting role.
I know the plot sounds strange, but from the first time I saw it, Fight Club spoke to me. I’ve never seen anything quite like it before or since. It’s the Gen X version of Huckleberry Finn, a coming of age story that captures its place in time. Tyler Durden, the movie’s radical protagonist, alludes to my generation’s unfilled search for meaning. When he bemoaned that he saw “an entire generation pumping gas and waiting tables,” it resonated with me; I don’t want to die without accomplishing anything important, but before September 11th, 2001, there didn’t seem to be any way to do that. For young people who want to change the world, a life spent shuffling papers in a peaceful era seems like a life wasted.
Regarding Tyler the webmaster, a case can be made that the movie is leftist propaganda. One of the film’s dominant themes is anti-commercialism. It obsesses over the “IKEA nesting instinct,” which appears to be the unforgivable sin of purchasing clever furniture to fill one’s dwelling. The narrator, Jack, whines that corporations are going to name interstellar discoveries, such as “the Microsoft galaxy.” Then there’s the ridiculous portrayal of Jack’s employer: no matter how potentially dangerous a known defect in his company’s vehicles may be, his company won’t initiate a recall if it isn’t cost-effective. For those who haven’t seen the movie in a while, the formula goes something like this: Take the number of false accusations about the business class. This is A. Multiply A by the probable rate of exposure, how often this paranoid slander is exposed as such, which is B. Multiply that by the average loss of political capital caused by B, which is C. A times B times C equals X. If X costs a group less political capital than admitting they were just preying on ignorance and fear, they don’t concede anything. I admit my memory might be a little fuzzy on this one.
Then there’s Tyler Durden’s revolution: Fight Club became Project Mayhem, whose ultimate goal was to blow up credit card buildings and create chaos, resulting (somehow) in a more holistic way of life where the Sears Tower is abandoned and superhighways are transformed into agriculture. No less than terrorism, but it’s presumably justified because they’re not planning on killing any people. As one can see through these examples, Fight Club could be mistaken for a left-wing rant.
Yet the film’s awkwardly wielded anti-commercialism is merely a plot device. First and foremost, Fight Club is about my generation’s search for meaning. The men of my generation don’t relate to our surrounding culture, so we “move against people” in the Hornean sense. The best lines from the movie come one of Tyler’s speeches. “We’re the middle children of history…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.” This yearning for meaning is the heart of the movie, not any of its revolutionary tendencies. It wouldn’t be difficult to rewrite Fight Club against the backdrop of dehumanizing statism instead of dehumanizing corporatism.
Besides, reading the movie as a straight political statement ignores a lot of senseless behavior on Tyler Durden’s part. He pees in his restaurant’s soup. He splices single frames of porn into family films at a movie theatre. He has his followers put up fake billboards informing people that they can fertilize their lawn with used motor oil. It’s hard to see how these specific acts contribute to any political cause. As Jack says about halfway through the film, “I’m a thirty year-old boy.” Tyler’s revolution is simply a colorful way for his generation to belatedly come of age.
I’ve heard Fight Club described as a fascistic film. The most compelling case for this would be the moments where Tyler Durden forces people to act against their will, but for their own good. There’s a scene where Tyler grabs Jack’s hand, gives him a chemical burn, and refuses to alleviate it until Jack accepts that he’s going to die. Later, and still before “Jack” realizes he and Tyler Durden are one in the same, Tyler blows up Jack’s apartment to liberate him from his possessions. Somehow I doubt a single person in America would appreciate it if I did either of these things for them.
Along with blowing things up to “liberate” people from commerce, Tyler Durden has a creepy ritual he calls “human sacrifice.” One example of this is shown as Tyler drags a computer store employee into a back alley, holds a gun to his head, and asks him what he wanted to be when he grew up. Stammering, the employee eventually tells Tyler he wanted to be a veterinarian, but there was too much school. Tyler responds by taking the man’s license (which has his home address on it), and telling him that if he isn’t on his way to becoming a vet in six weeks, he’ll be dead. This is a textbook example of fascism, forcing someone to act in their “best interests” under the threat of violence. A real life Tyler Durden would never allow you to go back to your life as usual—uninvolved, uninformed.
This is a much more serious critique that the anti-capitalist one. In the movie, Tyler tells his army that they’re not beautiful and unique snowflakes, that no one is special. “You are made out of the same decaying, organic matter as everything else.” I’m tempted to dismiss this as conventional military training; the same kind of verbal assault drill sergeants use to break down men before reshaping them into loyal soldiers. But this ignores the film’s unmistakable egalitarian streak.
What’s disturbing about this is that it’s a rejection of the value of diversity. I don’t mean this in the popular sense, that we’re all special and deserve to be recognized as such, the way Stuart Smalley would. Diversity is an often misused term because it implies two contradictory assumptions: all human beings are unique, yet essentially equal. This makes it suitable for moral doctrine (“…all men are created equal,”), but useless everywhere else.
Obviously not everyone was made equal, in the worldly sense. We all have different skills, genes, and tastes. We have different ideals and philosophies. We’re not even morally equal. I’m safe in assuming that even though I’ve done some things I’m ashamed of, I’m a better person than anyone who’s paid money to gang-rape a drugged-out teenager.
The true value of diversity is the realization that there’s nothing wrong with variety. Differences are what make people unique. They allow us to recognize talents in individuals. If everyone was equal, we would all deserve the same rewards in life. But we’re not, so it isn’t fair to say that a man whose skills and dedication and character and even luck made him a tycoon should have the same quality of life as someone who doesn’t have those things. Human beings aren’t ants; we weren’t made to live under guttural socialism where everything we do is for the common good.
Yet Tyler Durden’s goal is to level the economic system, an attempt to erase class distinctions. This goes against my good memories of the movie, but Fight Club is essentially anti-individualistic. The idea that one man can be more remarkable than another is completely ignored. Instead, it’s been replaced with a quasi-Marxist appeal to militaristic unity, where “Space Monkeys,” Tyler’s soldiers, aren’t allowed to have a name until they’re dead.
But let me stop here. Truly I’m reading too much into it, and I suspect if I take David Fincher’s film too seriously I’ll end up baiting myself. Fight Club isn’t a sinister movie; in fact, it’s still one of my favorites. Anyone who doesn’t understand the mood of young American men at the end of the Clinton era should watch it; in a very real sense, Fight Club is a cultural artifact, worthy of being preserved. At its worst, it’s more like the Federal Reserve’s response to the burst of the housing bubble. It’s a manifestation of the desire to do something about my generation’s lack of purpose (pre-9/11) divorced from the fear that that something could have negative consequences. Its fascistic undertone is incidental, and may be completely out of line with what the director envisioned. But then again, isn’t that always the case with left-wing revolutions?