The Sword and the Olive Branch

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 11^th, 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?

Posted in Belated movie reviews | Comments Off

Why The Dark Knight isn’t a conservative film

The post 9-11 era hasn’t been a golden age in cinema.  Today’s comedies aren’t trail-blazing satires; they’re not even original.   Pay for a comedy today, and chances are you’ll be throwing ten dollars at yet another stoner film or half-hearted romantic / buddy movie.  Will Farrell, Owen Wilson, and Vince Vaughn have been making the same movies in different forms for over a decade.  In efforts to placate America’s hyperactive sense of nostalgia, filmmakers have ceaselessly been remaking retired semi-popular shows our modern culture’s image, taking away the dated charm that made Starsky and Hutch (just to cite one example) barely palpable.  Today’s most intelligent movies, the semi-independent films made in the I Heart Huckabee mold, are often enjoyable, but are also excessively subdued to the point of distaste.  There’s a fine line between clever and glib, and the Parker Posey crowd reliably stumbles back and forth over it.  Even our landmark epic, The Lord of the Rings, doesn’t hold a candle to The Godfather or original Star Wars trilogy. 

Immersed in cinematic crap, I was beginning to worry that the millennium’s first decade of cinema would never find an identity.  When our documentaries are more compelling that our fictions, our imaginations are in poor shape.   One reason Americans are into short-term nostalgia is that today’s films are blandly formless.  Like bad Jazz music, every wonderful effort such as Kill Bill has been drowned out in a self-indulgent sea of promising stanzas that are never fully realized.  Today’s films have no coherent theme like the earnest but corny 1980’s or the colorful reactionary impulse of the 1990’s.  From the style to the dialogue to most of the pop culture references, a movie filmed in 2002 is difficult to distinguish from one produced five years later.  The Dark Knight may have changed all of that in 2008. 

Out of a combination of apathy and frugality, I don’t see a lot of movies soon after they’re released.  For example, I just saw King Kong (2005).  But I loved the last Batman movie, Batman Begins, and everything I heard about the second Christian Bale effort appealed to me.  It was supposed to be engaging, complex, and inconsolably bleak—it’s as if it were made with my personal cinematic tastes in mind.  So last summer I stood in line for an hour with hundreds of other Southern Californians, 80% of which were likely transplants from another region.  It was worth the wait plus twice the admission.

The plot was so detailed that I couldn’t give it justice without turning this into an essay, so I’ll only skim over it: The Joker runs around terrorizing Gotham in novel ways while Batman risks exhaustion trying to stop him.  Several subplots complicate their efforts, which are so personal and dogged they resemble a particularly sadistic team-building retreat.  Before we go much further, one thing must be said: while the film was not sexual at all, nor particularly violent, I wouldn’t take a child to it, superhero worship be damned.  The characters and plot were too compellingly depressing. 

As several reviewers have mentioned, the most memorable character in the Dark Knight is The Joker.  I know Heath Ledger’s death must have earned him some accolades out of sympathy, but his performance was truly Oscar-worthy.  The awards he’s won from this role are due to more than polite posthumous fawning.  Ledger continued the tradition of memorable portrayals of the Joker, and raised the bar for future incarnations of the villain. 

Batman’s alpha-nemesis has always been a product of his time.  Cesar Romero was an over-the-top villain in the “BAM,” “POW,” “WHACK” Batman of the overwrought 50’s and 60’s.  Jack Nicholson played a polished, charming Joker in 1989, a mechanically polished, transitional era in pop culture.  In 2008, America was defined by a long-growing fetish for authenticity.  Hence, Ledger’s Joker isn’t overtly powerful or strong or even unbelievably intelligent; he’s just creepy.  He’s not a charmer who inspires loyal devotion, but a nerdy-voiced, greasy-haired weirdo who needs to threaten to blow himself up to survive leaving a room full of conventional thugs.  The new Joker can only inspire loyalty through money, fear, and exploitation of the mentally ill.  Otherwise, he’s relegated to recruiting gullible youths like a white supremacist.

Despite all of his ostensible vulnerability, Ledger’s Joker drew inspired the worst in me.  I often root for the villains in movies because they’re less detestable than Hollywood’s cloying impressions of heroism (See: Revenge of the Sith).  Yet I wanted Batman to use every resource he had available to kill The Joker, just to put an end to his terrorizing tactics.   What makes the Joker so villainous is that he’s perfectly at ease with his violence.  There is no grand motive other than to fulfill his urges.  Like everyone else in America, he is simultaneously acting out and being himself.  Today, nothing could be more resonant. 

Christian Bale also puts in a good performance, as well as one my favorite actors, Aaron Eckhart, who took on the movie’s most difficult role by portraying a realistic goody-good in Harvey Dent.  But as deep and complex as The Dark Knight is, the movie isn’t as good as Batman Begins for one reason: Batman Begins didn’t have a fascistic undertone.  To understand what I mean, we must discuss the script’s treatment of the aforementioned Mr. Dent. 

In juxtaposition to The Joker’s self-indulgent anarchy, Dent is an idealistic Gotham city attorney.  Like Rudy Giuliani, he spends his time persecuting the mob and ignoring death threats.  Unlike Rudy Giuliani, Dent is presented as a lofty paragon, a spotless human being cosmopolitan women like Rachel Dawes (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) want to marry.  As the story progresses, Dent finds himself entangled in The Joker’s feud with Batman, and by the end, The Joker has him kidnapped along with Rachel.  Dent, tied to a chair in a room full of 55-gallon drums full of explosive liquids, is told by the love of his life over speakerphone (she’s tied up at another location just like his) that she’ll marry him.  Dent tells her that she’s going to be o.k., but soon his brand-new fiancée is blown up and half of his face is burnt off as Batman inadvertently saves him instead of Rachel. 

Thus Harvey the light-bearer, whose self-sacrificial dedication to law and order couldn’t save the person closest to him, becomes Two-Face, a psychopath who decides whether his victims live or die based on a coin flip.  Embittered and driven, Harvey embarks on a quest to confront everyone who could possibly be held culpable for Rachel’s death (except for The Joker, who convinces Harvey he’s just a loon who can’t be held responsible for his crimes, sort of like the way America is blamed for Islamic terrorism).  This includes not only the corrupt officials who sold him and Ms. Dawes out to the mob (which contracted The Joker) but also Commissioner Gordon for tolerating so much corruption in his own office.  Two-face even threatens to kill Gordon’s pre-teen son, forcing Batman to kill Gotham’s former golden boy. 

While all of this is disturbing on some level, none of it is as depressing as the way Batman decides to deal with Dent’s death.  Because Dent’s crimes toward the end of his life could compromise the cases he made against hundreds of criminals, Batman decides to whitewash Dent’s final hours by all but forcing Police Commissioner Gordon to lie and say Batman committed all of Harvey Dent’s murders and then killed Dent in cold blood.  All because Batman decided that instead of the truth, Gotham “needs a real hero.”  The movie ends with a disgusting press conference, where Gordon plays his part and presents the whole of Dent’s life as heroic.  To be consistent, the next Batman movie will be required to have Che Guevara-like murals of Dent spray-painted on all the brick buildings. 

The movie didn’t have to end this way.  It could have been handled in a manner similar to this:  Batman, acknowledging that Dent had it in him to kidnap the police commissioner’s family and almost kill a child, allows Commissioner Gordon to tell the public the truth: Gotham’s white knight was overwhelmed by The Joker’s devilish ability to justify bad behavior.  Dent was constantly burdened by death threats, the love of his life was murdered, and half of his face had been burnt off.  None of that excuses the crimes he committed in the last hours of his life, but neither does it erase his past good deeds.  We still have Batman, but let Harvey’s story remind us that to truly keep Gotham afloat, we must remain vigilant against not only Gotham’s criminals, who we are in the middle of a virtual war against, but our own dark urges, which we can control.  Yes, we may have to try a few cases again, but that’s a consequence of having rule of law as opposed to a police state.  

But the end of the Dark Knight isn’t as nearly thoughtful.  Instead, Batman takes the blame for Dent’s crimes, unnecessarily inhibiting his own ability to confront evil.  He initiated dishonesty on the part of Gotham City’s law enforcement.  Yet for all of that, the only thing Batman accomplished was to make himself feel better by bearing someone else’s guilt.  Oh, and he compromised his future crime-fighting endeavors by turning an entire city against its most powerful hero, who’s too afraid of being held to unrealistic standards.  What’s so conservative about that? 

The Dark Knight has been mistakenly characterized as a right-wing fantasy.  While it’s refreshingly devoid of liberal moralizing, and even includes scenes where Batman beats The Joker during interrogation and commits one-time surveillance on his entire city, a vigilante’s disregard for legal protocol is not exactly uncommon in crime-fighting movies.  This film actually has little to say about the children of Russell Kirk.  More than anything, the Dark Knight is not some godforsaken political commentary, but the best movie of its era, an unmatched product of its time in terms of quality and the public’s positive reception to it.  But perhaps I’m overestimating Ledger’s performance; it could never be as creepy as real life, where tens of millions saw a movie, yet no one seemed to notice its implicit approval of whitewashing a political figure’s sins for the greater good. 

Cross-posted at

Posted in Belated movie reviews | No Comments »