2. MM
It’s a set text for A2 Film students
which has divided critics and
audiences alike for its complex and
contradictory messages. Is it an
extreme right-wing call for violent
revolution, a satirical critique of
capitalism, or a black comedy of
psychosis? Mark Ramey suggests
a range of interpretations of the
ideology of David Fincher’s Fight Club.
Although Fight Club (Fincher USA 1999) was
largely a critical and commercial failure on its
release, it has now become a cult movie, fuelled
in part by the film’s many political interpretations.
Fight Club has variously been read as an
anti-capitalist call-to-arms, a manifesto for
anarchic-primitivism (advocating a return to
a de-industrialised, non-organised society) and
even a demand for paramilitary rule and
strong leadership. It seems that Fight Club
can talk to those on both the far right and far
left of the political spectrum. On such readings
Fight Club is anti-democratic and advocates
violent revolution. This article will hopefully help
students of A2 Film Studies develop a political
response to Fight Club in the light of these
diverse interpretations.
It is clear from the contemporary high-profile
reviews of Pulitzer prize-winning US critic Roger
Ebert (‘cheerfully fascist’) and the outspoken
Evening Standard film columnist Alexander
Walker (‘resurrects the Fuhrer principle’) that
many initial reactions to Fight Club were based
on the film’s supposed right-wing politics.
It is argued that the film takes a dramatic and
downward turn with the formation of Project
Mayhem. Its recruits, the space monkeys, become
barely disguised Nazi black shirts; and Tyler
Durden is elevated to the status of a charismatic
Hitler-like autocrat who dominates his disciples
and victims with emotive propaganda and the
threat of violence. Tyler’s soap is culled from the
bodies of the rich just as the Jews were‘farmed’
for their body parts in the death camps. Tyler
and Jack dehumanize the recruits to their private
army by physically and verbally abusing them
and even banning their names. Project Mayhem,
like the Nazis, aims to destabilise society through
well-orchestrated propaganda, violence and
vandalism. And, just like the Nazis, Project
Mayhem enables an elite to enact brutalising
transformations on the people –‘human
sacrifices’. Finally we have the sense that the past
is a failure, and that for the truly modern world to
emerge a cleansing is needed: Tyler’s destruction
of the ideologically-polluted past (‘credit records’
in the film, and the‘National Museum’in the
novel) is the equivalent of the Nazis burning
books.
Jesse Kavadlo on the other hand, in an essay
on Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club’s author, ,
presents a different view:
The book’s political subtext, far from right
wing, insinuates that our cherished bastions
of American liberty – the free market, liberal
autonomy, and family values – come loaded
with nascent totalitarianism’
You Do Not Talk About Fight Club
This view suggests that it is rampant
capitalism that leads to fascism. A culture
such as ours, overburdened with commodities
and with consumers targeted by aggressive
and ubiquitous marketing, leads to a strange
kind of far-right politics disguised as a liberal
democracy: political engagement mutating into
brand loyalty and purchasing power.
So perhaps Ebert and Walker are onto
something, and Fight Club is wishfully evoking
a desire for strong leadership and an end to
woolly liberalism? Or perhaps Kavadlo is right,
and it’s the paradox of fascism inherent in
capitalist liberalism that is the narrative’s real
target. Whatever the answer, it is easy to see
why both ends of the political spectrum were
enraged by the film: conservative right-wingers
fearing the individualistic anarchy and nihilism
of its first half; and liberal left-wingers loathing
the cultish militarism and tyranny of its last half.
However for any of these critiques to have
credibility we should look more closely at
what the filmmakers actually say about the
film’s politics. Director David Fincher and the
cast were largely working on the film under
the assumption that it was to be variously a
dark comedy, a drama of male maturation, a
leftfield love story, and a satire of contemporary
life – but not really a text that argues strongly
for any one specific political stance. In his book
Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher, James
Swallow quotes Fincher as saying:
I don’t see the film as a condemnation of
capitalism … but I do think it’s a definite
condemnation of the lifestyle seekers, the
lifestyle sellers and the lifestyle packagers.
People misread a lot of what happened in
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Fight Club as some sort of anarchist recruiting
film, and really, I don’t think the movie really
promotes any specific answers.
So what of the political mechanism of
revolutionary violence apparently proposed in
Fight Club? Fincher notes that
I always saw the violence in this movie as
a metaphor for drug use … [Jack] has a
need. … The violence gives him the pain he
feels. You’re talking about a character that’s
ostensibly dead. You’re talking about a guy
who’s been completely numb. And he finally
feels something and becomes addicted to
that feeling.
To rail against the political leanings of Fight
Club is perhaps to read the film too literally.
It is to confuse what the film ‘depicts’with
what it‘prescribes’. It is dangerous to forget
the messy narrative at the expense of its lurid
representations. Jack is a confused, depressed
and emotionally numb insomniac. He cannot
relate to humans in a normal situation –
beyond scenes of his morally repugnant work
and alienating office life – so we witness him
metaphorically and literally ‘in transit’, lost in a
‘single-serving’, sterile world of hotel rooms and
airports. When not working he spends time in his
apartment browsing IKEA catalogues and starring
at the TV like a zombie. His fridge, like his soul, is
empty and lacking substance. The first ‘subliminal
Tyler’we see presages the catharsis offered by
therapy groups and is not only evidence of Jack’s
narrative predicament but also wakes us up as
spectators. As Jack slips further into a schizoid
world we are forced to actively engage in the
(often passive) experience of watching a film.
Tyler’s appearance is also a reminder that we
are literally inside the mind of a mad man.
Indeed the film starts inside that mind, inside
the fear-centre of Jack’s brain. Jack’s frustrations
are, however, real; and their causes are real
too. As Fincher says, the‘lifestyle seekers and
sellers’are the real villains of Jack’s ‘Everyman’
tale. The real target of the film is the vapid and
enervating nature of consumer culture, and the
subsequent fascistic character of Project Mayhem
is merely the deranged fantasy of a powerless
man desperately trying to gain control of his Self.
The Project soon overpowers Jack (such is its
reprehensible nature) and Jack eventually realises
that he doesn’t need disciples (fight club), a God
(Tyler) or the IKEA catalogue to become fulfilled.
He just needs Marla.
It could be argued that Fight Club highlights
a political philosophy known as Luddite
Utopianism or anarchic-primitivism. Tyler
sums up this position in his desire to return the
world to ‘ground zero’– a pre-industrial agrarian
utopia. According to him, Project Mayhem’s going
to ‘save the world by producing a cultural ice
age. A prematurely induced dark age.’He later
fantasises about hunting elk in the forests that
in the future will have reclaimed the Rockefeller
Centre in New York. He wants to end civilisation
and the great cultural legacy that supports
it – a legacy symbolised by museum vaults and
credit card company data banks. Tyler’s war
with the past is largely informed by his war with
the future; modernism is his enemy. He argues
against a technologically driven utopian future
where progress and equality are realised on a
global scale. Tyler takes-up-arms against modern
culture. His battle plan, the plan of an immature
alter ego given flesh, is often facile, chaotic
and confused, as one might expect,. Targets
range from individual sacrifices or resurrections
(‘near life experiences’) to the destruction of
civic art, fake castrations of public officials,
demagnetising rental video tapes, urinating into
soup at restaurants, splicing pornography into
family films at the cinema, and of course setting
up a franchise of fight clubs. The final act of
commercial apocalypse and the destruction of
the credit card company tower blocks is in itself a
hugely elaborate prank. The collapsing towers are
a statement, a line drawn in the sand, but not the
fall of the Bastille.
By smashing the old world order, Tyler hoped
to usher in a neo hunter-gatherer culture. But
this is fantasy not politics. By throwing-out
the superficiality of a heavily mediated culture
Tyler also dispenses with the Law, the Arts,
and knowledge accumulated over millennia. A
dark age is not dark just because there are no
lights: it is dark because chaos and irrationality
walk abroad. The Luddite’s problem is that they
hate the technological present and fantasize
nostalgically about a simpler past that crucially
they think they can return to. But this is‘black-
and-white’thinking, and lacks the complex
response needed for a complex solution. Tyler’s
political views are at best childish and at worst
mad; and critically they are something the mature
Jack ultimately rejects.
In my view then, the political message of
Fight Club, lies in its characterisation of (a) the
misguided but seemingly empowering appeal
of extremist political cults and (b) the desire to
re-engage with a reality that is otherwise heavily
mediated and alienating. On such a reading
Fight Club is a political wake-up call, but one
that lacks a consistent political ideology. The film
identifies a problem, and hints at some possible
solutions; but these solutions are the product of
a damaged mind. Fight Club is then ultimately a
film about the symptoms of a cultural madness
– a madness represented by the unhappy life
of one man. It is not however a film with a well-
conceived political remedy. Jack ultimately rejects
Tyler’s‘insane’political approaches in favour of
humanism, compassion and love. And so must
we.
Mark Ramey is Head of Media at Collyers Sixth Form College,
Horsham
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