Fight
Club appears to be a sequel to Clockwork Orange
(1971) for the yuppie X Generation, half of whom see their
parents get a divorce and are fatherless teenagers. (The word
"clockwork" is in the script!) Jack (played by Edward Norton)
narrates the film, explaining how his 1997 life of white-collar
employment and middle-class materialistic success bored him
until he fell under the spell of Tyler Durden (played by Brad
Pitt), who takes on part-time jobs so that he can engage in
mischief to deal with his own identity crisis. In the early
part of the film Jack has insomnia, but his physician will
not give him stronger sleeping pills, urging him instead to
attend alcoholics anonymous-type groups so that he will meet
those with real problems. Initially, the nightly meetings
provide enough emotional catharsis so that Jack can get a
good night sleep. Then Marla (played by Helena Bonham Carter),
another faker, starts attending the same meetings, so impotent
Jack no longer enjoys the experience. Looking for something
different, one night in the parking lot outside a bar Jack
greets Tyler, who asks him to slug him. The exhilaration of
the fight prompts them to repeat the ritual, and ultimately
Jack abandons his yuppie lifestyle to live in Tyler's ramshackle
house (after Tyler secretly plants a bomb to destroy his condo).
Others, watching the two slug it out, soon want to fight,
too, whereupon Tyler organizes the Fight Club, eight rules
in all, which meets in the basement under the bar. (The eight
rules appear patterned on the famous 12-step programs of the
AA groups.) Interchangeable parts in an overbureaucratized
world, where everyone is employed and thus feels no compulsion
to become politically active to get politicians on the ball,
the club's members belong to the working class in contrast
with middle class Jack and Tyler. Fight Club's camaraderie
provides the psychological support so that they can revert
to their own animalistic resources. Only Tyler enjoys sex
(with Marla). The others seem so crude in appearance that
they have obviously not been able to seek release via sex;
that they enjoy a nihilistic men's club, where men are topless,
is a clear sign of repressed homosexuality. Only through showing
muscle can they feel like men after their demasculinized postindustrial
jobs. In due course, Tyler changes the Fight Club into Project
Mayhem, a club with fascist rules that stockpiles explosives
in Tyler's home preparatory to blowing up high rises. The
Asian seen twice at Fight Club, however, is not invited to
join Project Mayhem, which has now become an all-white conspiracy.
Meanwhile, Tyler organizes Fight Clubs in several big cities,
and presumably Project Mayhem is about to go nationwide when
Tyler's death ends the film as high rises are exploded and
fall to the ground (the Oklahoma City bombing writ large).
What is most interesting about the film, which suggests that
brutal violence is a personal and societal solution to the
ennui of the X Generation, is that working class members of
the filmviewing audience are favorably aroused by the senseless
violence. For the working class, the excitement is the fisticuffs,
whereas yuppy Tyler enjoys organizing the clubs, and yuppy
Jack gets his kicks by bonding with a Hitler. In short, if
Fight Club's director David Fincher is seeking
to explain why extremist groups are gaining popularity in
the X Generation and why serial killers emerge at post offices
and elsewhere, the message may have boomeranged, since Fight
Club could for skinheads be perceived as the antidote
to the 1988 film Colors, which mythologized
urban Hispanic gangs, despite the film noir and comedic intentions
found in Fight Club's tagline "Mischief. Mayhem.
Soap." For more eloquent reflections, Nitzschean and otherwise,
the novel by Chuck Palahniuk is recommended reading, but the
visual images on the screen have tremendous power to make
viewers contemplate where postindustrial society is really
heading and beckon the filmviewer back for another look at
how easily a demagogue can organize anti-democratic militias.
Accordingly, the Political Film Society has nominated Fight
Club for an award as the best film of 1999 for raising
consciousness of the need for greater democracy. MH
I
want to comment on this film
