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Wake-up call? Unpicking the Politics of Fight Club

16 MediaMagazineOnline – Politics & Power | December 2011 | english and media centre

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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

18 MediaMagazineOnline – Politics & Power | December 2011 | english and media centre