Fight Club Examination

Ostensibly, Fight Club is about a group of frustrated men creating anarchy. If we are thinking of Deleuze's piece about smooth spaces and extreme compartmentalization, we can see the film as a backlash against modernism. Men are tired of separating themselves from everything else. Tyler Durden's dream of an world free of debt, without needless items and the feminization of men. He wants a truly post-civilization America. The burden of modernism, of materiality, is just too much. The narrator, as described by Fincher, must "travel on a path to enlightenment in which he must 'kill' his parents, his god, and his teacher." Thus the film takes on a path of one man's spiritual growth in the face of stark modernism. As you can tell by my profile, Fight Club is one of my favorite films. I love the way the movie is set up, and its anarchic humor. There is so much going on thematically, cinematically, and emotionally, and it is all handled rather masterfully by the director David Fincher, proving that Alien 3 might not have been his fault after all. For me, this film resonates. There is something true in Durden's teachings, which many people can relate to. It's probably one of the most masculine films I have watched, and this is all symbolized in the male god who is Tyler Durden. Sorry for being crass, but he's almost a giant, wagging penis, preaching about the death of God like Nietzsche. Tyler is the epitome of manhood, of testosterone, of the obelisk. He is like the giants portrayed across ancient myth—the giants of Jotenheim who wage war on the Norse gods, the titans of Greek lore, Nimrod, the gibborim who raises the Temple of Babel, Goliath, King Og, the giants of the Incas, wiracochas. He wants to destroy the world because it is there. He wants to smash it pieces, make it into chaos, and bring down civilization and order. Like Tyler says, "Self improvement is masturbation. Now self destruction..." You have to kill everyone and everything internally to let go of these useless desires.

Tyler Durden's world is free-floating, always changing and in motion; however, the modern world is stagnant, and dead. Men aren't defined by what they do, but by what they own. Fighting is simplification—there is no class, no money, no hierarchy, no race, there is only one guy duking it out with the other. It's a relief to feel the physical pain; it knocks the man out of his psychosis. This world is a result of a lack of connective-ness. Everyone feels separate. Everyone works at pointless jobs. Everyone wants something more, but they can't name what. Everyone desires to have the world revealed to them, to have their eyes open, to be a part of something more important than themselves. A man needs to be away from women and go hunting, fighting, and killing. The woman's job is domestic, the man's is nomadic. This is a key word to Deleuze, who defines the nomad as being in between points. He never arrives at a permanent destination, but is constantly moving inside his territory. If Tyler is sick of having the world striated into increasingly smaller boxes, the nomad is a release from that pain. Thus the State tries to control this and keep men docile and tame, stealing from them their true nature. Organizations are always in the act of organizing, just like people are always in the act of being people, and trees always 'treeing'. The world is alive with movement, where materialism wants to squelch and place everything into nice little categories. Modernism creates a country of borders and demarcations. However, Fight Club wants us to remember that this is foolish—just examine the yin-yang table in the narrator's home, or Tyler's continued push for the narrator to let go of his prior ideas about materialism. To feel pain is recognize you are alive; there is no other alternative but to face the fact that you are a part of this cosmos.

Technology in this society is intrusive, it takes away man's need to fend for himself; and we can see how great this desire actually is. Men come from across the stratum of society to be a member of this ‘club’. The director, David Fincher, says this about his film: "We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman [the narrator] is created." Modernism has completely severed us from nature. Like Heidegger described, it slowly becomes "standing reserves", no longer part of a greater whole which we are also a member. It has robbed us of spiritually in our pursuit for more pleasure and safety. Because we dread pain and death (and forget to realize that pain is connected with feeling pleasure, and death is intimately coincided with being alive), our lives are meaningless. Men will sit at home in a figurative cave, raising the kids, just like the cavewoman. It is not in his nature to be inactive, to sit in a chair all day. These things do not give men a sense of worth. Instead, he wishes to fight, to feel alive and in connection with some sort of higher authority. I was reading Joseph Campbell's "The Power of Myth" the other day, and he says war can give a man similar emotions. When a person is standing on the precipice of death, of pain, that's when the world becomes brighter, more interesting. We see it when Tyler pulls his gun on the convenience store clerk and says, "Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel's life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted." We want to be slapped awake. We want to rage war. We want to fight the power. It's in our very nature; however, this is exactly opposite of what Foucalt's "societies of control" want from us. The rise of reality television programs, of sports, of the indebted nation, of useless left-right politics, work to distract us from ourselves. We are injected with chemicals from our food, as men physically become more effeminate from hormones in the water. Sperm count is falling across the Western world, and amphibians, the harbinger of environmental troubles, switch sexes. Feminists wage war on the male, and television sitcoms portray him as the bumbling idiot. Man, as a gender, is dying out, we are told in The Daily Mail, because of the weakness of the Y chromosome. Just like Operation Northwoods, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the sinking of the USS Maine, terrorist attacks are used to drive us further into endless wars to enrich the elites, and to steal the American citizens’ rights. A police state can be formed right under our noses because we as a nation are too caught up in who's going to win American Idol, what Glenn Beck or Keith Oberman said about the other party, or racial tit-for-tat. We can be played against each other and forced back into our houses as the Fed continues to pump more money into the hands of the bankers, as we begin to engage in operations in five Middle-East countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Pakistan), and our rights erode from under us. Tyler Durden is exactly the kind of person this system does not want, thus the endless war, the endless talk about race, and why there are more US troops on the Korean border than the American one. White people and minorities alike are constantly reminded how awful white culture is, and minority history is celebrated. Republicans and Democrats follow the exact same policy in office because our whole system is controlled by corporate interests and a wealthy elite. This is not the fault of capitalism or even government; it is the fault of the weakness of our politicians giving into lobbyists, into sponsorship. The corporatocracy, the revolving door, only drives us further and further into the pit. No one was watching the Congressman or Executive politicians selling out, and this might be a problem of “societies of discipline”. We are caught in a death spiral and Fight Club tries to offer a way out. Debt isn’t healthy. Debt is a scheme by the bankers to keep us enslaved. Erase it, and we all go back to zero, to quote the film.