Amazing Satire and Philosophy

Rating: 10/10 (7 June 2008)

Undeniably one of the best films of the tremendous cinematic year that was 1999, David Fincher's Fight Club is a cultural landmark. Chuck Palahniuk's acerbic first novel (and still the best the 5 of his books that I've read) is visualized with Fincher's stylistic creativity and the result is a modern classic.
Edward Norton plays a white collar stiff, whose life is so nondescript that he is known only as The Narrator. He acknowledges that he is mired in shallow consumerism; a slave to the "IKEA nesting instinct." He is also an insomniac and can only find catharsis and sleep after sitting in on 12-step program meetings for dying people. This strategy fails, however, when Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) pulls the same stunt and ruins the reality that he has found. After an explosion that destroys the narrator's apartment, he moves in with soap salesmen and revolutionary Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). Together, they start an underground society in which men reject civilization and unleash their primal urges upon each other.
Fight Club is often described as anti-consumerism or anti-establishment. There are, however, two less talked about ideas that I take away from it. The first is the conflict between biology and society. Sitting on a bus, the protagonists see a rather gaudy advertisement for Gucci underwear. Durden asks derisively, "Is that what a man looks like?" I would argue that it is the insidious nature of the consumer culture, that it actually emasculates men by tapping into their male drives. It is the natural role of the male to be the hunter/gatherer, so buying things has become the modern incarnation of this. Another example of this interplay occurs when the narrator described how his father would leave his family to start a new one every six years. "Setting up franchises," says Durden. Interestingly, the behavior described here does approximate the behavior of human males, pre-civilization. The short average duration of modern marriages suggests the hard-wired nature of this behavior. The fight club, however, is an outright rejection of modern society, in which men revel in short bouts of non-lethal violence, perhaps as they were meant to. When these urges are bottled up, it may not be too much of a stretch to suggest that the result can be wars and genocide.
There are also, I believe, religious implications to the fight club and to Project Mayhem. Tyler Durden's philosophy seems to be part anarchism and part determinism, behaviorism and materialism (in the metaphysical sense; certainly not in the consumerist sense). He is about three parts B.F. Skinner and one part Henry David Thoreau. It is those facets of Skinner-type philosophy that are of the most interest to me and that Durden espouses most fervently. Like any good materialist, he utterly rejects the notion that human beings have any special worth. He extols to his followers: "You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else... We are all part of the same compost heap." Yet ironically, in supposedly freeing his followers from consumerism, he makes them slaves to his own purposes. They are shaved to become like the oft-mentioned sacrificial "space monkeys." They are removed of their names (this has a very anti-Christian feel to, since the having of and giving of names by humans is considered an important gift from God among the most meticulous followers of that religion). "Sooner or later we all became what Tyler wanted us to be," says the narrator. Durden also expropriates the idea of 'hitting bottom' as the beginning of salvation (the 12-step program is a fundamentally religious construct), further casting him as a sort of Anti-Christian. B.F. Skinner suggested that understanding the science of human behavior was the key to controlling that behavior benevolently. Similarly, Durden exerts control over his followers for what he believes are good ends. Whatever the merits of those ends, there is no doubt that Tyler, in some ways, becomes very much like the corporate fascists he despises.
Finally, Fight Club is a definitively 'male' movie. This is neither good nor bad, but it is undeniable. The character of Marla is entertaining, but almost entirely defined by her relationship to the two male protagonists. The picture would have almost worked without her. The idea of castration is presented as a deeply held male fear and is used skillfully throughout the movie. If we can take one thing away from this film, it would be the danger of denying the difference in biology between males and females. Males have a need for some level of violence and it is important that we have acceptable outlets for it. Conversely, it is interesting to take note of some of the ways in which society attempts to homogenize the sexes. Take the idea of "paternity leave" for new fathers - it's great in theory and it should certainly be an option, but I can almost guarantee that it will never become the norm, because it is a practice that is just so contrary to our deeply ingrained biological drives. To deny this is the height of naivety and will do no one any good.
Overall, Fight Club makes my top 10 list for superb acting (especially by Norton, the best American actor of his generation), great humor and satire and its excellent script, thanks largely to the excellent source material. To conclude, I'll quote the deterministic, yet strangely comforting words of Chuck Palahniuk, from near the end of Fight Club (the book): "We are not special. We are not crap or trash either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens."