Hurt So Good: Fight Club, Masculine Violence, and the Crisis of Capitalism

And if . . . a little sensual pleasure falls to my share, I feel justified in accepting it as some slight compensation for the inordinate measure of suffering . . . that has been mine for so many past years. - Freud's Dr. Schreber in Three Case Studies [Fight Club] examines violence and the roots of frustration that are causing people to reach out for such radical solutions ... . Because a culture that doesn't examine its violence is a culture in denial, which is much more dangerous. - Edward Norton (qtd. in Svetky) "First rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club. Second rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club." For a movie that advocates its own silence, the critical reception of 1999's Fight Club has exploded into an array of polarized discourse surrounding the film's critical yet problematic portrayal of late capitalism's obsessive push for profits and excessive consumerism, and, more importantly, the latter's damaging effects on an American masculinity gone soft. Edward Norton plays "Jack," a nameless insomniac and unfulfilled cog in the wheel of bureaucratized America who cannot seem to escape the (feminized) trappings of corporate oppression and Swedish home furnishings. In his attempt to heal himself of his malaise, Jack encounters Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt, who seduces Jack into co-founding Fight Club, an underground world of rebellion and hyper-masculinity where men can reclaim their lost manhood by stripping down and pummeling each other pulpy. The club, however, quickly turns into a highly organized paramilitary group that rebels against a seemingly impersonal and feminized dominant culture by blowing up that very world. The film continues to unravel as an adrenaline-induced joyride that ultimately leaves even Jack astounded when, in the end, corporate buildings come tumbling down. The twist at the end of the film is that Jack and Tyler are the same person, two identities inhabiting the same body; Jack is revealed as an individual who suffers from the actual medical disability, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). In locating the recovery of a socially disempowered manhood in a divided subject that seeks release in brute, regressive masculinity, the film suggests that violence is not only symptomatic, but also constitutive, of this condition of dissociated identity. Critics of the movie, such as Henry Giroux, find the film pedagogically irresponsible because it ostensibly encourages a male revolt against a constraining feminized culture that has hijacked men of their rugged individualism and instead has transformed them into cubicled automatons that serve the faceless world of corporate America. Moreover, Giroux argues that this transformation is not the product of feminized culture but, rather, is the result of a privatized understanding of agency. This understanding, as exemplified in Fight Club, does not seek to resolve personal dissatisfactions in the public sphere but instead suggests that agency is possible only through private and violent expressions. In contrast to these arguments, though, I feel it is possible to read Fight Club as a movie that attempts to satirically critique this phenomenon that links the problem of emasculative capitalism with violent solutions. As Suzanne Clark is keen to point out in her response to Giroux's article, is it possible that this "brilliant artistic representation of violent acts," in its disruptive way, is able to incite discourse about gender identity and violence and thus "leave ... space for some public discussion"? (419). I am inclined to agree with Clark that Fight Club is a film that attempts to open this space for us. Giroux's scathing denunciation of the film, though valid in many respects, overlooks the use of violence as a vehicle for critiquing a culture dictated largely by consumerism and commercialism, as well as exposing the contradictions of normative gender relations. My argument is that violence in Fight Club is a necessary device in discussing gender identity, namely the production of white masculinity. …