The 20th Anniversary of Fight Club and The Matrix: Two Futures All Around Us in 2019
By: Barry Vacker
Tags: Philosophy, Art, Culture, Media, Film

The Zero of Fight Club

Based on the 1995 novel by Chuck Palahniuk, David Fincher’s Fight Club opened with Tyler Durden holding a gun in the mouth of Jack, accompanied by the following lines from Durden: “Three minutes. This is it. Ground zero.” The book and film depicted a violent rebellion against consumer society and the modern world, centered on brutal fistfights among gangs of GQ guys in an underground network of “fight clubs.” In so doing, the book and film offer clever and trenchant commentary about corporate life, consumer society, and evolving/devolving visions of masculinity. That much is obvious and has received ample commentary. No need to repeat all that, especially given the f*cked up “manliness” still on display everywhere, with advanced primates thumping their chests and claiming to make Russia and America great again. Perhaps that’s because there are broader and deeper philosophical issues on display in Fight Club.

The “fight club” movement was organized by an alienated corporate drone named Jack (Edward Norton), under the inspiration of his alter ago named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who took the form of a Luddite hipster-philosopher-terrorist attired in urban grunge anti-fashion fashions. Durden also sold soap (made in a most gruesome way), a metaphor for spiritual cleansing offered by the fight club movement. From fistfights, the movement expanded its scope and ambition to detonating corporate public sculpture and destroying the skyscrapers of credit card companies, all in the effort to fully erase credit card debt—to get us to go “back to zero.” Zero debt is a smart plan, but the zeroes in both films mean much more.

The Unabomber Manifesto

As the fight clubs expanded in membership and networks, we discovered that Durden’s utopia was a premodern world, an agrarian-oriented hunter-gatherer society where people were attired in all-leather clothes and grew food amidst abandoned skyscrapers and superhighways. Over the course of the film, it became apparent that Tyler Durden was an urban Unabomber, acting on a much larger scale in the metropolis.

A former math professor, Ted Kaczynski was an American terrorist who took the name the “Unabomber” and mail-bombed scientists and technologists at universities and corporations in the 1980s and 1990s. Writing under the pen name FC, he authored The Unabomber Manifesto (1995), which argued that industrialization leads to apocalyptic doom for society and the environment. In a stunning move of intellectual blackmail, he forced the New York Times and Washington Post to publish the entire manifesto in the Sunday edition of their newspapers—in exchange for him to cease his mail-bombings. The newspaper publications led to Kaczynski’s brother identifying his writing style and alerting the FBI, who soon arrested Kaczynski living in a tiny cabin in the woods of remote Washington. Kaczynski was placed on trial and sentenced to life in prison, where he remains today.

The Unabomber’s proposed planetary eco-solution was to destroy all industrial technology, blow up all factories and burn the technology books, making possible the irreversible return to a hunter-gather society. Durden’s description of the future reflected the vision of the Unabomber:

“You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five- degree angle. . . .” (…) You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you’ll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles.”

This was the goal of Project Mayhem, Durden said, the complete and utter destruction of civilization. In the conclusion to the film, we return to “ground zero” and view the implosion of several skyscrapers in cinematic imagery very similar to the collapse of the Twin Towers two years later at Ground Zero.

Copies Masking Nothingness

“With insomnia, nothing is real. Everything’s far award. Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy”

In the film Fight Club, Jack offers the above lament while standing at a copy machine, on top of which is a Starbucks coffee cup. The copy machine methodically cranks out the copies, in a room full of identical workers also sipping Starbucks and making copies. Managerial drones making copies, converting skyscrapers into 100-story file cabinets. A thousand feet high, stacks of papers and computers, filled with data, managed by drones.

Jack expresses angst over the loss of authenticity and individuality in a world of malls, packed with mass-produced goods, and a mass media that never sleep, running 24/7, with an explosion of image and information. The real and authentic seem ever farther away, disappearing beyond the horizons of the mediated and artificial. The idea that “everything’s far away” also echoes the fate of the Big Bang universe expanding across the vast voids of billions of light years. That’s the great fear of Fight Club, that our mass-produced consumer society is concealing meaninglessness in a universe of expanding nothingness, dotted with galaxies and stars.

The Zero in The Matrix

The Matrix tapped into the same zero imagery. The film began with vertical columns of ever-changing green numbers, glowing and cascading down against a black background. The title — THE MATRIX — emerged from the glowing numbers. There followed more columns of cascading green numbers. Slowly zooming in on a single digit — 0 — moviegoers were propelled through the zero, through the void, the vanishing point, the mediated realm of nothingness, the virtuality of “the Matrix.” The Matrix is another retelling of Plato’s Cave, where prisoners are chained in a cave of illusory shadows they mistakenly believe represent the real world. In The Matrix version of the Cave, humans are enslaved to a global computer network, where the mediated world has become the “real world” for everyone—except Morpheus and his band of rebel hackers.

Outside the Matrix is “Zion,” the supposedly real world populated by real people. But Zion seems rather banal and boring, with everyone acting tough in drab gray clothes, making most moviegoers prefer the life inside the Matrix, with all the stylin’ fashions of the future—as displayed by Morpheus, Trinity, Switch, and Neo. A future without fashion is a dead future, precisely because fashion is primally connected to human identity in the universe.

Neo’s Book

In The Matrix trilogy, there is only one book shown and it is in Neo’s apartment. Early in the The Matrix, Neo (Keanu Reeves) opens a dark green book called Simulacra and Simulation; the book is a hollowed shell containing computer disks and other items. In that scene, the Wachowskis are referencing the most famous book of media philosopher Jean Baudrillard, the main theorist of “hyperreality.” In fact, Baudrillard is sort of hyperreal himself, kind of like Plato and Marshall McLuhan on steroids, with some occasional Jean-Paul Sartre as his energy drink to wash it down. That helps explain why Baudrillard is a controversial and complex thinker, whose explanations of the hyperreal are often vague or obscure.