Fight Club

Thomas E. Wartenberg, Thomas E. Wartenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136665622
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Released in 1999, Fight Club is David Fincher's popular adaption of Chuck Palahniuk's cult novel, and one of the most philosophically rich films of recent years. This is the first book to explore the varied philosophical aspects of the film. Beginning with an introduction by the editor that places the film and essays in context, each chapter explores a central theme of Fight Club from a philosophical perspective. Topics discussed include:

• Fight Club, Plato's cave and Descartes' cogito
• moral disintegration
• identity, gender and masculinity
• visuals and narration.

Including annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, Fight Club is essential reading for anyone interested in the film, as well as those studying philosophy and film studies.

Chapter 1

Thomas E. Wartenberg

INTRODUCTION

IN OUR POST - 9/11 WORLD, watching the final scene of Fight Club, in which the Narrator (Edward Norton) and Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) stand hand in hand watching the collapse of several skyscrapers as a result of a terrorist plot is uncanny. It is as if the film had anticipated the first national trauma to hit the United States in the twenty-first century: the terrorist attack planned by Al Qaeda in which hijacked planes precipitated the collapse of two buildings of the World Trade Center in New York City. It is significant that, in the film’s version, these traumatic events were caused by internal terrorists, not foreign ones. Project Mayhem, an anarchist, proto-fascist men’s organization that is the brainchild of Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), aims to disrupt the U.S. financial system by blowing up the headquarters of all the major banks.

Figure 1.1 Skyscrapers imploding

Although our retrospective viewing of this scene colors it in ways that the filmmakers could not have anticipated, this simply adds a layer to our problems in interpreting this troubling and absorbing film. For as viewers, we find ourselves repeatedly asking how we should interpret the film’s portrayal of its characters’ response to the alienating nature of American society. On the one hand, Fight Club seems to be acutely aware of problems that human beings have living in the corporate, branded world in which work no longer can be a source of meaning even for those it provides with the reward of opulent and comfortable sur-roundings. The film’s nameless narrator (Edward Norton) finds himself unable to sleep as a result of his isolation and alienation both at work and in his personal life. On the other hand, the solution the film initially offers and that accounts for its status as a cult film – the eponymous Fight Clubs that the Narrator and Durden found – morphs into a fantastic nightmare of fascist conformity. It is difficult to find a consistent perspective in the film and in our response to it on the Fight Clubs, the underground sites – are they an intentional parody of Plato’s Cave? – in which men come to beat each other and in which, as a result, they experience an authenticity that is precluded in their lives above ground. Are we attracted to the film only because we get to see Brad Pitt’s beautiful sculpted body half naked on the screen? Are we caught up in its violent sado-masochistic fantasy as a way out of our (post)modern conundrum? Are there other ways of understanding this intriguing yet troubling film?

Figure 1.2 Tyler reeling from a punch

These are some of the questions that motivate the contributors to this volume to assess the film and its philosophical vision. Because most of the essays include a synopsis of the film, I won’t include one here. Instead, I shall provide an introduction to each of the essays in this collection.

Many viewers of Fight Club have condemned the film for its celebration of male machismo masquerading as a serious critique of contemporary society. Murray Skees’ target in his contribution to this volume is an interpretation that takes just such a critical view of the film. Henry Giroux is one critic who had taken the film to task for its celebration of male violence in response to the feminization of male identity, arguing that such a political stance could not be the basis for an adequate critique of the ills of contemporary capitalism.

Skees points out that, like many other of the film’s detractors, Giroux simply assumes that the film presents Tyler Durden as an ideal type whose anarchic displays are ones that we are meant to accept as figuring the politics that the film endorses. But Skees argues that the film cannot be interpreted as a simple glorification of Tyler and his values. If nothing else, we need to realize that the Narrator’s killing of Tyler in the film’s final, climactic scene indicates the film’s rejection of Tyler as a role model for contemporary males, even if many young, and some not so young, men have taken this to be the message of the film.

Skees suggests that the film provides a deeper critique of modern society than one that focuses on either gender or class, the two categories that inform Giroux’s analysis. Instead, he claims that modernity itself is the object of the film’s critical unmasking. To understand how the film enacts such a critique, Skees suggests that we see the film as enacting the sort of social critique put forward by Friedrich Nietzsche, the great nineteenth-century German philosopher.

Nietzsche saw his contemporary culture as one whose values had to be exposed for damaging the lives of the human beings who inhabited it. His famous slogan, “the death of God,” registers the first step in his assault on the legitimacy of the values undergirding the European culture of his day. But once the previous attempts at justifying values on a transcendent basis had been exposed as illusory, Nietzsche worried that people would assume that there was no way to legitimate any standards whatsoever. Violence and anarchy would pose a threat in such a demysti-fied world. As a result, nihilism – the denial that there are any substantive values whatsoever – represented the gravest threat in the modern world.

For this reason, Nietzsche attempted to develop an alternative source of value, one that did not depend on such an outmoded idea as God for its legitimacy. Skees refers us to Nietzsche’s early work, The Birth of Tragedy, for an account of such a new set of values. In that work, Nietzsche interpreted culture as the result of a conflict between two different principles, the Dionysian and the Apollinian. The Dionysian was the anarchic principle that refused to accept any sort of limitation whatsoever and, according to Skees, is figured in the film by Tyler Durden. Opposed to the Dionysian is the Apollinian or order-giving principle, something present in the film through the Narrator in his pre-Tyler phase.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argued that there needed to be a renewed synthesis of the Apollinian and the Dionysian if modern culture was to survive the crisis of nihilism. Similarly, according to Skees, Fight Club offers us the enlightened Narrator, hand in hand with Marla, as the film’s figure for such a synthesis, for the Narrator has understood that Tyler is simply a part of himself that needed to be overcome in order for him to attain a successful integration of his own sense of emptiness and Tyler’s anarchic violence.

Charles Guignon begins his analysis of Fight Club with the admission that the film’s portrayal of violence, sadism, and masochism is attractive, especially to the young male viewers who are the film’s primary audience. The question he poses is how we are to understand the appeal of what ordinarily might be seen as gruesome and even horrific actions, that is, the beatings that take place in the Fight Clubs.

In order to explain this phenomenon, Guignon begins by investigating Fight Club’s critique of the modern “bourgeois capitalist” social order for failing to provide men with an adequate sense of identity, a meaningful conception of masculinity. Relying on the work of the philosopher and social theorist Charles Taylor, Guignon places Fight Club into a broader intellectual and social context that helps clarify the ground for its presentation of the quandaries facing contemporary men.

According to Guignon’s presentation of Taylor’s view, our modern world emerged from the hierarchic world dominant in the late middle ages. The warrior-knights of that age lived violent lives, as they fought and pillaged the villages over which they ruled. These brutal actiontypes were valorized in the warrior’s code as what men ought to do. Over many centuries, however, the modern capitalist order emerged, with a very different set of roles for men. This new social order required men to abide by the norms of a commercial system that required men to fit into specific economic roles.

With this background, Guignon thinks we have the proper perspective for understanding the critique of the capitalist society’s inability to provide men with a meaningful sense of identity that Fight Club embodies. The Narrator is the paradigm of what a man can aspire to achieve through this social system: he has a beautiful apartment furnished with all the “right” things and a job that pays him handsomely. But even as the film shows us the enviable aspects of the Narrator’s life, it shows that society does not provide him with a meaningful sense of identity, a fact figured by his chronic insomnia.

The Fight Clubs that Tyler and the Narrator found appear to provide men with a means of recovering a meaningful sense of identity by revalorizing aspects of the pre-modern model of masculinity. These underground warriors share a number of the virtues of the knights of the late middle ages, as they risk their physical integrity in struggles of pure prestige.

The attraction of the film’s portrayal of violence, then, according to Guignon, is that it provides a route for men to achieve an apparently more meaningful sense of identity than that proffered them under capitalism. But attractive as this option seems to be, the film shows it to be illusory. As the Fight Clubs morph into the tyrannical world of Project Mayhem, the film reveals the inadequacy of the violent route towards achieving an adequate model of postmodern masculinity.

Where, then, does the film finally come down in regard to bourgeois capitalist society and its ability to offer individuals paths to develop identities that are authentic? Are we left with a nihilistic sense that there are no good options for developing an identity that can be experienced as authentic that do not involve the sort of violence the film clearly views negatively? At the end of his paper, Guignon suggests that we need to turn to Marla for a more positive mode of identity formation than that which any of the male characters experience. Because of the women’s movement, he asserts, Marla is in a better position to develop an authentic identity than the Narrator or other men.

Cynthia Stark’s chapter begins where Guignon’s leaves off: focusing on Marla. Concentrating on her predicament as a woman in the fictional world of the film, Stark presents a feminist critique of the film. Now no one, I take it, would be surprised to find a feminist critique of the film, for it is very much a “boy’s film,” one in which all but one of the main characters is a man. What’s interesting, however, are the grounds on which Stark offers a feminist critique of the film. Her basic claim is that the film lacks the resources for women to find a way to recover the loss of self-respect that the film sees as central to the crisis of modern society.

Stark’s analysis of the film is grounded in recent philosophical theories about the nature of self-respect. Stark employs a distinction developed by Robin Dillon between recognition and evaluative self-respect. Within the Kantian ethical theory tradition, it has been a commonplace that human beings deserve respect simply in virtue of being human. This is what Stark terms recognition self-respect, for it is based on seeing oneself and others through each other’s eyes. But she argues that recognition self-respect is itself grounded in one’s commitment to values one deems important. Evaluative self-respect is based upon one’s living up to the values that one chooses as the grounds for one’s recognition self-respect.

The importance of this distinction emerges when Stark says that there are two different reasons why one could lack self-respect: a failure to have either recognition or evaluative self-respect. Take the much-discussed case of the deferential wife. She values her role as a man’s helpmate and achieves self-respect by doing that role well. Are there grounds for criticizing her? Stark’s claim is that we need the distinction between both types of self-respect in order to arrive at an adequate account of the failings of the deferential wife.

After a brief but insightful discussion of Fight Club’s self-conscious ironical stance and the difficulties that presents interpreters, Stark considers two different interpretations of the film. The first treats the film as gender neutral, so that all of the characters are shown to be alienated and the options for self-renewal are through self-punishment and dismantling the system of consumer capitalism. As Stark notes, on this interpretation Marla’s plight is simply ignored, for she is not allowed a role in overcoming the alienation common to all in the world of the film.

The masculinist reading of the film emphasizes that it is men’s alienation under consumer capitalism that is the focus of the film, as well as the means for men to reclaim their masculinity through belonging to fight clubs and then joining Project Mayhem. Here again, Marla presents a problem, for this reading simply leaves her out of its account.

To counter these readings, Stark proposes that the film, despite its critical focus on consumer capitalism, includes a highly conventional presentation of a woman’s option for achieving self-respect, of overcoming her alienation: she must place herself in a subordinate relationship to a significant male. That is, Stark claims that, for all its trendy effects and avowed stance of social criticism, Fight Club places Marla in the highly conventional place of the deferential wife, as if that is all that women could aspire to.

George Wilson and Sam Shpall present an interpretation of Fight Club that is intended to clear up misconceptions about the film’s political message. But to begin with, they focus on the unique nature of the film’s visual representations.

It is clear that Fight Club is a twist film. That is, the information that viewers receive towards the end of the film – most centrally that Tyler Durden is a projection of the Narrator’s warped consciousness – requires them to reinterpret everything they earlier saw. Wilson and Shpall begin their essay by considering the unique nature of what we are seeing in the pre-revelation sections of the film. Since we learn that Tyler is not real, but a creation of the Narrator’s mind, the question arises as to how to understand the sequences in which he appears. They are not completely imaginary, since the events they depict did happen in the film’s fictional world; yet they cannot be accurate depictions of the events in that world, for Tyler does not exist in it. How should we understand the structure of these sequences?

Relying on Wilson’s earlier work on film narration, Wilson and Shpall suggest that we interpret the film as permeated with “impersonal subjectively inflected shots.” The shots we see are impersonal in that we are meant to imagine that we are seeing what transpired in the world of the fiction. In this sense, they differ from what are traditionally called “subjective shots,” shots that are supposed to show us not what the fictional world of the film was like but how a character experienced that world. On the other hand, most of Fight Club’s shots contain aspects that are subjectively inflected, that is, that do contain features that are due to the way in which a character, usually the Narrator, experiences the world. So, for example, when Tyler and the Narrator are talking, we are presented with a scene as if it were an objective feature of the fictional world but the presence of Tyler indicates that this aspect of the scene is inflected through the Narrator’s consciousness.

Of course, Fight Club is a twist film in that the true nature of the scenes we are watching gets revealed only towards the end of the film. And once we reach that point in the film, we need to reevaluate what we saw earlier. But our reevaluations do not only concern questions of the reliability of what we were seeing, but how we are meant to ultimately take the film’s apparent critique of the Narrator’s alienation and estrangement.

Wilson and Shpall argue that our reevaluation of Tyler, the Fight Clubs, and Project Mayhem entails that we reject a view of the film as presenting the problem with the clearly troubled Narrator as due to his emasculation, as many critics and some of the authors in this volume, do. Instead, they maintain that we need to see his problem as stemming from his inability to communicate deeply and authentically with another human being. Marla thus represents both the Narrator’s problem and the solution to it. Like Stark, although from a different point of view, Wilson and Shpall ague that the ending and politics of the film are more conventional than they appear, for upon understanding the thematic significance of the twist, we realize that the Narrator’s problems can, indeed, be solved by the presence of a loving woman.

Nancy Bauer’s discussion of Fight Club aims at showing that the film has genuine philosophical significance. Notin...