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Fight Club (1999)
I'm going to leave this up, because, well, truth in advertising, and it's good for me to be reminded that sometimes I fuck up a reading, just like everybody else.
However, after having people argue with me all afternoon, I have realized that I was wrong.
Fight Club starts with two characters, the narrator and Marla. Both of them are equally dysfunctional. Both of them are emotional vampires. We follow one of them (being the narrator) through a convoluted and surreal fantasia of hyper-masculine reactions to the anomie of the white middle-class cubicle drone. Tyler, and the men of Fight Club/Project Mayhem, are the outward flourishes of the narrator's inner fucknutness. Marla stays on the outskirts, providing a baseline against which to calibrate the narrator's escalating insanity, and okay, yes, it DOES matter that in the end he rejects Tyler and holds hands with Marla.
I do think there are ways in which the NARRATOR's view of women and the NARRATIVE's view of women get elided, conflated, and otherwise confused, but the thing I thought I was seeing is not, I now think, a thing that is actually there.
We apologize for the inconvenience, and maybe I'll just shut up for another two weeks.
TYLER: We're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.
If "chick flick" is a derogatory term, used mostly--but not exclusively--by men, to designate a movie targeted at an audience that privileges a set of "feminine" values in a binary fashion that rejects "masculine" interest, then the equivalent on the other side of the binary would be "dick flick."
Fight Club is a dick flick.
As will be obvious from the scare-quotes around "masculine" and "feminine," I have philosophical objections to the binary view of gender that supports the labelling of movies as "chick flicks" (and "dick flicks," for that matter)--and I object even more strongly to the fact that that binary view of gender isn't limited to the labelling, that it in fact pervades and infects the movies themselves.
I don't like chick flicks.
I liked Fight Club a lot, but I felt unclean afterwards.
This movie is a male-centered fantasy in which violence sublimates (hetero)sexual drives, allowing men to form deep, necessary, and above all MANLY relationships with other men, while leaving women to simper and die, unfulfilled. Or, like Marla, to be used in a perfect Sedgwickian homosocial negotiation between two men.
Marla who--you will notice--fights like a girl.
This is a highly misogynistic movie--misogynistic to the point that it is struggling to imagine a world in which women don't even exist. "The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club." As Tyler points out, that rule gets broken almost as soon as it's made. Arguably, that's what it's for, because how else is Fight Club going to grow? And Fight Club has to grow, so that it can become Project Mayhem. The real first rule of Fight Club--or possibly the zeroth rule, à la Asimov, is: you do not talk about Fight Club to women.
Nobody has to say it, because nobody is ever going to break that rule. And because, in the movie's world, there are no women who might stumble across the evidence. Tyler considers Marla a threat because she's--in his view--close to finding out about [SPOILER], not because the narrator has told her about Fight Club, or even started to tell her about Fight Club. She's compartmentalized off on another track. In the world of Fight Club, the basement world, there ARE no women. No female bartenders, no female waiters, no female police officers. There's a moment where the narrator says something about the house being so full of people it moved (I can't remember the exact line, and I'm really not going to go searching for it), and I thought, The house isn't full of people. It's full of MEN. But it's not an exaggeration to say that for this movie, "people" = "men." Unproblematically.
And I think what makes me uncomfortable and unhappy with Fight Club, as a movie, is that it doesn't seem to recognize the fallacy inherent in that view. The movie is heavily invested in affirming masculinity (e.g., the obsession with testicles, from the initial focus on the Testicular Cancer Group all the way through to the punishment for trying to stop Project Mayhem being castration), and despite the fact that that affirmation becomes toxic, I can't get rid of the nagging feeling that it is also valorized.
Fight Club, of course, has an unreliable narrator, and a great deal of the movie's misogyny can in fact be laid at the door of its highly misogynistic narrator. (Whom Edward Norton plays brilliantly.)![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mirrorthaw pointed out that what we get in this movie is the view from the inside of the narrator's head, and we agreed, moreover, that it's an allegory, a parable, neither intended for nor sustainable under a realistic reading. But the thing about unreliable narrators is that for them to be successful, you have to show the audience their unreliability. And although Fight Club shows that the narrator is unstable, I'm not sure that it ever shows us that he's wrong.
And if you're thinking about jumping in here to argue that he isn't wrong, I beg of you, take that argument somewhere else. Also, if you're thinking about jumping in to argue that it isn't misogyny, that just because a movie isn't interested in "chick things" doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it--that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the movie's construction of masculinity is a sin both of omission and comission, that it's pretending that middle-class heterosexual white male masculinity, with its obsession with material objects and its obsession with its own perceived effeminacy, is the only kind of masculinity there is.
Marla is, as Tyler says, a predator masquerading as a house pet. I never once, throughout the whole thing, felt sorry for her. And there are almost no other women in the movie--the guided-meditation leader with the lobotomized smile, and Chloe who's dying and can't get laid--nothing to show us that the MOVIE realizes Tyler's chilling misogynistic crack (which I quoted at the top) is so much self-deluding bullshit.
Maybe the ending counts. But I'm not sure. I'm not at all sure the movie understands where Tyler and the narrator went wrong.
However, after having people argue with me all afternoon, I have realized that I was wrong.
Fight Club starts with two characters, the narrator and Marla. Both of them are equally dysfunctional. Both of them are emotional vampires. We follow one of them (being the narrator) through a convoluted and surreal fantasia of hyper-masculine reactions to the anomie of the white middle-class cubicle drone. Tyler, and the men of Fight Club/Project Mayhem, are the outward flourishes of the narrator's inner fucknutness. Marla stays on the outskirts, providing a baseline against which to calibrate the narrator's escalating insanity, and okay, yes, it DOES matter that in the end he rejects Tyler and holds hands with Marla.
I do think there are ways in which the NARRATOR's view of women and the NARRATIVE's view of women get elided, conflated, and otherwise confused, but the thing I thought I was seeing is not, I now think, a thing that is actually there.
We apologize for the inconvenience, and maybe I'll just shut up for another two weeks.
TYLER: We're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.
If "chick flick" is a derogatory term, used mostly--but not exclusively--by men, to designate a movie targeted at an audience that privileges a set of "feminine" values in a binary fashion that rejects "masculine" interest, then the equivalent on the other side of the binary would be "dick flick."
Fight Club is a dick flick.
As will be obvious from the scare-quotes around "masculine" and "feminine," I have philosophical objections to the binary view of gender that supports the labelling of movies as "chick flicks" (and "dick flicks," for that matter)--and I object even more strongly to the fact that that binary view of gender isn't limited to the labelling, that it in fact pervades and infects the movies themselves.
I don't like chick flicks.
I liked Fight Club a lot, but I felt unclean afterwards.
This movie is a male-centered fantasy in which violence sublimates (hetero)sexual drives, allowing men to form deep, necessary, and above all MANLY relationships with other men, while leaving women to simper and die, unfulfilled. Or, like Marla, to be used in a perfect Sedgwickian homosocial negotiation between two men.
Marla who--you will notice--fights like a girl.
This is a highly misogynistic movie--misogynistic to the point that it is struggling to imagine a world in which women don't even exist. "The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club." As Tyler points out, that rule gets broken almost as soon as it's made. Arguably, that's what it's for, because how else is Fight Club going to grow? And Fight Club has to grow, so that it can become Project Mayhem. The real first rule of Fight Club--or possibly the zeroth rule, à la Asimov, is: you do not talk about Fight Club to women.
Nobody has to say it, because nobody is ever going to break that rule. And because, in the movie's world, there are no women who might stumble across the evidence. Tyler considers Marla a threat because she's--in his view--close to finding out about [SPOILER], not because the narrator has told her about Fight Club, or even started to tell her about Fight Club. She's compartmentalized off on another track. In the world of Fight Club, the basement world, there ARE no women. No female bartenders, no female waiters, no female police officers. There's a moment where the narrator says something about the house being so full of people it moved (I can't remember the exact line, and I'm really not going to go searching for it), and I thought, The house isn't full of people. It's full of MEN. But it's not an exaggeration to say that for this movie, "people" = "men." Unproblematically.
And I think what makes me uncomfortable and unhappy with Fight Club, as a movie, is that it doesn't seem to recognize the fallacy inherent in that view. The movie is heavily invested in affirming masculinity (e.g., the obsession with testicles, from the initial focus on the Testicular Cancer Group all the way through to the punishment for trying to stop Project Mayhem being castration), and despite the fact that that affirmation becomes toxic, I can't get rid of the nagging feeling that it is also valorized.
Fight Club, of course, has an unreliable narrator, and a great deal of the movie's misogyny can in fact be laid at the door of its highly misogynistic narrator. (Whom Edward Norton plays brilliantly.)
mirrorthaw pointed out that what we get in this movie is the view from the inside of the narrator's head, and we agreed, moreover, that it's an allegory, a parable, neither intended for nor sustainable under a realistic reading. But the thing about unreliable narrators is that for them to be successful, you have to show the audience their unreliability. And although Fight Club shows that the narrator is unstable, I'm not sure that it ever shows us that he's wrong.And if you're thinking about jumping in here to argue that he isn't wrong, I beg of you, take that argument somewhere else. Also, if you're thinking about jumping in to argue that it isn't misogyny, that just because a movie isn't interested in "chick things" doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it--that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the movie's construction of masculinity is a sin both of omission and comission, that it's pretending that middle-class heterosexual white male masculinity, with its obsession with material objects and its obsession with its own perceived effeminacy, is the only kind of masculinity there is.
Marla is, as Tyler says, a predator masquerading as a house pet. I never once, throughout the whole thing, felt sorry for her. And there are almost no other women in the movie--the guided-meditation leader with the lobotomized smile, and Chloe who's dying and can't get laid--nothing to show us that the MOVIE realizes Tyler's chilling misogynistic crack (which I quoted at the top) is so much self-deluding bullshit.
Maybe the ending counts. But I'm not sure. I'm not at all sure the movie understands where Tyler and the narrator went wrong.
not to be a jerk, but...
I think a lot of people confuse violence/hate/anger with aggression. I see nothing wrong with aggression if it is dealt with in a clean way and doesn't hurt anyone...it becomes anger/hate/whathaveyou when it is consistently repressed over and over again and judged. It's similar to how sex used to be viewed (and still is by a lot of radical christians). I hate to say it, but a lot of men DO feel held back in this regard, and a lot of them DO blame women (which is silly of course, but often goes into the whole mother issues thing and stereotypes about women repressing men's masculinity, etc). Most of the "nice guys" just feel guilty for feeling this way and repress it. It's only the "a**holes/misogynists" who say it out loud, (trust me, I've have heaps of "nice guys" in sessions who explode into anger/frustration about these issues). To just dismiss this as 'misogyny' is missing the point. This blaming of an entire gender category for our anger/woes/feelings of powerlessness is a part of sexual politics on *both* sides and something that must be outgrown on the individual level before it can be overcome by entire groups.
Granted, fight club was a really violent way to deal with these feelings, but I think the observation that many people feel they are living with the volume turned down is not an illusion, and pretending that's not the case (or that it's only the case for *men*) isn't going to help anyone. I have referred clients to martial arts for this reason and it often does them wonders...makes them more happy, less angry and less violent.
In martial arts, some of the meanest, most violent and ANGRY partners I've had in sparring were women. I don't blame them for this...it was almost always because they had so much pent up aggression, anger and violence that they kind of freaked out once they got in the ring. But some of these women scared the crap out of me...like they wanted to kill their partners, not just fight in a friendly/aggressive way. Over time, they relaxed, lost some of their fear/anger and had more fun. The point is, repressing this stuff just doesn't work. Telling little boys that it's bad to get angry/aggressive is just as bad as the centuries and centuries where we told little girls the same thing. Calling these impulses 'inherently male' or 'inherently misogynistic' only worsens the problem.
And for the record, I thought Marla held her own. She doesn't have to be able to beat the guy in a fist fight to be strong. Frankly I am tired to death of "feeling sorry for" women. To me, a big victory would be no longer valuing the moral high ground over our own personal power.
Re: not to be a jerk, but...
Because I don't agree with the (unstated and unexamined) assumption that only men would be drawn to Tyler's fight clubs. I don't think there's any reason--except narrative misogyny--that this should be a "men only" movement.
But the movie's construction of gender doesn't allow women to be fighters. Which is, you know, only one of the problems with its construction of gender, but I do think it's a major one.
Re: not to be a jerk, but...
I think it's sort of a groupthink for men to blame the lack of this kind of outlet on women. Like people who continue to blame their parents for everything wrong in their lives when they're 40. A lot of women do the same with men, too, unfortunately. I know I've been guilty of that at times in my life. Some people grow out of this and some, well...don't.
Re: not to be a jerk, but...
I just friended you, btw, just because I am a writer, forner martial artist, and live in the San Diego area. Hi.
Re: not to be a jerk, but...
Re: not to be a jerk, but...
Re: not to be a jerk, but...
Greetings fellow San Diegan!
Re: not to be a jerk, but...
Greetings!