An extract on 'Fight Club' from the complete essay:
Chapter 1 Fight Club - Paranoid
Narratives and The Crisis of White Masculinity in the Nineties.
At the time of its release shortly
after the Columbine high school shootings in 1999, the movie Fight Club
received a mixture of critical responses. Whilst some reviewers celebrated its
critique of white masculinity in postmodern de-industrialised late capitalist
America, others condemned its representation of gratuitous violence, terrorism
and self-abuse. [1] My
personal interest in this movie for the purposes of this Independent Project
centres on the opinion that Fight Club, presents us with seemingly
complex negotiations of identity and in particular conflicted notions of
American masculinities. As such I intend to unpick these representations and
question whether or not this movie upfronts the problematics of various
constructions of masculinity and successfully subverts these, or simply
perpetuates hegemonic masculine ideals through displays of hysteria, violence
and masochism. As Tania Modeleski notes,
“We need to consider the extent to which male
power is actually consolidated through cycles of crisis and resolution.” [2]
1.1 Male Hysteria in Fight Club.
The protagonist of the film, Jack
(Edward Norton) is presented as a mentally unstable anti-hero. As such Fight
Club can be located in what Marita Sturken identifies as ‘paranoid
narratives’. Sturken identifies the fascination in popular culture in the 90s
with postmodern narratives of paranoia, their inextricable link with
contemporary discourses about gender and race, and the notion of hegemonic
white masculinity in crisis as identified by Faludi among others. As such films
like Fight Club, Affliction (1998) and Falling Down (1993) for
example, represent paranoid white male narratives that offer audiences angry,
troubled and often wounded protagonists, appropriating and articulating within
these texts a discourse of victimisation.[3]
Consequently this fascination with
paranoid narratives in contemporary American postmodern cinema should be read
in relation to an ongoing investment in narratives of male
hysteria. ‘Hysteria’ derives from the Greek ‘hystera’ meaning uterus,
which in turn derives from the word for stomach or belly. Hysteria was historically
considered as a female disorder. The meaning of hysteria has shifted over the
centuries, including Freud’s psychoanalytic reworking of the concept and more
recently feminist revision of hysteria in the late sixties and early seventies.
Through the understanding of the hysterical personality as a
caricature of femininity that has been encoded through dominant, patriarchal
discourses, hysteria is acknowledged for its paradoxical position as both a
concept that perpetuates patriarchal ideologies and a mechanism through which
the body can resist gender roles. As such the notion of white male hysteria as
inscribed in a variety of contemporary film texts is problematic. This is
compounded by the fact that many of the films that operate such narratives, despite
their postmodern credentials, are a product of mainstream Hollywood, which is
understood in terms of its ideological status.
Fight Club in particular wastes no
time in situating the viewer firmly inside of the paranoid white male psyche.
In its title sequence, which actually starts the film at its chronological end,
the camera tracks through the computer generated visual representation of the
protagonist’s brain, spewing out through his mouth to reveal the phallic image
of a gun barrel lodged there by Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt).[4]
The monotonous extra-diegetic voice over of the protagonist in this scene
operates to engage the viewer with his particular narrative taking us back in
time by six months. On the level of film form, the use of flashback from the opening
scene functions to highlight the importance of the action therein, from which
in a now linear ordering the narrative is redirected. This creates a sense of
expectation for viewers that on return, this scene will reveal a critical point
within the narrative, as indeed it does. When we return to this scene towards
the end of the narrative we, as viewers have learnt that Tyler is not actually
‘real’ but a product of Jack’s delusional mind, his alter-ego. This heightens
the tension when watching this final scene, as we now understand that Jack is
actually on the verge of shooting himself in the hope to rid his psyche of
Tyler. As postmodern narratives go, the idea of a character killing
himself/herself as a solution to his/her predicament is nothing new; in Thelma
and Louise (1991) for example the ultimate redemptive act appears to be
suicide.
The revelation in the text that Tyler is Jack
also establishes for viewers that the self-narration of the protagonist should
be understood as being unreliable[5]
and indeed hysterical, as we rapidly have to rethink the whole story in
flashback renegotiating the action without Tyler’s visual presence within each
scene. Just as the opening credit sequence locates us firmly within the white
male psyche, the use of self-narration sutures us further into this, making the
critical reveal about Tyler a potent trigger of reflection and renegotiation of
Jack’s narrative.
Jack’s mental state is staged in three
transitions within the narrative (similar to the three-act structure of classic
Hollywood cinema). Arguably these transitions function to expose the notion of
masculinity as a process, a precarious trial that must be negotiated and passed
through. In the first stage of his
transition, Jack is represented as a chronic insomniac. According to Wedding,
Boyd & Niemiec (2005) Jack's insomnia may be a symptom caused by the
frequent travelling his job entails. It may also be that the jet lag
exacerbates a pre-existing problem with primary insomnia, a symptom of another
disorder.[6]
Arguably this other disorder his 'great depression' as Tyler puts it later in
the movie, is Jack's life. Jack is represented as being disenfranchised by his
contemporary, commercialised life, qualified through his white collar job, a
fridge full of condiments and a condo furnished like an Ikea showroom. As
narrator, he openly admits "I'd flick through catalogues and think 'What
kind of dining set defines me as a person?'"[7]
Jack belongs to an ornamental culture where manhood is defined by and through
the consumer world. In her critique of this culture of ornament, Faludi notes,
"It's often been observed that the
economic transition from industry to service, or from production to
consumption, is symbolically a move from the traditional masculine to the traditional
feminine." [8]
As such, Jack embodies a domesticated
feminised masculinity. Emasculated, and quite literally restless Jack turns to
a variety of support groups for people with terminal diseases. He
becomes a 'tourist' of other people's pain. With no name for his own pain -
Jack's 'sickness' is dismissed by his
doctor who suggests Jack doesn't know what real pain is - Jack resorts to faking it, infiltrating
these support networks and stealing relief for his condition in crisis. In his
‘faker’ status, Jack appropriates the suffering and experience of those with
‘real’ illnesses and social marginality so that he can feel listened to and
alive. This positioning of ‘white masculinity as victim’ is problematic however
given the archetypal, hegemonic power of white masculinity within American
culture. Jack’s faking complete with pseudonyms heightens the unstable
performative levels of his identity at this point in the narrative. He
represents himself as every man (and woman) and an empty vessel at the same time.
The representation of these support groups within the narrative is highly
satirised. The film therefore can be understood as offering a mocking critique
of the Men’s movement in particular, and other New Age self-help groups that
were prevalent across America in the nineties, whilst simultaneously
contributing to the discourses of hysterical victimhood these very groups were
based upon.
‘Remaining Men Together’, Jack's
Tuesday night fix, is constructed as the support group that is central to
Jack's position within the narrative in this first transition. This gathering
of men who quite literally have no balls, sit around in circles talking about
their failed marriages, estrangement from their families, bankruptcy and the
many losses they have suffered as a result of testicular cancer. Jack may still
have his balls[9]
(although later in the movie this too is questioned and indeed threatened) but
within this group of men who regularly have 'one on ones where they can really
open themselves up' he finds peace. As the narrator he confirms,
“...and then something happened; I let go.
Lost in oblivion, dark and silent and complete I found freedom, losing all hope
was freedom.”[10]
Arguably this 'letting go of hope'
could be critiqued as being Jack's letting go of the traditional myths of
masculinity. By freeing himself from this burden, he has seemingly found peace
with his 'new man' self; the crying, embracing, sharing, caring man who is
capable of change; similar to the version of manhood Jefford's spoke of in her
critique of films in the early '90s.[11]
Ironically, while these emasculated men are sharing their crises and 'letting
go', an American flag hangs in the room where these very meetings are held,
signifying the mythic American manhood they are seemingly trying to break free
from. Arguably Jack's insomnia and the testicular cancer of the other men in
Remaining Men Together is a metaphor for a deeper 'illness' these men share;
namely the historicity of traditional notions of manhood. Jack is, however
momentarily, represented as having found a cure for his particular 'pain'; we
see him sleeping soundly and his extra-diegetic narration confirming that not
even babies sleep as well.
This solution to Jack's malaise is
short lived however with the arrival of one of the few female characters in the
film, Marla (Helena Bonham-Carter), another 'tourist', who violates one of the
men's one on one moments with her arrival. Marla, puffing through the smoke of
her cigarette, asks; 'This is cancer, right?'[12]
to a dumb struck room of weeping, embracing men. At this point in the
narrative, Marla functions to disrupt Jack's world. She is like him in that she
is a faker, but she poses Jack with two problems that jolt him back to his
insomniac, anxiety ridden self; she is a woman who has invaded his space and
stolen his cure and to make matters worse she has no real pain of her own,
claiming she only goes to the meetings because food and drinks are free. Jack’s anger towards ‘this chick Marla Singer’ can be
understood in terms of the Men’s movement’s discontent with what they call
‘feminised society’. Robert Bly’s Men’s movement, originating in the early
‘80s, gained phenomenal influence with the release of his best selling book Iron
John in 1990 (although the movement has diminished in recent years Bly
continues to run annual conferences in Minnesota). The movement offers weekend
retreats for men run by Bly in the hope of helping men get in touch with the
“wild man” inside whom the feminist movement and the effeminising culture of late
capitalism has turned into a “soft male.”[13]
In this context Marla metonymicaly signifies
the purported rise of the feminine within society. Although Jack as narrator voices his
anger against Marla, whose lie reflects his lie, extra-diegetically to viewers
of the movie, he like the other men in Remaining Men Together, fails to
vocalise this challenge diegetically to Marla and so he fails to prevent this
woman from entering their newfound domain. In challenging or exposing Marla for
the parasitic woman he believes her to be, Jack would not only expose himself,
but more problematically he would expose the other emasculated men in this
group. Marla may be able to identify with these men because she doesn't have
balls, but her being a woman problematises their crisis further. Her possession
of breasts can only heighten the realisation that Bob's (Meatloaf) Bitch tits'
are not real breasts. They are the product of his medication for cancer which
he informs Jack was caused by years of steroid abuse; which we may presume was
in the '80s when he was performing a different kind of masculinity, which it
turns out has made him terminally ill.
Ultimately Marla's presence exposes
these transformed 'non-men' who have readily embraced their effeminisation. The
crux for Jack and his buddies is that Marla signifies their 'non-woman' status
also. Consequently they are neither men nor women and with this realisation,
Jack's crisis, personified through his insomnia, is unabated. It is shortly
after this that Tyler Durden is introduced to the protagonist’s hysterical
narrative.
1.2 The Wounded body in Fight
Club.
The second transition in
the narrative is established when Jack 'meets' Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). Up
until this point in the narrative Tyler has been subliminally spliced into the
footage. He has been edited into 'blips' within the mise-en-scene and has
appeared only once within a scene. This particular scene acts as a visual clue
for the viewer that Tyler is lurking in the background of Jack’s diegesis.
Within the scene Tyler appears in an airport going on the opposite escalator to
an exhausted looking Jack. At this point Jack as narrator wonders,
"If you
wake up at a different time in a different place, could you wake up as a
different person?"[14]
Although Tyler appears as
a separate character, these visual and narrative clues that suggest he may be
otherwise are subtly constructed within the movie. In contrast to Jack who is
represented as being outwardly bland and grey (even his suits are grey) Tyler
is a flush of '70s retro colour, with blonde spiky hair, large shades, red
checked suit and open wide collared white shirt as opposed to Jack's
constraining white collar. Tyler embodies an altogether different type of
masculinity. He is tanned, honed, cool, retro, with his statement costumes
signifying a potency that Jack so clearly lacks. The dialogue between Jack and
Tyler in this their first scene together highlights Jack's conditioning of
qualifying both himself and others through their jobs. But it also functions to
establish that Tyler not only looks different to Jack, he thinks and acts
differently too. Tyler signifies
everything that Jack is not. As the delusion of Jack's fractured mind, Tyler
embodies the man that Jack has failed to be and desires to become.
When Jack arrives home from a work
related trip, he finds himself homeless due to an explosion at his condo. With
this, Jack's material existence has been wiped out. This is a symbolic scene in
the disintegration of Jack's identity, given the knowledge at the end of the
movie that allows us to cast the narrator as both the victim and perpetrator of
this act. To this point Jack's consumerist feminised ornamental manhood as
discussed earlier, has been central to the construction of his identity. It is
at this juncture that Jack decides to contact Tyler and to 'let him in'.
Subsequently both characters move into the dilapidated house on Paper Street.
The house itself signifies Jack’s rejection of the consumer-driven reality he
formerly inhabited, but it also functions metonymically to signify Jack's
mental state. He has shifted into the
unstable regions of the imaginary[15]
and other than his continuance to go to work every day, the rest of Jack's time
is spent with Tyler either in the house or at their newly formed 'fight club'
set in the dark, nasty underbelly of Lou's tavern.
Negotiations of masculinities and
homoeroticism are played out through brutal violence between anonymous
predominantly white men brawling in these underground bare knuckled fight clubs
late at night. Shirtless mainly white male bodies appear bloodied and damaged.
Arguably the voyeuristic pleasure derived from the spectacle of male bodies in
these fights operates both intra-diegetically for the non-fighting members of
the fight club[16]
and extra-diegetically for us as viewers. Through these ritualistic masochistic
acts of violence the film positions the male body as wounded, victimised. These
representations correlate with Robinson’s critique of white masculinity in
crisis;
“Representations
of a hysterical, masochistic, or wounded white male body testify to the real,
material effects of a perceived displacement of white masculinity away from the
centre, from the normative, from the mainstream…
…White masculinity most fully represents itself as victimised by
inhabiting a wounded body.”[17]
Robinson therefore
identifies that representations of the wounding and marking of white male
bodies constitutes the puncturing of the archetypal myth of white heterosexual
middle-class masculinity and in so doing recognises how such representations
operate to undermine its historic position as unmarked. This is problematic
however given Savran’s argument that,
“Masochism
functions precisely as a kind of decoy and that cultural texts constructing
masochistic masculinities characteristically conclude with an almost magical
resolution of phallic power.”[18]
Within the narrative the
chaotic and brutal world of fight club established by Jack and his alter-ego
Tyler seemingly offers a tangible and empowering experience of manhood for the
members of fight club as well as Jack, who in his extra-diegetic narrative
reveals,
"After
fighting, everything else in your life got the volume turned down. You could
deal with anything...
... Who you were in fight
club was not who you were in the rest of the world. " [19]
This arguably suggests, or at least
problematises, the idea that the seemingly redemptive function of the fight
club may culminate in the restoration or rehabilitation of phallic power as
some academic accounts of the film argue[20]
and as such this needs further investigation. With this in mind, I propose that
reading the film in terms of reflexive masochism as opposed to masochism may be
more fruitful.
Masochism, like hysteria,
was historically relegated to the realm of the feminine. In psychoanalysis the
terms masochism and sadism were adopted by Freud and continually reworked
through a variety of his texts on sexuality. Masochism, associated with the
feminine was therefore coded as passive whilst sadism was located as masculine
and active. He also claimed that both tendencies commonly occurred in the same individual. According to
Freud, reflexive masochism was located midway between sadism and masochism.
According to Silverman, “reflexive masochism does not demand the renunciation
of activity, it is ideally suited for negotiating the contradictions inherent
in masculinity.”[21]
She goes on to argue that rather than pose a threat to masculinity, reflexive
masochism may actually “represent a necessary component of virility.”[22]
Therefore if we are to understand reflexive masochism as the sadistic masculine part of the self punishing the masochistic feminine part of the self, the representation of Jack’s self abuse within the narrative in this context punctuates the feeling of empowerment he expresses as narrator, which he achieves through reflexive masochistic expression. By its very definition reflexive masochism suggests on ongoing tension between the passive and active rather than the mastery of one by the other.
It can therefore be argued that the rehabilitation of the protagonist to a normative heterosexual masculinity, as he is reunited with Marla at the close of the film does not function to restore phallic power. There are two crucial images within the diegesis that support this reading. The couple are represented as watching the collapse of the skyscrapers, the symbol of masculine power, outside the window[23] signalling a ‘mark’ on this previously ‘unmarked’ sphere. The splicing of a frame of a fake penis in the last seconds of the film is the second image that supports this reading. The fact that this penis is fake, connotes the unreal, fake status of phallic power. Ultimately Jack’s reunion with Marla signals the fact that he is now able to move beyond his feelings of inadequacy, to leave his hysteria behind and with it the burden of a mythical masculinity. I am therefore drawn to agree with Faludi who notes in her review of the film,
“For men facing an increasingly hollow, consumerised world, that path lies not in conquering women but in uniting with them against the hollowness. In that way… 'Fight Club' ends up as a quasi-feminist tale, seen through masculine eyes…In 'Fight Club,' the man and the woman clasp hands in what could be a mutual redemption."[24]
In Fight Club then, the falling towers,
signalling the destruction of the credit card system according to Tyler’/Jack’s
manifesto for Project Mayhem, envisions a new society beyond capitalism and the
negation of commodified identities for all. This is the ultimate rejection of
Jack’s formerly ornamental consumerised masculinity. The film then, offers
audiences a resolved critique of
‘masculinity in crisis’ through leaving behind its hysteric, paranoid,
self-destructive performance. Ultimately rather than perpetuate hegemonic male
power, it stimulates audiences to envision a future where men and women are
equal.[25]
[25] I acknowledge the film is
still problematic however as this resolution is presented from a white-centric
position and issues of class, race and ethnicity are excluded from the film’s
discourse.
