Walking a bridge with weakening cables

Fight Test – The Flaming Lips
Where Is My Mind – The Pixies
Fighting In A Sack – The Shins

Fight Club is a faux-intellectual, faux-authentic valorization of masculinity, hiding behind some sleek packaging. It’s the sort of film designed to make people feel like their socially regressive inclinations are actually hyper-cool and postmodern.

I’m not trying to make the facile critique: that it’s a violent movie trying to glorify that violence. This seems easy to refute.  You’re clearly meant to understand the main character as insane, and the eventual consequences as indicative of an out-of-control personality. And if you want to be especially generous, you might argue that the real point of the movie is to complicate all sides of the equation. That is: the fight club clearly goes off the rails, but it is a necessary product of bankrupt consumerist society. So there is a component of chickens coming home to roost, where the insanity of each element only feeds off the other and leads them both toward catastrophe.

There is something to all of this, but here’s the thing: it’s a really banal point. The world is absolutely stuffed with this sort of faux-critique. And it’s only become that much more of a cottage industry in the world of the War on Terror, which almost seems designed to elicit this sort of crap from Hollywood.  There’s clearly something far more substantial going on with Fight Club.

In my mind, the real message of the film is the following set of observations:

• Look how COOL it is to be authentic
• Being authentic means going back to nature, where everything is violent
• Society sucks SO MUCH that it can pervert even something so freaking awesome as this.
• The problem with the fight club is that it quickly becomes organized. That’s what paves the way for its corruption. Therefore, a blank slate of violence for its own sake and nothing else is the only genuine form of existence
• Finally, and perhaps most importantly, women couldn’t possibly understand. In fact, femininity is really dangerous because it exemplifies the weak-willed sort of liberal order, where people talk about feelings and are good consumers. It’s what makes us so crazy in the first place as well as what ruins us when we try to break out.

For its proponents, the takeaway point of the movie is either vaguely progressive or vaguely critical. If you parse out the plot, you can certainly make a case that the fault lies with excessive masculinity. Or you could argue that it exposes some deep-rooted incapacity for liberal society to eradicate violence. And so on.

But the vagueness, and incompatibility, of these points is precisely the problem. The conjunction of a somewhat progressive perspective with this sort of aesthetic nihilism ends up producing a massively regressive artistic object. As I wrote a few years ago, regarding a particular style of violent artistic depiction:

I don’t mean that they uncritically support this stuff, although there is some element of that. It’s just that if they are critical, it is only in the details – they still buy into the general ethos that there is something unutterably cool about violence, addicts, and the general wreckage of human lives. Sure, you’re not supposed to idolize these people, but you are supposed to get off on the catastrophe of it all. It’s like Fight Club, which wants you to think it’s a progressive movie, but is far too in love with how awesome all the violent scenes are to ever really get around to making an actual point. And when the movie’s over, all you really walk away with is a sense that fascism is kind of sweet.

I would amend that a little bit now. It’s not that the only message you end up with is ‘fascism is sweet.’ You also might read it as saying ‘fascism is bad! (but only because it keeps having to deal with liberalism. If you could really eradicate all the ‘fake’ parts of society, we could all be happy fascists together)’

Fight Club is the perfect mirror-image counterpart to gung-ho action movies where violence is awesome, but only when deployed by the hero and in the name of justice. In either case, the essential point is the glorification of violence and the condemnation of weak-willed (feminine) values which get in the way. That this perspective is more oblique in Fight Club only makes it more dangerous.