Short Week: Fight Club Explains Itself in Less Than a Minute and a Half
This is the sixth post in (the first annual?) Short Week at freddiedeboer.substack.com. Since people constantly complain that my stuff is too long, this week all posts will be 500 words or less. We will return to our usual longwinded ways next week.
Fight Club continues to be divisive, more than 20 years after its premiere. (Really divisive, apparently.) The essential question is how seriously we’re to take “Jack,” Tyler, the fight club, and Operation Mayhem. I find myself frequently annoyed by all sides in the debate. Yes, it’s certainly unfortunate that some people continue to think that the film argues that forming a fight club or participating in an anarchist terrorist network are healthy, which has been the position of both some of the film’s biggest fans and biggest critics. But I also find the hand-waving “it’s all satire” position to be too cute as well, as this claim undermines the very real and legitimate unhappiness produced by “the end of history” and its expression in office job tedium and consumerist apathy. (The movie judges what it depicts, but satirical is just not the right word; satire is a mood, and this movie just doesn’t share that mood.) Movies like this one and Office Space and American Beauty and many more from the era typically portrayed unhelpful and destructive reactions to that malaise. But they didn’t argue that the feelings of malaise themselves were illegitimate, or that dissatisfaction with the era was privileged or whatever, that everyone should have just gotten happy.
There are nuanced takes on Fight Club that I dig; if you can get past the gimmick here you’ll find a pretty interesting point about how the movie’s thematic ends are undermined by how cool it makes everything look. Still, I think the continuing debate can be resolved with this brief scene. It’s pretty simple: “Jack”’s first instinct is to go to the girl, which is to say to the potential for an authentic human relationship. Marla represents the possibility for real, meaningful connection with another person, perhaps through a romantic lens. But that’s scary! It’s scary to put yourself out there; there’s the fear of being rejected, there’s the fear of intimacy, the fear of revealing who you really are…. And so “Jack” instead turns to Tyler, the destructive fantasy he’s created, retreating inside of himself, accepting madness and chaos. But his first instinct, as scary as it may be, was the right instinct. The only way out of meaninglessness and apathy are through love, through human connection. And in the end, he gets there. It’s just a lot more complicated than it had to be.
That scene above, that’s the movie. I’ll always read interesting analysis about how the film’s perspective works, but nothing else is necessary to understand the point.
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So, about that guy you linked to....
He's a primary example of why Film Twitter became so incredibly fraught after Trump won. Following the election, he stopped the all-caps gimmick. That's fine, but then in the years to come he became extremely, insufferably, unbearably woke. I'm not kidding. It was like someone bottled the very essence of Tumblr and he swallowed the whole thing. Every movie that came out during the Trump years that Woke Twitter hated, he was right there in the trenches. And he writes in an incredibly condescending manner now, as if the entire world can be divided into right-thinking Woke people who like the Morally Correct movies (and TV shows, and videogames), versus the rest of us plebes who might as well be Gamergate (which I'm not; fuck Gamergate). It's revolting, and he and people like him did a real number on me and my mental health.
Forgive me for rambling, but those days were really rough. They nearly killed my love of film.
Yes, agreed, and it's in more than just that scene - the whole film changes when you see it through the lens of men who are afraid of women. When I'm feeling especially saucy, I like to trot out my personal take that Fight Club is actually one of the salient feminist artworks of the last couple decades (plus a year or so). I didn't think so when I first saw it (as an adolescent who was afraid of girls and found the prospect of self-effacing toughness very appealing), but the more I've thought about it since, plus a few more viewings, the more I think the conclusion is impossible to avoid. Instead of reckoning with his own vulnerability, Jack continues to double-down on hypermasculine (to the point of overt homoeroticism that people twisted themselves in knots trying to pretend wasn't there) efforts to self-actualize. The world his split psyche builds is the inversion of his initial misery as a sexless, lifeless drone: the same lack of identity and humanity, except now he's a fascist instead of a consumer.
Note also that Tyler doesn't appear until after Marla - the entry of a feminine avatar for his own desperate urge for authenticity and openness - appears. He's smitten, but he turns away from any chance of romance because their shared deception threatens the remaining layer of security: she knows the dumb name stickers he wears to the support groups are false. Vulnerability appears to be a dead end, so: he invents Tyler.
And the answer? To get in touch with his feminine side - which he does, at the end, to the genuinely positive vision of creative destruction. It's a utopian-feminist masterpiece!
Also note the brilliant editing of the explosion occurring when Marla picks up the phone: as if Jack's psyche is overwhelmed by the prospect of this feminine presence in his life. That Fincher, he's a real one.