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One-Dimensional Men: Fight Club and the Poetics of the Body.
by Asbjorn Gronstad We can also read representations of consciousness, self-consciousness, articulacy and inarticulacy in men's texts as claims about men's subjectivity, and examine them for consequent aporias. (Peter Middleton) One of the most memorable performances of masculine bravado in classical Hollywood cinema occurs in John Ford's "Irish" epic The Quiet Man (1952), in which the character of Sean Thornton (John Wayne) instigates a mock fistfight with his brother-in-law Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen). As the two men pummel each other around haystacks, streams, and hillsides, even stopping for a pint at a nearby pub, they seem to respect what I believe is the seventh rule of Fight Club: "fights will go on as long as they have to." Conceptually as well as rhetorically, this particular sequence from Ford's movie comes across in retrospect as a narrative blueprint for the masochistic spectacle of excessive corporeality which constitutes the centerpiece of David Fincher's visceral tour de force. Though Gavin Smith has proclaimed it "the first film of the next century" (58), Fight Club may also be appreciated as the logical culmination and synopsis of a century-long discourse in American arts and letters on the meaning and substance of violence and masculinity. The notion of split subjectivities which undergirds Fincher's narration exteriorizes the schizophrenia afflicting the male protagonist of countless Hollywood fictions. Fight Club lays bare the identificational rift that has remained implicit or unpresentable in preceding exhibitions of violent masculinity. From Scarface's Camonte to Reservoir Dogs's Mr. White, the characters' perspective has tended to be that of Fight Club's Tyler Durden, and the constructedness of this fantasy is rendered explicit by Fincher's film. One of the reasons that makes Fight Club such a landmark event in the cinema of violence is that it represents the acme of a tradition in which the awareness of the artificiality and performativity of this violent Other has emerged only slowly and tentatively. As both a practice and a sign, violence in Fight Club is poised between being and nothingness. "You just had a near-life experience," Tyler Durden tells Jack after he has poured an acid solution on the latter's wrist, thus implying a conflation of the particular mode of pain and the general mode of existence. Unwittingly, the Durden persona formulates an ethical philosophy that in some respects is indebted to Levinas' postulation that suffering implies "the impossibility of nothingness" because pain means to be "directly exposed to being" (40). For the characters in Fincher's film, the experience of agency and autonomy begins with the deliberate submission to acts of physical injury. What distinguishes Fight Club from other violent movies, and what makes it so supremely equipped to function meta-discursively vis-a-vis its tradition, is the film's abandonment of any narrative pretexts save that of violence itself. In Kubrick, Peckinpah, Scorsese, and even Tarantino, the use of violence seems unavoidable yet accidental; that is, the characters of these earlier narratives become enmeshed in the vortex of violence while pursuing other ends and activities. The principal attachment of Fincher's heroes, on the other hand, is to the teleology of the fight. Even more brazenly so than The Wild Bunch, Fight Club is a thesis-driven narrative whose mindset is focalized through the narrator's and Tyler Durden's polemical commentary, much of which is fashioned as aphoristic statements concerning the putative marginalization of Masculinity in hyper-modern society. Dubbed "ersatz-Nietzschean" by Gavin Smith (58), Durden's puerile rhetoric is ambiguously lodged between sincerity and parody: I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men
who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see
squandering. God damn it, an entire generation
pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars.
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working
jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're
the middle children of history, man. No purpose or
place. We have no great war. No Great Depression. Our
Great War's a spiritual war ... our Great Depression is
our lives.
You're not your job. You're not how much money you
have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're
not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking
khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the
world.
We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of
shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's
nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to
explore. In that social emasculation this everyman
is created.
Henry A. Giroux's stigmatizaion of the ...
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