I am Jack’s Complete Lack of Surprise – Capitalism and the inevitability of violence.
Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) tackles the issue of contemporary capitalism in many ways, but often in conjunction with the themes of gender, mental health and personal identity and also war and terror (which are all in themselves inextricably linked), to ultimately conclude that the natural consequence of oppressive capitalism is violence. It achieves this through many stylistic and narrative elements, quite notably motifs involving the (male) body. This essay assumes that one of the main roles of The Narrator’s (or Jack played by Edward Norton) alter-ego Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is to represent violence, both in terms of its many causes and consequences, and as well as representing the other previously mentioned themes individually.
Codell’s (1989) argument, taking into account Scarry’s 1987 work on pain and also Marxist theories, that the violence in film is representative of emotional/social/cultural pain inflicted upon it as much as it is the physical, and while from the start of Fight Club, violence is motivated narratively by Tyler, his justification for violence is entirely ideological – destruction of the body means halting the ability to participate effectively with the working class workforce, and the destruction of materialist need implies the eventual destruction of consumer capitalist ideology.
Capitalism is challenged by the undeniable overarching theme of mental health – arguing that mental health problems have been exasperated by both consumer culture and the capitalist workforce. Although a problematic point made by the film, Fight Club tends to blame Jack’s diminishing mental health (insomnia, later psychosis and dissociative identity disorder) for his later violence. Firstly, the repeated motif of Tyler Durden appearing in random frames before we are officially introduced to him as a character is an undoubtable reference to psychosis and hallucination, brought about by his disorder, which is furthermore brought about by his repetitive 9-5 job which he is forced to work to keep up his repetitive consumerism. Furthermore, one could also argue that the justification for the Starbucks coffee motif is along the same lines and thus equating consumerism and brand recognition to a sort-of collective societal mental breakdown, not to mention how it calls to make the audience question how ‘real’ and necessary these brands are (Mann, n.d.) – everything ‘is a copy of a copy of a copy’. The juxtaposition of the copying machine with our first introduction of Tyler makes explicit the film’s overall relation of capitalism to violence. Secondly, the club also represents a form of extremely misguided alternative therapy (in opposition to support groups, talking therapies and medication introduced in the first act) – an outlet for men who otherwise cannot easily express their emotions. The eventual degradation of Jack’s mental health also results in acts of personal violence, firstly where Tyler takes control of the car, so disillusioned by life and society – ‘we just had a near-life experience boys!’ – and in Jack shoots himself in the head, releasing him of Tyler completely, clearly representing suicide and thus violence against oneself as a misguided solution to emotional problems. Applying Codell’s previously mentioned work, we see a pattern of Tyler committing or indirectly motivating pain inflicted on others, but here it is a subversion of capitalism itself and government agencies inflicting it, it is actually to escape the grasp of capitalism and the strain it places on Jack’s (and greater society’s) mental health.
Capitalism is also arguably the cause of war and terror according to the film (arguing that it is also a result of toxic masculinity and poor mental health). Fincher even went so far as to compare the bombing at the end of Fight Club and the disillusionment felt by Jack and Tyler to the Columbine High School Massacre and to suggest that the film was in many ways about the shooting (1999). The obvious link to terror in the film is the bombing in the final act, where Jack/Tyler blow up credit card companies (Mann, n.d.), which in Tyler’s mind are the centres of capitalism society and the source of suffering under capitalism. The first allusion to terror in the real world is arguably the fact that Jack is a recall coordinator, and yet has no emotional response to the car wrecks that he assesses – he has become desensitised to violence, as society has to depictions of violence both in cinema and television but also in the news, but this is also perhaps justifies why Jack is unfazed by violence until he sees the burning building on the news. It is also interesting to note various discussions comparing the end and particularly the final shot of Fight Club to the attack on the World Trade Center two years later, although Fincher says he never wanted the film to be ‘watch out or this will happen!’ (2006) while Norton agreed he could see the parallels – ‘you’re talking about the furious compulsion to tear down, like, everything that’s oppressive about modern consumer material society’ (2006). Finally, ‘the Project Mayhem members are subject to, and believe wholeheartedly in, an ideological system created by Tyler Durden. Its tenets, while different from those of the "real world," are nevertheless as strict and as binding as a religious sect' (McCray 2006), motivated entirely by destroying capitalism, – epitomised by the line ‘our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly black or white or rich anymore. We all want the same. Individually we are nothing", reminiscient of communist ideologies. Here, Scarry’s (1987)/Codell’s (1989) argument about violence, pain and the body is more literal, describing a cyclical system of oppression – capitalism creates the club therefore creates violence and pain, which in turn has created terror, creating more violence.
Capitalism is finally and most directly challenged by the theme of gender, in this case specifically masculinity, in Fight Club. Capitalism is argued to be the root cause of feelings of emasculation and gender anxiety among today’s men (Christoffersen, 2016) where Jack strives to become a hyper-masculine version of himself in the form of Tyler Durden. The all-male club becomes the alternative to the ‘feminised’ support groups that Jack visits in the first act, where Bob has assumed a maternal figure in Jack’s life – a role that Tyler argues has become important as they’re ‘men raised by women’ as men have becomes slaves to the workforce and are therefore absent, and thus something that must be rejected – re-enforced by the development of breasts due to an excess of oestrogen post testicular cancer surgery (Mann, n.d). This is made explicit by Tyler’s reference to John Wayne Bobbitt and also his damning of Jack’s ‘self-improvement […], maybe self-destruction is the answer’ (Mann, n.d). It is also interesting that castration is the threat imposed onto the officials who try to stop Project Mayhem later on in the film, as though the oppressive government and capitalist regime is somehow intrinsically linked to the masculinity their genitalia represents. Jack describes himself as slave to the ‘IKEA nesting instinct’ and we see his condo literally become an IKEA catalogue, which Johnson and Blanchard (2008) describe as a feminised, yet still consumerist, version of looking at magazines with naked women. The male body also plays an important and varied role in expressing the link between capitalism and masculinity (not limited to genitalia), in that we are bombarded by Calvin Klein advertisements throughout the film with varying degrees of subtlety and epitomises the body-image-obsessed culture of men that Tyler also calls for the destruction of; yet it is no great surprise that Jack’s alter-ego, the man he wants to become, is identical to those same adverts. The destruction becomes literal – ‘Angel Face’ (Jared Leto) has his looks physically destroyed. We come again to Scarry’s (1987, as cited in Codell 1989) theory about the political implications of pain in film, but this time it is more subtle and slightly subverted – the agents inflicting the pain are emotional societal notions of gender as imposed by modern capitalistic materialism, but to rid themselves of them they must also ‘self-destruct’.
In conclusion, among many other themes and issues that Fight Club tackles, sets out to argue that capitalism is the cause of violence in the modern world and it does this through emphasising the various crises of masculinity, the increased number of cases of poor mental health in the Western world and also the cause of contemporary war and terrorism.