The film is a wonderful example of adding if not improving an already very good book. That Tyler Durden is the alter ego of the narrator is skilfully implied, your adult imaginary friend to help you through confusing times. Chuck P ( how do you say it never mind spell it) I remember making an insightful comment about the power of being in a marginal group, gay men in 20 th century, gave considerable powers of detached observation so necessary for engaging writing. A power that has diminished as a marginal group joins or becomes mainstream.
Brett H
6 months ago
I find Feeneyâs writing a bit like meditation, well what I imagine it to be, so it might be something else, but thatâs all right. I read through it, following one word after the other, one sentence after the other and then at the end thereâs just this emptiness ⊠wha?
Lancashire Lad
6 months ago
Here’s my take.
Any work of art, to be truly great and stand the test of time, should be able to be reinterpreted afresh by each new generation. Think… Shakespeare. Further, it should be possible for a wide range of people to access something within it about their lives and their humanity; or to put it another way, for the work to allow different ‘takes’.
Therefore, any work (of any genre) which aims only to be didactic, or which succeeds only in being so, can’t be considered great.
I’m not sure from this article whether Fight Club falls into that category, although the author seems to suggest it can be re-interpreted 25 years down the line. It’d be useful to hear from anyone who watched it when it was released, and who has watched it again recently in the light (or darkness) of those intervening years.
One thing is for sure – the Wild One (or is it Ones) has not stood the test of time.
Tyler Durden
6 months ago
The closest thesis to match Fight Club comes from the Left, and the postmodern Left too: Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs’ and the post-May 68 trend of mixing Marx, Freud and Nietzsche in a ‘schizoanalysis’ responding to the conservative Lacan.
In short, the movie is even more like Thus Spake Zarathustra than the book. The key scene is the protagonist breaking wildly through the pain threshold in his soap production acid ‘initiation’ which dissolves the (corporate) American ego entirely into schizo-anarchist fragments than can no longer be tamed.
I think it is fair to say that it is trying to be more than âjust a movieâ – and in my view it succeeds. It certainly sets out to say something – even if there is disagreement on what that is.
Is the author implying that INCELs get anything right?
Emmanuel MARTIN
6 months ago
What an empty word salad !
Fight club is a great movie, but it just struck me reading this drivel that maybe the reason it acquired cult status is because it one of the last piece of mainstream media that represented western white young males as a group whith their own legitimate interests, values, and more generally did not gaslight them as “problematic”.
Ian Wray
6 months ago
“The generation of lost and yearning fight clubbers was raised by women because those women were abandoned by their husbands.”
So, if a couple separate it’s always the man’s fault? And women don’t prevent their ex-husbands from having contact with their children? The author is profoundly ill-informed. And before using insults such as ‘Neanderthals’ perhaps he ought to take a look in a mirror?
Youâre perhaps taking it more seriously than it deserves – but divorce figures suggest it is women, more than men, who are jumping ship. And as a culture we havenât become any nicer about men in the last two decades or so.
Matthew Hauxwell
6 months ago
There should be a follow-up article, ‘Yes they can and what you don’t understand about incels’.
Maximilian R.
6 months ago
This is why Roger Ebert (the famous critic from the Chicago Suntimes) didn’t like this movie. He felt its deeper themes were buried under the macho facade. So the people who should listen to its deeper themes weren’t getting it.
Romper Stomper with Russell Crowe has a similar problem.
Andrew
6 months ago
“If, like those teenage boys and Right-wing Neanderthals, they also understood the Narratorâs sad story as valid, and the need for a remedy like fight club as thus real, what, exactly, is Fight Club a satire of? Blowing up buildings?”
Mr. Feeney’s critical rationale rests on the above assumption, and I think stumbles because of it. He’s saying the story can’t be a satire because of the reasoning quoted, which is flawed. If he’d followed through on his rhetorical question, he’d have seen the flaw.
If the director and actor understand a character’s story as valid — that is, they relate to it, it jibes with their experience of life — that does not mean the artists also “see the need for a remedy like fight club.” And since belief in such a remedy does not follow from belief in the affliction, as the author assumes, the artists do not “thus” understand such a remedy as real, as viable.
The artists’ satire — their critical point of view, their “message” — arises from the break in the series of beliefs: they believe in the spiritual damage happening to young men, but they do not believe it can be resolved through violence, which, going by the progression of events, only makes matters worse. Fight club turns into nihilism club.
To resolve their valid discontents, the characters embrace a solution that leads to extreme moral relativism, to nihilism. They become skeptical toward ethical truth, skeptical about the idea that humanity can be improved. It has to be blown up.
The point of the satire is that by choosing a remedy such as fight club, they replace a moral void with a moral void. This is the underlying theme of the story, made via satire.
Frankly, this is not hard to see. The author is correct that incels get the story wrong. Yet they get it wrong for the same reason he does: missing the satire.
As for this:
“if itâs Brad Pitt dressed in disco polyester telling people to blow up buildings, youâre gonna have to count on those people to understand that itâs a movie and to make the right decisions when itâs over, despite the strange attraction that blowing up buildings suddenly has.”
It seems too lenient to give viewers who miss this satire a break by invoking what people think Truffaut was saying about anti-war films. Yes, the lead was charismatic, the director’s style was attractive, etc. But look carefully at the shifts, at the introduction of discordant notes. How much was Pitt’s charisma gradually undercut? How much was Fincher’s alluring style gradually turned harsh? Never underestimate the power of motivated viewing, to see only what you want to see.
The director may not be recommending this as a lifestyle, and may feel it is a road to nowhere, without sacrificing the society directed satire.
The two main characters provide the director with a point of view (not his own) from which to critique society, which he does not wholly agree with, but is sympathetic towards. He gets why the characters might feel like that. They have a point.
Surely this is also the appeal to incels – itâs a voice which does not praise them – but at least shows a kind of sympathy for their feeling of lostness in the modern world.
David Morley
6 months ago
neither he nor the Narrator ever actually criticise the influence of women
Maybe Iâll have to watch it again. But I thought all that liposuction stuff was implicitly critical of women. And my memory is that this was pretty typical – though I could be misremembering it.
David Morley
6 months ago
Marlon Brando answering, âWhattaya got?â
Iâve always found Brando lame and out of place in this movie – and this is his lamest line. Heâs just not very believable. Compare something like On the Waterfront. Certainly a lot less convincing than Brad Pitt in Fight Club.
James Hooper
6 months ago
Frightening to think that Fight Club is now 25 years and I remember seeing in Nov 99 in the lead up to the millennium.
At at its dark heart, it’s satire on consumerism. Palahnuik’s and Fincher’s bleak vision was disturbing enough back then when the society was judging its citizens on what they were able to purchase and and consume. However this now seems quaint as now we perceive life ( and all its complexities ) though the measurement of ‘followers’ ‘likes’ and ‘shares’……
This even bleaker state of affairs was foreseen by Fincher (again ) and Aaron Sorkin eleven years later with The Social Network.
The two films make fascinating companion pieces and it’s interesting to compare ‘maleness’ firstly in the gnarly machismo of Tyler Durden and then the wounded vindictiveness of Zuckerberg
Yes – this is how I remember the film, not something about absent fathers. And consumerism is associated largely with women or femininity – hence the liposuction/soap stuff.
Duane M
6 months ago
“[Brad Pittâs character is] lamenting feckless fathers. Heâs denouncing the spiritual pathogens of spectral capitalism. Heâs mounting a critique of inauthentic living. These arenât profound positions…”
Actually, those are profound and important positions. Back in 1999 and just as much today. I would only qualify it to state that the absent fathers are absent because of the demands of capitalism, which is the overriding economic and social force in modern society. And the most disruptive.
Jon Gordon
6 months ago
I appreciate much of what the writer has to say and think I should reacquaint myself with a film I haven’t really seen.
Just one thing though. Why is the writer using the word ‘eros’ when the word that makes sense in the context he’s using is in fact ‘ethos’ ?
Matt Sylvestre
6 months ago
âThere is never going to be enough sexâŠâ – Reality, David Bowie
All I know is that it’s a brilliant film.
The film is a wonderful example of adding if not improving an already very good book. That Tyler Durden is the alter ego of the narrator is skilfully implied, your adult imaginary friend to help you through confusing times. Chuck P ( how do you say it never mind spell it) I remember making an insightful comment about the power of being in a marginal group, gay men in 20 th century, gave considerable powers of detached observation so necessary for engaging writing. A power that has diminished as a marginal group joins or becomes mainstream.
I find Feeneyâs writing a bit like meditation, well what I imagine it to be, so it might be something else, but thatâs all right. I read through it, following one word after the other, one sentence after the other and then at the end thereâs just this emptiness ⊠wha?
Here’s my take.
Any work of art, to be truly great and stand the test of time, should be able to be reinterpreted afresh by each new generation. Think… Shakespeare. Further, it should be possible for a wide range of people to access something within it about their lives and their humanity; or to put it another way, for the work to allow different ‘takes’.
Therefore, any work (of any genre) which aims only to be didactic, or which succeeds only in being so, can’t be considered great.
I’m not sure from this article whether Fight Club falls into that category, although the author seems to suggest it can be re-interpreted 25 years down the line. It’d be useful to hear from anyone who watched it when it was released, and who has watched it again recently in the light (or darkness) of those intervening years.
Must rewatch.
One thing is for sure – the Wild One (or is it Ones) has not stood the test of time.
The closest thesis to match Fight Club comes from the Left, and the postmodern Left too: Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs’ and the post-May 68 trend of mixing Marx, Freud and Nietzsche in a ‘schizoanalysis’ responding to the conservative Lacan.
In short, the movie is even more like Thus Spake Zarathustra than the book. The key scene is the protagonist breaking wildly through the pain threshold in his soap production acid ‘initiation’ which dissolves the (corporate) American ego entirely into schizo-anarchist fragments than can no longer be tamed.
You should be writing for Artforum
Golly.
And sometimes, a movie is just a movie.
True. Even if a movie is a cult movie in some circles.
I think it is fair to say that it is trying to be more than âjust a movieâ – and in my view it succeeds. It certainly sets out to say something – even if there is disagreement on what that is.
Yes, but at other times, a movie isn’t a movie
Is the author implying that INCELs get anything right?
What an empty word salad !
Fight club is a great movie, but it just struck me reading this drivel that maybe the reason it acquired cult status is because it one of the last piece of mainstream media that represented western white young males as a group whith their own legitimate interests, values, and more generally did not gaslight them as “problematic”.
“The generation of lost and yearning fight clubbers was raised by women because those women were abandoned by their husbands.”
So, if a couple separate it’s always the man’s fault? And women don’t prevent their ex-husbands from having contact with their children? The author is profoundly ill-informed. And before using insults such as ‘Neanderthals’ perhaps he ought to take a look in a mirror?
Youâre perhaps taking it more seriously than it deserves – but divorce figures suggest it is women, more than men, who are jumping ship. And as a culture we havenât become any nicer about men in the last two decades or so.
There should be a follow-up article, ‘Yes they can and what you don’t understand about incels’.
This is why Roger Ebert (the famous critic from the Chicago Suntimes) didn’t like this movie. He felt its deeper themes were buried under the macho facade. So the people who should listen to its deeper themes weren’t getting it.
Romper Stomper with Russell Crowe has a similar problem.
Mr. Feeney’s critical rationale rests on the above assumption, and I think stumbles because of it. He’s saying the story can’t be a satire because of the reasoning quoted, which is flawed. If he’d followed through on his rhetorical question, he’d have seen the flaw.
If the director and actor understand a character’s story as valid — that is, they relate to it, it jibes with their experience of life — that does not mean the artists also “see the need for a remedy like fight club.” And since belief in such a remedy does not follow from belief in the affliction, as the author assumes, the artists do not “thus” understand such a remedy as real, as viable.
The artists’ satire — their critical point of view, their “message” — arises from the break in the series of beliefs: they believe in the spiritual damage happening to young men, but they do not believe it can be resolved through violence, which, going by the progression of events, only makes matters worse. Fight club turns into nihilism club.
To resolve their valid discontents, the characters embrace a solution that leads to extreme moral relativism, to nihilism. They become skeptical toward ethical truth, skeptical about the idea that humanity can be improved. It has to be blown up.
The point of the satire is that by choosing a remedy such as fight club, they replace a moral void with a moral void. This is the underlying theme of the story, made via satire.
Frankly, this is not hard to see. The author is correct that incels get the story wrong. Yet they get it wrong for the same reason he does: missing the satire.
As for this:
It seems too lenient to give viewers who miss this satire a break by invoking what people think Truffaut was saying about anti-war films. Yes, the lead was charismatic, the director’s style was attractive, etc. But look carefully at the shifts, at the introduction of discordant notes. How much was Pitt’s charisma gradually undercut? How much was Fincher’s alluring style gradually turned harsh? Never underestimate the power of motivated viewing, to see only what you want to see.
The director may not be recommending this as a lifestyle, and may feel it is a road to nowhere, without sacrificing the society directed satire.
The two main characters provide the director with a point of view (not his own) from which to critique society, which he does not wholly agree with, but is sympathetic towards. He gets why the characters might feel like that. They have a point.
Surely this is also the appeal to incels – itâs a voice which does not praise them – but at least shows a kind of sympathy for their feeling of lostness in the modern world.
Maybe Iâll have to watch it again. But I thought all that liposuction stuff was implicitly critical of women. And my memory is that this was pretty typical – though I could be misremembering it.
Marlon Brando answering, âWhattaya got?â
Iâve always found Brando lame and out of place in this movie – and this is his lamest line. Heâs just not very believable. Compare something like On the Waterfront. Certainly a lot less convincing than Brad Pitt in Fight Club.
Frightening to think that Fight Club is now 25 years and I remember seeing in Nov 99 in the lead up to the millennium.
At at its dark heart, it’s satire on consumerism. Palahnuik’s and Fincher’s bleak vision was disturbing enough back then when the society was judging its citizens on what they were able to purchase and and consume. However this now seems quaint as now we perceive life ( and all its complexities ) though the measurement of ‘followers’ ‘likes’ and ‘shares’……
This even bleaker state of affairs was foreseen by Fincher (again ) and Aaron Sorkin eleven years later with The Social Network.
The two films make fascinating companion pieces and it’s interesting to compare ‘maleness’ firstly in the gnarly machismo of Tyler Durden and then the wounded vindictiveness of Zuckerberg
Yes – this is how I remember the film, not something about absent fathers. And consumerism is associated largely with women or femininity – hence the liposuction/soap stuff.
Actually, those are profound and important positions. Back in 1999 and just as much today. I would only qualify it to state that the absent fathers are absent because of the demands of capitalism, which is the overriding economic and social force in modern society. And the most disruptive.
I appreciate much of what the writer has to say and think I should reacquaint myself with a film I haven’t really seen.
Just one thing though. Why is the writer using the word ‘eros’ when the word that makes sense in the context he’s using is in fact ‘ethos’ ?
âThere is never going to be enough sexâŠâ – Reality, David Bowie