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Fight Club as Holy Writ
Fight Club as Holy Writ
“You Are the All-Singing, All-Dancing Crap of the World”
http://www.counter-currents.com/2012...it/#more-22346
http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...=5064#post5064
1. I am Jack’s Most Devoted Space Monkey
I have hesitated to write an essay on Fight Club for some time, as it would mean breaking the first two rules of Fight Club. But I can no longer remain silent. And I’ve got a lot to say. So brew yourself a big pot of coffee and spend an hour with me. I promise I’ll make it worth your time.
Fight Club has now displaced Network (1977) as my favorite film. It’s not because Fight Club is a better piece of cinema, or “the greatest film of all time.” It is because Fight Club speaks to me in a way that no other film does. I have watched it countless times with countless people under all sorts of conditions (it seems to go particularly well with Jägermeister). This film addresses my problems and the problems of the age; it speaks to my own deepest dissatisfactions and darkest desires; and proposes (or at least seems to propose) many of the right solutions to what ails us (though, as I shall explain, there is one major lacuna in the film’s ideology).
Fight Club has the capacity to inspire me like no other film. If I am feeling down, depressed and discouraged by “things today” or by my own inability to put the chicken shit of my daily life into perspective, one late-night viewing of Fight Club is enough to get me back on track and restore my sense of “mission.” In a certain way, I have to admit that I feel slightly awkward about this. After all, Fight Club is (I think) a film intended for a much younger audience. In many ways its aesthetic belongs very much to the present. And let’s not lose sight of the fact that as great as this film is, it is a Hollywood product. I am a highly-educated man. I’ve read every major work in the Western canon. How can a recent Hollywood movie (with Brad Pitt for Christ’s sake!) be so important to me? And yet it is. And I make no apologies for it.
I’m also far from being alone. This film has struck a chord with countless young and youngish men. It has probably been responsible for recruiting more young guys to mixed martial arts academies than any pay per view broadcast of the UFC. (One of my best friends tried to interest me in Brazilian jiu-jitsu – in which he is now a brown belt—by telling me “it’s like Fight Club!”) Note that I’ve referred so far only to men, because if ever there was a “guy flick,” Fight Club is it. Fight Club has now surpassed the Three Stooges as the most effective way to drive women out of the living room. In terms of our struggle against the modern world (see my mission statement here) Fight Club is the most important artwork of the last fifty years – and the only artwork to be directed exclusively at men. But in order to change the world one must always appeal, primarily, to men.
You will have noticed in all of the above that I have been referring solely to the film of Fight Club, not to the novel. There are two reasons for this. First, Fight Club belongs to a group of cinematic adaptations of novels that have almost completely eclipsed their original source. If I mention Gone With the Wind, do you think of the film or of the novel? Ditto The Wizard of Oz. And consider James Bond: nobody reads Fleming anymore. So, in writing of Fight Club for readers of Counter-Currents it is the film, primarily, that I must speak of.
Second, the film improves upon the book in a number of significant ways. None of this is meant to disparage either the novel or its author, Chuck Palahniuk. In fact, one can really speak of the film and novel together because although the film does depart from the novel in some ways, for the most part it follows it very closely. (A huge amount of Edward Norton’s voiceover narration in the film is taken directly from the text.) Without Palahniuk, there would be no cinematic Fight Club, and so we must all bow to his genius. However, as I will discuss later on, his genius is of a very peculiar and problematic kind.
And this leads me to a very important point, which I must state up front: I am not the slightest bit interested in what Palahniuk has said about his novel, or its film version. The reasons for this have to do with that peculiar and problematic genius I will (I promise) elaborate on later. For now, I will simply invoke Roland Barthes’s infamous “death of the author” thesis: texts mean more than their authors think that they do, and an author’s intentions or personal understanding of his work is not the be-all-and-end-all of interpretation. I am also not the slightest bit interested in what director David Fincher or screenwriter Jim Uhls think of their film. (I will tell them what it means, thank you.)
.
2. I am Jack’s Thumos
No lengthy plot summary is necessary. I’ll wager virtually everyone reading this – and probably everyone reading this website – has seen Fight Club. The central character in both the novel (which is told in the first person) and the film is not named initially. And to keep matters straight we can’t begin by calling him by the name we later learn is actually his own. The screenplay refers to him as “Jack,” in reference to a series of brief anatomy primers that he discovers, bearing titles like “I Am Jack’s Colon.” (In the novel, it is “Joe.”)
.
Edward Norton as "Jack".
Our friend Jack is the Last Man. He works as a “recall coordinator” for a major, unnamed car company and he is living “the American dream.” When not working, he spends his time stocking his climate-controlled, concrete-lined condo (in Wilmington, Delaware – though the film only hints at this) with IKEA furniture, duvets, and dust ruffles. He has it all: CK shirts, DKNY shoes, AX ties. And absolutely nothing else. Had this film been made (or the novel written) more recently no doubt a large portion of Jack’s evenings, and days off, would be spent looking at porn online and masturbating. (Sorry, guys. Did that hit too close to home?)
Jack says “I would flip through catalogues and wonder, ‘What kind of dining set defines me as a person?’” My God, I’ve done the exact same thing. I’ve spent many an afternoon winding my way through IKEA looking at their displays thinking “Is this the sort of couch a person like me would have?” Or, worse yet, “What do I want to say about myself by buying that bedspread?”
Fight Club does a marvelous job of conveying the utter barrenness of this modern life – especially the way it tries to cover its stench with the sickly-sweet perfume of moral superiority. Jack buys “Rislampa wire lamps of environmentally-friendly unbleached paper,” and “glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections. Proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of . . . wherever.” And, of course, there are the awful, smarmy support groups where everything is referred to in euphemisms, everyone who suffers is “heroic,” and every death is a “tragedy.”
And everywhere there is the oppressive vulgarity of a processed, homogenized, corporate world: “When deep space exploration ramps up it will be the corporations that name everything. The IBM Stellar Sphere. The Microsoft Galaxy. Planet Starbucks.” (Of course, it seems now that the dream of deep space exploration has just been quietly dropped. Perhaps it’s a good thing that this planet is the only one we will trash.) Fight Club not only captures the ugliness and emptiness of today, it captures its inhumanity as well. The automated phone lines with their menus within menus, the corporations that knowingly put our lives at risk with shoddy products, the bosses who think your life belongs to them, and the complete and total lack of any sense of community, any sense of caring for others. This plush little Rislampa lit paradise we’ve created is hard and cold, filled with harried, angry people.
It’s the men who are angriest of all. The women, true enough, are awful: brittle, desiccated career harpies; emotionally stunted and even physically damaged by their religious commitment to infertility. And this is, in many ways, very much a woman’s world. It is soccer-mom safe. Oriented around material comfort, security, and the suppression of thumos. As I said in my essay “Dystopia is Now!”:
Now, what is important to understand is that although thumos is a human possession, it is pre-eminently a male possession. Actually, it’s even more complicated than that. It’s possible to be a male, a grown-up male, and not be a man (or as we sometimes say “a real man”). All men intuitively understand this, even drag queens. (Want to get slugged by a drag queen? Just impugn her manhood.) Becoming a man has everything to do with the expression and management of thumos.
Young men often think they will impress older men through an unbridled expression of thumotic rage. They quickly learn that this is greeted with disapproval. A real man doesn’t fight unnecessarily, and he sure as hell doesn’t fight in order to “prove something” (beyond a certain age, the desire to “prove you’re a man” is a sign of stunted emotional growth and narcissism).
But a real man will fight (physically or verbally) when something important is at stake – including his dignity and honor, or the dignity and honor of his family, or his people. Whereas the inability or unwillingness to fight when the situation calls for it – especially when this is due to fear – marks a man as unmanly, and exposes him to the contempt of other, manlier men.
How thumos gets expressed, and what counts as a situation calling for its expression, differs from culture to culture. For example, the phenomenon of “honor killings” fills us Westerners with horror – and indeed the dumber the humans, the dumber will be their expressions of thumos. But the Untermenschen at least have some thumos, whereas ours seems to have been sliced off some time ago.
Yes, it’s with emasculation that Fight Club begins. Literally. (And literal emasculation is a thread that runs through the entire film.) The world of Fight Club – our world – is a world where all healthy, male expressions of masculinity have been pathologized and suppressed. And the story of Fight Club starts when Jack, an emotionally repressed insomniac looking for some kind of catharsis, visits a support group for men with testicular cancer: “Remaining Men Together.” Some of these men have literally been emasculated. One of them, Bob, has developed “bitch tits” because testosterone therapy caused his body to up his estrogen level.
How did Bob get in this predicament? We are told that he was a “champion bodybuilder.” And like all champion bodybuilders he was a ‘roid head. (Bob gives us a litany of the drugs he used to use, saying of one of them “They use that on racehorses for Christ’s sake!”). It is implied that Bob’s steroid abuse led to his testicular cancer. How ironic. Here’s a guy who pumped himself full of synthetic man hormones and built enormous man muscles – why? Well, to be manly for gosh sakes. And it led to his manhood being removed.
Punishment from the gods, if you ask me. Like Jack and so many other men today, he felt a sense of masculine inferiority. And like so many men today he addressed it through the external, through the cosmetic. So he built big muscles (which, of course, any fairy can do in a gym in Chelsea). Others allow a quarter inch or so of stubble to accumulate on their faces, and carefully trim it every few days. Others buy snazzy cars.
Still others respond to those “penis enlargement” spam emails. Why is penis size such a big issue these days? Why are there countless websites and pills promising to give a guy three inches in three weeks? Why do guys in gyms now wear their underwear into the shower? (Something which would have been considered really weird in my father’s day, when guys swam naked at the Y without shame, and without anybody thinking it was “gay.”) Is it just because we’re exposed to more porn now than ever before, and have a distorted image of what’s “normal”? No, it’s because all the traditional ways in which men have proved their masculinity are now closed to us. And so masculinity becomes purely a matter of externals, of looks and size: height, size of muscles, size of penis, size of bank account, size of house, etc.
Fight Club is about reclaiming lost masculine rites of passage, and pathways to male self-actualization. It’s about reclaiming masculinity itself. Note that I did not say “reinventing” or (choke) “reimagining” masculinity. That’s what the phony “men’s movement” is all about: creating a new, feminist-approved masculinity. Sitting in sweat lodges, banging drums, and weeping about how the “traditional masculine gender role” has been “hurtful” to them. Palahniuk is, partly, parodying this with “Remaining Men Together.” But don’t misunderstand me, there’s nothing wrong with men crying – so long as they don’t cry too often, too easily, and over too trivial a matter. Read The Iliad. Those guys cried more than Republican hopefuls in an election year.
When Bob embraces Jack at Remaining Men Together, after a moment’s hesitation Jack begins weeping freely. (When he releases Bob and we see the tear stains on Bob’s grey shirt it looks kind of like the image on the Shroud of Turin. This always gets big laughs from audiences, for some reason.) Why does Jack cry – or, better put, what is he crying over? He’s crying over the shrieking nothingness he lives the rest of the day (to borrow some words from Paddy Chayefsky’s Network). He has every reason to cry – and so do we. There’s nothing wrong with feeling sorry for yourself so long as you’ve really got something to be sorry over. We’re Last Men living at the End of History, in the wreckage of the Great Society, drowning in the brown tide. And to add insult to injury we’ve had our balls handed to us. “Go ahead, Cornelius. You can cry.”
But Tyler Durden put it best:
Then, in the screenplay (but not in the finished film), Tyler say: “We are the quiet young men who listen until it’s time to decide.” A very significant line, as we shall see . . .
“You Are the All-Singing, All-Dancing Crap of the World”
http://www.counter-currents.com/2012...it/#more-22346
http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...=5064#post5064
1. I am Jack’s Most Devoted Space Monkey
I have hesitated to write an essay on Fight Club for some time, as it would mean breaking the first two rules of Fight Club. But I can no longer remain silent. And I’ve got a lot to say. So brew yourself a big pot of coffee and spend an hour with me. I promise I’ll make it worth your time.
Fight Club has now displaced Network (1977) as my favorite film. It’s not because Fight Club is a better piece of cinema, or “the greatest film of all time.” It is because Fight Club speaks to me in a way that no other film does. I have watched it countless times with countless people under all sorts of conditions (it seems to go particularly well with Jägermeister). This film addresses my problems and the problems of the age; it speaks to my own deepest dissatisfactions and darkest desires; and proposes (or at least seems to propose) many of the right solutions to what ails us (though, as I shall explain, there is one major lacuna in the film’s ideology).
Fight Club has the capacity to inspire me like no other film. If I am feeling down, depressed and discouraged by “things today” or by my own inability to put the chicken shit of my daily life into perspective, one late-night viewing of Fight Club is enough to get me back on track and restore my sense of “mission.” In a certain way, I have to admit that I feel slightly awkward about this. After all, Fight Club is (I think) a film intended for a much younger audience. In many ways its aesthetic belongs very much to the present. And let’s not lose sight of the fact that as great as this film is, it is a Hollywood product. I am a highly-educated man. I’ve read every major work in the Western canon. How can a recent Hollywood movie (with Brad Pitt for Christ’s sake!) be so important to me? And yet it is. And I make no apologies for it.
I’m also far from being alone. This film has struck a chord with countless young and youngish men. It has probably been responsible for recruiting more young guys to mixed martial arts academies than any pay per view broadcast of the UFC. (One of my best friends tried to interest me in Brazilian jiu-jitsu – in which he is now a brown belt—by telling me “it’s like Fight Club!”) Note that I’ve referred so far only to men, because if ever there was a “guy flick,” Fight Club is it. Fight Club has now surpassed the Three Stooges as the most effective way to drive women out of the living room. In terms of our struggle against the modern world (see my mission statement here) Fight Club is the most important artwork of the last fifty years – and the only artwork to be directed exclusively at men. But in order to change the world one must always appeal, primarily, to men.
You will have noticed in all of the above that I have been referring solely to the film of Fight Club, not to the novel. There are two reasons for this. First, Fight Club belongs to a group of cinematic adaptations of novels that have almost completely eclipsed their original source. If I mention Gone With the Wind, do you think of the film or of the novel? Ditto The Wizard of Oz. And consider James Bond: nobody reads Fleming anymore. So, in writing of Fight Club for readers of Counter-Currents it is the film, primarily, that I must speak of.
Second, the film improves upon the book in a number of significant ways. None of this is meant to disparage either the novel or its author, Chuck Palahniuk. In fact, one can really speak of the film and novel together because although the film does depart from the novel in some ways, for the most part it follows it very closely. (A huge amount of Edward Norton’s voiceover narration in the film is taken directly from the text.) Without Palahniuk, there would be no cinematic Fight Club, and so we must all bow to his genius. However, as I will discuss later on, his genius is of a very peculiar and problematic kind.
And this leads me to a very important point, which I must state up front: I am not the slightest bit interested in what Palahniuk has said about his novel, or its film version. The reasons for this have to do with that peculiar and problematic genius I will (I promise) elaborate on later. For now, I will simply invoke Roland Barthes’s infamous “death of the author” thesis: texts mean more than their authors think that they do, and an author’s intentions or personal understanding of his work is not the be-all-and-end-all of interpretation. I am also not the slightest bit interested in what director David Fincher or screenwriter Jim Uhls think of their film. (I will tell them what it means, thank you.)
.
2. I am Jack’s Thumos
No lengthy plot summary is necessary. I’ll wager virtually everyone reading this – and probably everyone reading this website – has seen Fight Club. The central character in both the novel (which is told in the first person) and the film is not named initially. And to keep matters straight we can’t begin by calling him by the name we later learn is actually his own. The screenplay refers to him as “Jack,” in reference to a series of brief anatomy primers that he discovers, bearing titles like “I Am Jack’s Colon.” (In the novel, it is “Joe.”)
.
Edward Norton as "Jack"
Our friend Jack is the Last Man. He works as a “recall coordinator” for a major, unnamed car company and he is living “the American dream.” When not working, he spends his time stocking his climate-controlled, concrete-lined condo (in Wilmington, Delaware – though the film only hints at this) with IKEA furniture, duvets, and dust ruffles. He has it all: CK shirts, DKNY shoes, AX ties. And absolutely nothing else. Had this film been made (or the novel written) more recently no doubt a large portion of Jack’s evenings, and days off, would be spent looking at porn online and masturbating. (Sorry, guys. Did that hit too close to home?)
Jack says “I would flip through catalogues and wonder, ‘What kind of dining set defines me as a person?’” My God, I’ve done the exact same thing. I’ve spent many an afternoon winding my way through IKEA looking at their displays thinking “Is this the sort of couch a person like me would have?” Or, worse yet, “What do I want to say about myself by buying that bedspread?”
Fight Club does a marvelous job of conveying the utter barrenness of this modern life – especially the way it tries to cover its stench with the sickly-sweet perfume of moral superiority. Jack buys “Rislampa wire lamps of environmentally-friendly unbleached paper,” and “glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections. Proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of . . . wherever.” And, of course, there are the awful, smarmy support groups where everything is referred to in euphemisms, everyone who suffers is “heroic,” and every death is a “tragedy.”
And everywhere there is the oppressive vulgarity of a processed, homogenized, corporate world: “When deep space exploration ramps up it will be the corporations that name everything. The IBM Stellar Sphere. The Microsoft Galaxy. Planet Starbucks.” (Of course, it seems now that the dream of deep space exploration has just been quietly dropped. Perhaps it’s a good thing that this planet is the only one we will trash.) Fight Club not only captures the ugliness and emptiness of today, it captures its inhumanity as well. The automated phone lines with their menus within menus, the corporations that knowingly put our lives at risk with shoddy products, the bosses who think your life belongs to them, and the complete and total lack of any sense of community, any sense of caring for others. This plush little Rislampa lit paradise we’ve created is hard and cold, filled with harried, angry people.
It’s the men who are angriest of all. The women, true enough, are awful: brittle, desiccated career harpies; emotionally stunted and even physically damaged by their religious commitment to infertility. And this is, in many ways, very much a woman’s world. It is soccer-mom safe. Oriented around material comfort, security, and the suppression of thumos. As I said in my essay “Dystopia is Now!”:
Thumos is “spiritedness.” According to Plato (in The Republic) it’s that aspect of us that responds to a challenge against our values. Thumos is what makes us want to beat up those TSA screeners who pat us down and put us through that machine that allows them to view our naughty bits. It’s an affront to our dignity, and makes us want to fight. Anyone who does not feel affronted in this situation is not really a human being. This is because it is really thumos that makes us human; that separates us from the beasts. (It’s not just that we’re smarter than them; our possession of thumos makes us different in kind from other animals.) Thumos is the thing in us that responds to ideals: it motivates us to fight for principles, and to strive to be more than we are.
.Now, what is important to understand is that although thumos is a human possession, it is pre-eminently a male possession. Actually, it’s even more complicated than that. It’s possible to be a male, a grown-up male, and not be a man (or as we sometimes say “a real man”). All men intuitively understand this, even drag queens. (Want to get slugged by a drag queen? Just impugn her manhood.) Becoming a man has everything to do with the expression and management of thumos.
Young men often think they will impress older men through an unbridled expression of thumotic rage. They quickly learn that this is greeted with disapproval. A real man doesn’t fight unnecessarily, and he sure as hell doesn’t fight in order to “prove something” (beyond a certain age, the desire to “prove you’re a man” is a sign of stunted emotional growth and narcissism).
But a real man will fight (physically or verbally) when something important is at stake – including his dignity and honor, or the dignity and honor of his family, or his people. Whereas the inability or unwillingness to fight when the situation calls for it – especially when this is due to fear – marks a man as unmanly, and exposes him to the contempt of other, manlier men.
How thumos gets expressed, and what counts as a situation calling for its expression, differs from culture to culture. For example, the phenomenon of “honor killings” fills us Westerners with horror – and indeed the dumber the humans, the dumber will be their expressions of thumos. But the Untermenschen at least have some thumos, whereas ours seems to have been sliced off some time ago.
Yes, it’s with emasculation that Fight Club begins. Literally. (And literal emasculation is a thread that runs through the entire film.) The world of Fight Club – our world – is a world where all healthy, male expressions of masculinity have been pathologized and suppressed. And the story of Fight Club starts when Jack, an emotionally repressed insomniac looking for some kind of catharsis, visits a support group for men with testicular cancer: “Remaining Men Together.” Some of these men have literally been emasculated. One of them, Bob, has developed “bitch tits” because testosterone therapy caused his body to up his estrogen level.
How did Bob get in this predicament? We are told that he was a “champion bodybuilder.” And like all champion bodybuilders he was a ‘roid head. (Bob gives us a litany of the drugs he used to use, saying of one of them “They use that on racehorses for Christ’s sake!”). It is implied that Bob’s steroid abuse led to his testicular cancer. How ironic. Here’s a guy who pumped himself full of synthetic man hormones and built enormous man muscles – why? Well, to be manly for gosh sakes. And it led to his manhood being removed.
Punishment from the gods, if you ask me. Like Jack and so many other men today, he felt a sense of masculine inferiority. And like so many men today he addressed it through the external, through the cosmetic. So he built big muscles (which, of course, any fairy can do in a gym in Chelsea). Others allow a quarter inch or so of stubble to accumulate on their faces, and carefully trim it every few days. Others buy snazzy cars.
Still others respond to those “penis enlargement” spam emails. Why is penis size such a big issue these days? Why are there countless websites and pills promising to give a guy three inches in three weeks? Why do guys in gyms now wear their underwear into the shower? (Something which would have been considered really weird in my father’s day, when guys swam naked at the Y without shame, and without anybody thinking it was “gay.”) Is it just because we’re exposed to more porn now than ever before, and have a distorted image of what’s “normal”? No, it’s because all the traditional ways in which men have proved their masculinity are now closed to us. And so masculinity becomes purely a matter of externals, of looks and size: height, size of muscles, size of penis, size of bank account, size of house, etc.
Fight Club is about reclaiming lost masculine rites of passage, and pathways to male self-actualization. It’s about reclaiming masculinity itself. Note that I did not say “reinventing” or (choke) “reimagining” masculinity. That’s what the phony “men’s movement” is all about: creating a new, feminist-approved masculinity. Sitting in sweat lodges, banging drums, and weeping about how the “traditional masculine gender role” has been “hurtful” to them. Palahniuk is, partly, parodying this with “Remaining Men Together.” But don’t misunderstand me, there’s nothing wrong with men crying – so long as they don’t cry too often, too easily, and over too trivial a matter. Read The Iliad. Those guys cried more than Republican hopefuls in an election year.
When Bob embraces Jack at Remaining Men Together, after a moment’s hesitation Jack begins weeping freely. (When he releases Bob and we see the tear stains on Bob’s grey shirt it looks kind of like the image on the Shroud of Turin. This always gets big laughs from audiences, for some reason.) Why does Jack cry – or, better put, what is he crying over? He’s crying over the shrieking nothingness he lives the rest of the day (to borrow some words from Paddy Chayefsky’s Network). He has every reason to cry – and so do we. There’s nothing wrong with feeling sorry for yourself so long as you’ve really got something to be sorry over. We’re Last Men living at the End of History, in the wreckage of the Great Society, drowning in the brown tide. And to add insult to injury we’ve had our balls handed to us. “Go ahead, Cornelius. You can cry.”
But Tyler Durden put it best:
I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who have ever lived — an entire generation pumping gas and waiting tables; or they’re slaves with white collars. Advertisements have them chasing cars and clothes, working jobs they hate so they can buy shit they don’t need. We are the middle children of history, with no purpose or place. We have no great war, or great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We were raised by television to believe that we’d be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars — but we won’t. And we’re learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed-off.
.Then, in the screenplay (but not in the finished film), Tyler say: “We are the quiet young men who listen until it’s time to decide.” A very significant line, as we shall see . . .