I was listening recently to author Chuck Palahniuk on Joe Rogan's podcast and they were talking about Fight Club as being a way for guys to come together and talk about their lives and their feelings the way that women do over books all the time. Palahniuk said that men basically only have Fight Club and Dead Poets Society. But he also talked about how some philosophers have said that men need a secondary father figure to be the mentor in their lives to healthily grow (what Tyler essentially represents in the story). Rogan is joining in making the parallel to martial arts and self mastery and discipline and how important that is for self growth and self worth. It's an interesting conversation and has really stirred that pot within my brain.
The problem I have with this is that even if I agreed that men need to express their internal energies in an external violent way (I don't agree with that), I would still say that Fight Club isn't about any of these things that they're talking about. If anything it shows the opposite, that expressing these violent tendencies makes the men into fighting addicts and brainless submissives rather than more fully functioning adults. To me it is saying that this expressing of violence is the opposite extreme to what the Narrator (Ed Norton) had been living, a life of consumerism and relative passivity. There needs to be a balance in life, of course, but the movie doesn't really show or say that. Even ultimately its ending tries to feel emotionally like a resolution, though it resolves nothing and is illogical and idiotic.
Now, maybe the book and movie have different agendas, I don't know, again I haven't read the book. Maybe this is getting into misleading territory with the author of the book commenting on something that I only have knowledge of the movie version, but I think Palahniuk is way off here about what his intention was versus what was created. The men in Fight Club don't talk about their lives, their feelings, or become more whole human beings. They don't express anything but anger and frustration through acts of violence, ultimately turning to terrorism. There has always seemed to me to be an internal dissonance within Fight Club because of this. It's not as smart as it thinks it is, and I don't think it's saying what it thinks it's saying.
The movie turns in on itself in the third act, as the members of Fight Club become submissive terrorist followers to their leader Tyler (Brad Pitt), but then what does that mean for what the movie is saying? Is it then reversing its agenda and showing Tyler to be in the wrong the whole time? Is it then positing that violence is not the answer? Ultimately no, it actually abandons thematic meanings to try and end on a note of hope for the relationship between the broken Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) and the Narrator. Why? Why should we hope for anything for these two people individually or together? They've seemingly learned nothing, and don't have any kind of model relationship that will save either of them from the demons that will come back to haunt them again.
I think my issue is that I feel like the movie doesn’t ultimately say anything at all. It brings up points about consumerism, masculinity, and other things, but with the way that the story ends, it doesn’t then present anything else as a conclusion. So we’re left with these points, which cause questions, and that’s certainly not a bad thing. But the movie also doesn’t have anything to say about the questions it brings up, I don’t think. Questions are good. I like a movie asking questions. But I guess I think a movie should be more than a question. Even movies that present an issue but then don’t take sides on the issue ultimately are explicitly asking for a discussion of the issue. When a movie presents itself like it has an answer in the Id embodiment that is Tyler, only to subvert that by showing Tyler to be wrong (maybe? I'm still not sure that's what the movie thinks it's doing, even if I think that is what it's doing), I think it needs to present some viewpoint, not cop out by presenting no viewpoint. Fight Club seems to present Tyler as the answer to consumerism and impotent masculinity, and then shows Tyler to be the “bad guy” but doesn’t present him as being wrong necessarily. It just “kills” him and Marla and the Narrator watch as they are powerless to stop the destruction that Tyler has caused. End of movie. What?
I think that people need an outlet for their emotions. Could be an artistic outlet, it could be a therapist or even just a close friend that you are able to be truthful and vulnerable with. I'm not sure if my issue with the movie has always been that it seems to present violence as the only outlet, or that it then seems to undercut it in the end, leaving no real statement being made. It's almost like it tries to have it both ways, and people don't seem to realize that it is not actually saying much in the end, is it? Am I being too hard on it? It's trying to say something about consumerism, about needing a balance of Id and Superego, about violent tendencies, but what is the movie itself ultimately saying about those things? There are a lot of think pieces we could write inspired by what the movie brings up in us, and maybe that's the point, but what is the movie itself actually saying about any of it?
Now, I don’t think a movie has to say anything. Movies don't necessarily have to have deep themes that they explore in some way. There doesn't necessarily have to be some philosophy behind a movie. But I guess if a movie like this comes along with a protagonist looking for answers, has a character who appears to have all the answers that the protagonist is looking for, only to be shown to be fraudulent as far as answers go, ultimately leaving the protagonist in seemingly not too different a place as he started the movie, outside of the experiences of the movie, I feel like it should make a statement on what it actually believes. Fight Club doesn't do that, because it doesn’t seem to outwardly believe anything. I agree with others about the satirical aspect of the movie. I don’t think the movie is actually advocating violence even though that has been the overwhelming takeaway for most people from the movie. But if not that then what? It doesn’t then advocate anything else. A different way of thinking, different ideas. It just has that cop out ending and asks us to be satisfied by that.
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