The novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk Essay Example for Free

The novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk Essay The novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk is a Generation X classic, so it makes sense that the film became one as well.   Starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt as the two sides of the same brain, director David Fincher takes a critical look at the rampant consumerist world that drains the humanity from its victims and replaces them with robotic automatons.   The way the characters in the film deal with this problem, besides going crazy, is through violent confrontation with each other, in an attempt to purge their demons and cleanse their souls. Rather than just a slick film about a violent subculture, Fight Club is the interrelated critique of capitalism and its dehumanizing effects.   The central protagonists in the film, Jack and Tyler, represent two opposing views on consumerism. Jack is representative of a generation of men condemned to corporate toadyism, with emotional lives and investments mediated through the allure of commodities and goods.   No longer a producer of goods, Jack exemplifies a form of domesticated passivity, alienated, and without ambition.   On the other hand, Tyler represents an embodied freedom that refuses the seductions of consumerism, while fetishizing self sufficient production from soaps to explosivesthe ultimate negative expression of which is chaos and destruction, both products of late capitalism (Giroux 12). Consumerism in Fight Club is criticized primarily as an ideological force and existential experience that weakens and domesticates men, robbing them of their primary role as producers and relegating them to mere tools of forces that control them.   The importance of this is not lost on director David Fincher, but the director is less interested in fighting oppressive forms of power than he is in exploring the ways in which men yield to it. Freedom in Fight Club is not simply preoccupied with the de-politicized self, it also lacks a language for translating private troubles into public rage, and as such succumbs to the cult of immediate sensations in which freedom degenerates into collective impotence.   Moreover, consumerism, for David Fincher, can only function with the libidinal economy of repression, particularly as it rearticulates the male body away from the visceral experiences of pain, coercion, and violence to the more â€Å"feminized† notions of empathy, compassion, and trust.   Hence, masculinity is defined in opposition to both femininity and consumerism while simultaneously refusing to take up either in a dialectical and critical way. When not making a political statement, Fight Club functions less as a critique of capitalism than as a defense of authoritarian masculinity wedded to the immediacy of pleasure sustained through violence and abuse.   Survival of the fittest becomes the clarion call for legitimating dehumanizing forms of violence as a source of pleasure and sociality. Pleasure in this context has little to do with justice, equality, and freedom than with hyper modes of competition mediated through the fantasy of violence.   More specifically, this particular rendering of pleasure is predicated on legitimating the relationship between oppression and misogyny, and masculinity gains its force through a celebration of both brutality and the denigration of the feminine.   Fight Club’s vision of liberation and politics relies on gendered and sexist hierarchies that flow directly from the consumer culture it claims to be criticizing. The anti-consumerist theme and violent escapism of the film is described by New York Times critic Janet Maslin who says: â€Å"Fight Club watches this form of escapism morph into something much more dangerous.   Tyler somehow builds a bridge from the anti-materialist rhetoric of the 1960s†¦into the kind of paramilitary dream project that Ayn Rand might have admired.†Ã‚   The over-the-top rejection of enslavement to consumerism manifests itself in a dark, sometimes pointless orgy of violence. But, there is a point to it all and a method to the madness – freedom.   The ultimate goal of the narrator, Tyler, Project Mayhem is to liberate themselves from the bonds of conformity to a culture they view as shallow and erroneous.   Though this opinion may be shared by many Generation X’ers and children of the 60s, the methods used in Fight Club are cultural rebellion to the extreme.   The freedom they achieve is largely an illusion, but justified in the words of Tyler:   â€Å"Its only after weve lost everything that were free to do anything† (Fight Club).   The movie takes two hours of stark, violent, often sexist action to reveal its message of simplicity.   However, a viewer must look past the blood, acid burns, and bone-crunching punches to find it. Works Cited:    Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. Perf. Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. 1999. DVD. Twentieth Century Fox, 2000. Giroux, Henry. â€Å"Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders.†Ã‚   Penn State University.  Ã‚   (July 2000).   February 15, 2006.   http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/FightClub Maslin, Janet.   â€Å"Fight Club: Such a Very Long Way From Duvets to Danger.†   The New York Times.   October 15, 1999.   February 15, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/101599fight-film-review.html.