I blame Fight Club for so much.
For one, Fight Club made writing screenplays about split personalities okay, when the oh-shit-Norton-is-Pitt twist really wasn't that interesting a twist in the first place.
That's the least interesting bit of the film, really. Having taught screenwriting for several years, by far the most overdone, clichéd, beaten to hell plot device among beginning writers is the split personality.
That device got so common in the years following Fight Club that I eventually made a list of banned story ideas for my classes. "Split personalities" was near the top.
(Of course, I offered to grant exceptions for those students who were also licensed, practicing psychiatrists. Nobody ever took me up on that.)
Fight Club explores the emasculation of men in modern capitalist society, but doesn't do much to provide reasonable solutions or alternatives, just postulating that the pendulum on which inept men sit must one day swing back, violently, against whomever or whatever performed the emasculation.
This is the logical conclusion, circa 1999, to the arc on which we found ourselves. Prior to 9/11, our greatest enemies were ourselves. Timothy McVeigh parked a van full of explosives and blew up a building. Sound familiar? The largest terrorist attack on American soil prior to 9/11 was perpetrated by an American. This is the world into which Fight Club was born.
Who is our enemy since 9/11? You make the call. Are the terrorists our enemy? Muslims? Republicans? Someone else?
Who says we have to have just one enemy? We were fantasizing about blowing up our own financial sectors in escapist film in 1999. When you have no real threat, you make one up. Hollywood has done this for years. Don't get too comfortable.
"We're a generation of men raised by women," Tyler Durden suggests, as if mothering causes the beta male mentality, some kind of dime store psychoanalysis. I don't buy that, exactly.
(Interesting choice of words: "I don't buy that.")
No, Mom didn't make us this way. Not by herself, anyway. (A male-dominated society attributing predominantly male foibles to females. That's rich.)
Fight Club also factored into my ill-advised aspirations as a film theorist. I had these grand ideas of doing my Ph.D. in film, and I'd seen a few articles on the demasculinization theme. I read them, enjoyed them, found them fascinating, and they validated some of my favorite films. I like when scholars write papers and books about films I enjoy.
Of course, these papers and books also tend to make every male film theorist look like an asshole. Hey, look, now the white guys are wringing their hands and trying to tell everyone how tough it is, being a white male. Y'all don't know what it's like, being male, middle-class, and white.
Our fathers wouldn't do this...would they? Where's the pendulum now?
Finally, for all of Fight Club bluster against material goods, I never stopped acquiring them — still haven't. In one year of owning a Blu-Ray player, I've amassed some 60 Blu-Ray discs. I don't know what all of this means, except that I probably don't take Fight Club to heart very much. Maybe I can't blame Fight Club exactly. Maybe here I just blame myself for not getting the message.
When I think about how my collections have gotten out of control over the years — the hundreds of DVDs and CDs, the thousands of baseball cards and comics, the shelves and shelves of books, and the mountain of debt I've built for myself over the years, all in an effort to satisfy...something, I can't help but think of what Tyler Durden would say:
"The things you own end up owning you."
More than any line, that one sticks with me. So much truth there. Give up your worldly possessions and move out of town. Fight Club is Walden with bloody fists.
Everybody says marriage and family tie you down, but I was tied down long before marriage. Paralyzing fear of the unknown and the lack of control I sometimes feel all seem to feed into this obsession to collect.
I've explored that here before, tried to generate something positive by writing and examining what I've made of this, and nothing could be more beta male than this navel-gazing writing project that goes from arrogance to self-loathing to self-aggrandizing to simply justifying materialism and obsessive-compulsiveness run roughshod. I'm not going to blame a movie and I'm not going to blame Mom. There's no point in assigning blame.
If I had nothing left but my wife and my rabbit, I'd still be happy because everything else can be replaced or recreated. They are the true currency, the true possession, the real meaning.
Watching Fight Club beats all that out of me.
I can certainly agree with your statement "The things you own end up owning you" when I have to rent a storage garage because the things I've purchased will no longer fit comfortably in my one-bedroom apartment.
ReplyDeleteThe '00s were both the best and worst decade with regards to home video releases. I've got boxes and boxes of DVDs purchased because they were such a good deal and I was convinced that I'd find time to watch them... someday. Now I'm considering ripping them to a large hard drive and selling them, because I just can't bear the thought of so much of my stuff locked away in storage, where aside from the fact that I'll probably never get around to watching them, I also can't enjoy looking at such an impressive collection and remembering just how and why each DVD entered my life. Each one has a story, as your site so deliciously explains.