Fight Club

I had seen this movie once before, years ago, and all I could remember were Brad Pitt’s abs. Ah, the abs. I don’t remember it having to do with consumerism at all, but it was very interesting to watch it at the very end of this class. Here are my reflections.

Fight Club is essentially a cult, which becomes a terrorist cell that is based on fighting, and more broadly the subversion of conspicuous consumption. The members fight to feel real, intense emotions to counteract the numbing of everyday life that mass-consumption creates. The critique on consumption begins with Ed Norton’s insomnia. Lack of sleep becomes a physical manifestation of simulacra- Norton can’t tell what is real, everything is a copy of a copy, and déjà vu hits repeatedly. When the insomnia first begins to take over his life, he is a proud conspicuous consumer. He orders from catalogs, and cleans his Scandinavian furniture when he is upset. He is what we all are- complete and utter victims of marketing. Lives ruled by commodities.

Norton meets Brad Pitt and they organically grow a fight club. Men gather to fight because of the intensity of raw feelings, even though it is mostly pain. Obviously it is a release of tension and/or anger, but it is ultimately a willing act of subversion. The members subvert the capitalist system by forming an egalitarian group in which money and commodities are entirely absent (except when the level of destruction rises with the evolution of the group to Project Mayhem). They become a lot like the Situationists in that they are nihilistic, will stop at nothing, and are not afraid of destruction on a mass scale for their cause. Pre-Project Mayhem, Fight Club was able to subvert the entire system of capitalism. Even though capitalism has invaded our consciousness, it has not invaded communal underground fighting for, well, nothing- no money, no commodity prize. Voluntary pain cannot exist in the system of capitalism because capitalism is based on pleasure, desire, and ever-growing profits.

Money is involved for Pitt and Norton to survive- they make luxury soap. Soap is a brilliant choice for the characters’ commodity engagement. Soap is something that makes us clean, that smells good, that comes in an infinite variety of different flavors, and is almost always thought of in a positive and easily accessible way. This is a brilliant play on Marx’s notion of the consumers’ extreme distance from the production of the products they consume. I remember when my father told me that soap was made of fat and chemicals. I could not believe it, was extremely disgusted for maybe an hour, and then resumed my pleasant, consumer-oriented attitudes towards soap. The scene where they steal fat from the dumpster trucks of the hospital is really poignant because it shows how disgusting the process of production really is and how distanced it is from the average consumer. Either Pitt or Norton says, “We’re selling rich women their own fat asses.” I am convinced that New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik saw the movie or remembered the quote before writing his article on Veblen, “Display Cases.” On the first page he says, “Veblen wanted to explain not just who wins and who loses in business but why the winners, who have won so much, seem to enjoy themselves so little…[why they] pay big wads of money to put fat in their mouths, and even bigger wads to have it sucked back out through their thighs.” Fat asses seem to be a hot topic among academic discussions of conspicuous consumption- who would’ve thought?

The violence seemed a little abrasive to me this time around. I realized that the movie is forcing the view to do the same thing that the members of fight club do, which is watch massive amounts of violence. The members of fight club, like us viewers, are desensitized to violence, even extreme violence, find pleasure in violence, art in violence, and entertainment in violence. If we didn’t, why would we watch the movie? Fight Club is a great catalyst to question one’s sensibilities and one’s relations to commodities.

"Postmodernism is the New Black"

I came across a very interesting article while accumulating too many sources for my research paper. It’s called Post-Modernism is the New Black; Shopping and Philosophy. It is from The Economist, London, December 23, 2006. It is very short- here is the URL to take a look:

http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1196369361&sid=2&Fmt=3&clientId=3620&RQT=309&VName=PQD

It is periodical that doesn’t seem to have an author, or at least ProQuest doesn’t know who the author is. Whatever the case, this is a very interesting article that argues that modern marketing uses the tools of post-modern discourse, “thus capitalism employs the critique that was designed to destroy it.” I am particularly interested in consumption and post-modernism. I am currently reading several texts on postmodernism for my art history class, and every single one is heavily preoccupied with the effects of mass-consumption. A quote by Jean-Francois Lyotard thoroughly sums up the relationship between consumption and postmodernism in that there is no hierarchy of goods: “eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture; one listens to reggae, watches a Western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games.” The activities that Lyotard listed are no longer contradictory in postmodernism because everything is individualized, fragmented, and random.

The mysterious author of this article argues that the pomos, Lyotard, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida all wanted to destroy capitalism, but they predicted how capitalism would reinvent itself in the 1980s and 1990s, or the postmodern era. The author cites Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as the founding post-modern text, declaring that, “the 18th-century attempt to replace religion with rationalism had supplanted one form of mental slavery with another.” Horkheimer and Adorno, along with the pomos and other postmodern writers, sought to deconstruct theories such as socialism, Marxism, and capitalism to reveal their true natures and liberate their readers. Capitalism has reinvented itself in the past few decades in the same way- using offbeat advertising to liberate consumers, appeal to the individual, and make the consumer the artists of their own life. This can be seen in recent forms of non-traditional advertising, such as rebellious tilts (the author cites Nike), or highly individualized tones, such as “because you’re worth it.” Advertising campaigns superficially seek to breakdown authority and hierarchy within consumers, within companies, and within the relationship between consumers and the companies they buy from.

Both postmodernism and free-market economics seek to free the individual from authority- through thought and economic power respectively. Individual choices, and the power derived from choice, were to be the most important themes. Finally, the author argues that mass culture has broken apart into a million different niches, citing the success of companies based around one niche, such as Dolce & Gabbana (“…for people with lots of money and loud taste”) or American Apparel, who’s niche is moral and economic because people buy their expensive T-shirts not only for style or brand appeal, but because they supposedly treat their workers well.

In conclusion, a set of beliefs put forward by the pomos as postmodernism- the deconstruction of capitalism and other rationalist theories in order to liberate people and promote individual ability to take control of their own life- has been co-opted by corporations to increase profits. Huge stores based around a niche, or radical advertising with a highly individualistic, liberating flavor is the byproduct of the commodification of post-modernism. I guess the colonial nature of commodification is true- it subsumes all other logic.