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.