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...because, midst of the celebratory discourse of globalization, and the daily operation of transnational capital, including speculative investment, out-sourcing, downsizing, "restructuring," and the militarized expropriation of labour and natural resources, it is necessary to remind ourselves that most people in the world are not immune to the degradation of life in capital, and are attracted to dystopic stories about the end of capitalism. In many cases, it could be said that the people of the world share sentiments with those heroic (and sometimes mad) social agents (like the central characters of action films, including Fight Club) who would bring the system to its knees. In Hollywood, populism and popular nihilism rule the day, as cultural producers and audiences anticipate the latest spectacle that can be "blowed up real good," as the SCTV film reviewers used to exclaim.
Fight Club, despite its art cinema "look," is one of many films, made throughout the last decade of the 20th century, which connect with their audiences by telling stories about a failed American Dream. With its various depictions of male characters who discuss, deride and destroy elements and signs of daily consumption (e.g., Martha Stewart, Ikea, Starbucks, BMW), the film is easily recognized as anti-consumerist, but its anti-capitalism has been less commented upon, and its other meanings (in particular, its sexism) have been understood in a variety of ways. For instance, fans have taken the film's depiction of the "fight club" as an endorsement of masculine violence, with the most zealous acolytes reportedly setting up their own "fight clubs," in the wake of the film's release. Cultural critics have also misunderstood the film's meanings and Henry Giroux, in particular, was moved on several occasions, to dismiss the film as an opportunistic gloss on anti-consumerism, and a clarion call for macho pranksters of the world to unite. (2) Yet, other critics considered it an inspired critique of masculinity. (3) The confusion in determining the value of the film is symptomatic, I think, of the indeterminacy, in general, of the period of globalization. That the cultural work of the period would be incoherent, multivalent, incomplete, and tentative seems entirely consistent with what we know about this historical conjuncture. In general, though, we can understand these types of dramas to be about professionals in a crisis-riddled capitalism.
Often, the crisis which threatens contemporary professionals has class-based origins but, in the world which these films construct, class relations are difficult to articulate, principally because the class designation of professionals, while easy to represent, is difficult to fully comprehend. That is, professionals seem to occupy a place of privilege in capitalism, and this is often represented as middle class indifference to class struggle, although professionals are regularly minions to it, or victims of it (sometimes both). Moreover, while they populate the upper echelon of capitalism's hierarchies and the state's bureaucracies, professionals also recognize that their knowledge is being instrumentalized, and this engenders a degree of disharmony in relations between owners and professionals. But, typically, professionals are understood to be "organization people" and "team players" who, like Smithers in The Simpsons, conform to established power relations in society.
Fight Club is a story about the delusions of professionals in the "New World Order". It is an extraordinary representation of the repressed rage of middle America, which has intensified since the loss of the Vietnam war. This social anxiety has been fuelled by a variety of social movements, including feminism and the civil rights movement, but is also involves confusion about post-Fordism and post-Keynesian economics, as well as frustration over the collapse of the American Dream. Usually male and white, this anger and disillusion is expressed as "populist resentment," and includes such cultural artifacts and phenomena as the FOX television network, Michael Moore, Roseanne, John Carpenter's They Live!, the yuppie horror film, professional wrestling, reality television programming, tv talk shows, "shock jocks" like Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, and G. Gordon Liddy, male rampage films, C.O.P.S., and nihilist slacker entertainment. The anger and distrust expressed in such culture is directed at economic disparity, lack of effective leadership, various forms of alienation and oppression, broken homes, the increased role of consumption and shopping (i.e., the so-called "feminization" of America), the loss of communities and social networks, ecological devastation, and a general sense of dystopia and collapse, on both personal and social levels.
While anti-establishment critique is emblematic of much Hollywood film of the last 25 years, what makes Fight Club progressive is that it portrays violent masculinist resistance to capitalism as both attractive and misguided. On the one hand, this explains the film's success with large numbers of young white males, but it also explains why their partial reading, or entire misreading of the film, led to re-enactments of the "fight clubs." The film does not advocate such a solution and, in fact, makes it clear that the paramilitary reaction (both in the film and in real life) is a masculine fantasy, and a dystopic, mysogynist endgame. In short, the "fight club" is psychotic behaviour. Nonetheless, the film's criticism of consumerism is an often humourous and effective critical strategy, which connects good ol' American libertarianism to class struggle. The subversive lifestyle, pranks and actions (e.g., golfing in deindustrialized urban zones, recycling fat as soap and explosives, manipulating workplace rules for personal gain, vandalism) align freedom with urban resistance. The film makes clear that the "clubs" are typically organized around an affinity structure that is white and white collar working class. This has serious and obvious limitations, but the film's success with "its" audience is suggestive of the severity of disenfranchisement felt by this group of workers in globalization. Ed Norton's character, for instance, is profoundly confused about his identity, and the film draws attention to this by providing alter-egos, as well as not providing a fixed name for his character, who is variously known as Rupert, Jack, Cornelius, and, in the end credits, simply as the narrator. One of the alteregos, Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt), makes the point that Ed Norton's...
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