Reader responses on "Fight Club"

www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#Fight.Club.Atta.911

More on "Fight Club:" The 1999 Brad Pitt - Edward Norton fable about underground bare-knuckle brawling clubs evolving into a private army of anarchist terrorists is one of the more intellectually stimulating movies of recent years. Readers write:

The great James Bowman demolished Fight Club some years ago: for some of the same reasons you now criticize it. He hinted at the most devastating critique, which is that the filmmakers' view of masculinity is totally impoverished, insofar as they seem to believe that the quintessential male feature is animal violence when in fact, as most of our great cultural artifacts attest, the quintessential male feature is the desire to create, the desire for a man to, as Chesterton once put it, impose "his will upon the world in the manner of the charter given him by the will of God."

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Bowman makes the usual conservative mistake of throwing out the baby with the bath water: "I think the film is vile, therefore I'm not going to waste any more grey matter wondering why so many young men worship the film."

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I think the genius of "Fight Club" is precisely in how it resolves its "revolution": by pointing out how ridiculous it is... I think it actually gives some insight to "movements" like Al Qaeda - Osama Bin Laden's fantasies of a global caliphate, in an Islamic context, have the same attraction to disaffected males that Tyler's [Pitt's] nihilism does in the movie.

In fact, part of the true genius of the movie is the fact that most viewers completely misunderstand it - they see Tyler as a true prophet, and miss the fact that the Narrator has to reject him and his fantasies in order to grow up... It might be the most misunderstood work since "The Catcher in the Rye", in which Holden in the last few pages comes to realize that he can't maintain his adolescent rebellion forever, and that he can't keep kids from growing up by acting as a "Catcher in the Rye" (which image is based on Holden's misunderstanding of a Robert Burns poem - something that is pointed out to him in the novel) I guess any such work will be seen by adolescent fantasists as confirming their view of the world - since, from the fantasist's perspective (like the conspiracists') , EVERYTHING does...

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Fight club is the ugliest spirited movie I have ever seen. I didn't buy into the macho teenage crap from the opening scene. It is an evil movie with evil values.

Because there are no acceptable masculine outlets for young men they turn to the most violent and reprehensible ones. If all expressions of masculinity are unacceptable, then why not go for the most violent and ugly.

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In regards to your review of Fight Club: While I agree with your conclusion, I'm wondering if one can overlay another theory on top of yours: the growth of the service sector economy. It seems to me that men have an underlying distaste for being service-oriented employees, shall I say, "system administrators." Men seem to prefer "task-oriented" jobs that don't entail endless hours of brown-nosing and hand-holding. Women, of course, seem to love being administrators, which seems to explain why Ed schools are packed to the gills with them.

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I saw it a few days after 9-11. For a New Yorker, the ending was a bit tough to take so soon after the WTC was destroyed. Knocking down office towers didn't feel "cathartic" in late September 2001.

But the movie was amazing. And I don't think it was dishonest at all about what these guys are revolting against:

TYLER [Pitt]
If you could fight anyone, who would you fight?
JACK [Norton]
I'd fight my boss, probably.
TYLER
Really?
JACK
Yeah, why, who would you fight?
TYLER
I'd fight my dad.
JACK
I don't know my dad. I mean, I know him, but he left when I was like six year old. Married this woman, had more kids. He did this like every six years. Goes to a new city and starts a new family.
TYLER
He was setting franchises. My dad never went to college, so it was really important that I'd go.
JACK
Sounds familiar.
TYLER
So I graduate, I called him a long distance and asked: "Dad, now what?", he says "Get a job".
JACK
Same here.
TYLER
When I turned twenty five, my yearly call again "Dad, now what?", he says "I don't know, get married!"
JACK
I can't get married, I'm a thirty-year-old boy!

TYLER
We're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.

And the guy with the breasts [Meat Loaf plays a bodybuilder who gets testicular cancer from steroids]? It's not like the fact that the movie is a fantasy of masculine revolt against a feminine civilization is exactly hidden under the surface of a movie about hating consumerism. Fight Club is not Supersize Me.

And watching the movie not long after 9-11 was clarifying. Mohammed Atta *was* a Space Monkey, after all: a nerdy little guy who compulsively shaved his body hair, revolting against feminized, alienating modernity in the name of a primal masculinity, and doing so through an act of horrific violence comprehensible only as grotesque theater. Fight Club was prophecy: the goddamned Space Monkeys started World War IV.

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Masculine leadership charisma and the young male urge to form hierarchies of purpose, whether for destruction or creation, is one of the most important subjects in world history, but we lack a vocabulary to talk about it these days. So, when a movie comes along that takes on the subject directly, it can be electrifying.

I'm reminded a little of the movie that I tend to think was the greatest film of the 1980s, even though it was one of Steven Spielberg's rare box office bombs: "The Empire of the Sun." It's about the horrors of the Second World War as told from the perspective of a young English boy interned by the Japanese outside Shanghai, to whom the war isn't horrible at all: it's a blast.

Lt. General James Mathis recently got into hot water for saying:

"Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot...It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling." The general went on to say: "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway...So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them anyway."

Thank God we have men like this on our side. Too bad the other sides have lots of guys like this as well.