Adam Cadre ([info]adamcadre) wrote,
@ 2009-06-28 00:00:00
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28 June: Fight Club (second article)

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[info]arctangent
2009-06-28 11:02 pm UTC (link)
You keep talking about stuff I'm a huge fan of (being a child of the '90s and this being a retrospective of the big hits of the '90s, this is probably inevitable), so hey, here's another comment.

I actually thought it was kind of obvious, really, that The Dark Knight's Joker is a more-obviously-evil Tyler Durden -- and that basically Fight Club was sort of the missing part of The Dark Knight, the part that tries to explain who the Joker is and where he came from and why he does what he does -- and, critically, why he gets so many people to follow him and throw away everything (including standing right there while he burns the pile of cash that was to be their paychecks) in order to be his henchmen and goons.

As with other similar films that got savaged for promoting what they aimed to satirize or deconstruct, I don't quite know where I stand ultimately on whether Fight Club "promotes masochistic violence", as with whether Starship Troopers (the film) is actually "pro-war" or Blue Velvet is "pro-rape" or Trainspotting is "pro-drugs". The most I can say is that, from my POV, you have to have at least *some* understanding of why the bad thing you're attacking is seductive, thrilling, beautiful, addictive -- or else your attack comes off as insincere and narcissistic and pointless. Where to draw the line between simply showing the seductive appeal of masochistic machismo and actually advocating it is a hard line to draw.

Really I don't think the message of Tyler Durden in Fight Club is particularly new, and in the sense that it was once new it was only new to one particular generation of filmgoers, and since then a "Tyler Durden" character has almost become a cinematic cliche and overused to the point of a "Tyler Durden" showing up as Robin Williams on Law and Order. It's not hard to look around for examples of people taking a bizarre kind of strength from nihilistic despair -- arguably the real triumph of Fight Club is taking as whitebread and middle-class and socially upstanding a protagonist as possible and putting him in a situation where he, and we through him, can empathize with the faceless "bad guys" we see on the news all the time, gangbangers and suicide bombers and school shooters et al.

Whether we really should be working that hard to empathize with them is an open question; ISTR you actually answered that with an emphatic "No" in Ready, Okay! (The long speculation about what Carver Fringie's last thoughts were, followed by the dismissive statement that Krieg had "probably never thought a thought worth thinking".)

I don't really agree that the mind of the nihilistic psychotic murder-suicide freak is *never* worth probing, but given that we have tons and tons of examples of people feeling no shame at all about wallowing in the mindset of the crazy bad guy, it's not a lack in Ready, Okay! that's particularly worth criticizing, IMO.

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Also
[info]arctangent
2009-06-28 11:11 pm UTC (link)
Basically there was the Trilogy of Disaffected Middle-Class American Rebellion in 1999 -- American Beauty, The Matrix, and Fight Club -- and of the three I think Fight Club is the artistically superior one and, interestingly, the most socially responsible.

For all that Tyler is glorified and idolized in the film, the film's very "edgy" disturbing nature that made it such a hit with college-aged males also does in fact make Tyler's message more ambivalent and scary at the same time as it makes it appealing.

Compare The Matrix, where there is never any real question at all whether Morpheus is the good guy and we should sit back and let our brains rest comfortably while our adrenal glands pump us up for the heroes' bullet-drenched massacre of security guards and cops in the name of liberation. And American Beauty *should* be making us feel bad about Lester Burnham being an irresponsible, emotionally abusive, masturbating pedophile but layers on the heaps and heaps of appealing witty asides for him so thick while tossing huge steaming piles of unnecessary condemnation on his wife that ultimately it's nothing but one long redemption and exoneration for Lester Burnham and an advertisement for the joy of the midlife crisis. (Indeed, the way the movie warps its own moral to make Lester an unquestionably likable character despite the fact that the movie revolves around him being a narcissistic dick to basically everyone in his life -- and the way critics unquestioningly embraced this -- reminds me a lot of Look Back in Anger, and Kit Whitfield's moderately infamous-on-the-Internet takedown of said play as a Macho Sue masturbation exercise.)

By comparison to Lester Burnham or Neo, give me Tyler Durden any day -- a swaggeringly dangerously masculine and appealing psychopath for sure, but a psychopath who wears his psychopathy on his sleeve, who is grungy and nasty and dirty and profane, who hurts countless innocent people unapologetically, and whom you at least feel a little frisson of guilt about identifying with. (I don't mean to excoriate American Beauty entirely, I just find it a flawed movie that undermines its own premise by having the director's clear love for Kevin Spacey cut down what, if you just read the script, is supposed to be a cockeyed glance at a guy who's not all that lovable. The Matrix, on the other hand, I find to be morally askew from beginning to end and forgivable because unlike most stupid action movies it actually *tries* to have a moral stance -- I also forgive it because I do think the two sequels prove the Wachowskis meant to deconstruct this "FUCK YEAH RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE" bullshit from the very beginning, and only failed to do so because the sequels were such terrible movies in every other respect.)

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Re: Also
[info]adamcadre
2009-06-28 11:31 pm UTC (link)
I'm not planning to see The Matrix again, but American Beauty is on the list. (It's been ten years, but as I recall I kind of hated it, not because of its treatment of Lester but because of its raging hard-on for Ricky Fitz, whom I despised. Look! Look at the plastic bag!)

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[info]adamcadre
2009-06-28 11:27 pm UTC (link)
Well, in R,O! the dismissal of Krieg is coming from someone who had been pretty directly victimized by him and who wasn't very empathic in the first place. (Peggy is the only character for whom he's willing/able to switch off his judgment apparatus.) You'd get a much different assessment from, say, Alley Dawson. To a great extent Krieg's character (such as it is) was influenced by the same story that inspired the (now-deleted) "23,040 Bridges" page on my site - he's the troll, hardwired to murder everyone who attempts to cross the bridge. Whether that makes him the most culpable or least culpable actor in the scenario is a matter of dispute.

(For the record, on Criticker I dropped Fight Club to a 59, which still puts it near the top of my second-highest tier.)

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Tangent about R,O!
[info]arctangent
2009-06-29 04:23 pm UTC (link)
That's the thing, though -- sure, Krieg is the person Allen has the most reason to hate in the world, but surely Carver Fringie ranks a healthy #2 on the list. Krieg may be the mindlessly psychopathic murderer but Carver is the fucking philosopher of rape, after all.

That's why it was so striking that Carver's death actually elicits multiple pages of real, sincere empathy and sympathy from Allen -- the brute fact of death strips away all the layers of morality and personality and self that separate Allen from Carver and make it impossible for Allen to not feel *something* that someone had to die so horribly, even if it was a monster like Carver.

And then in the next breath we get a total dismissal of Krieg and his buddy as nothing more than, well, hardwired murder trolls.

I know Allen isn't meant to a 100% reliable narrator but that still bugged me. I also know that even from a cold, objective level Krieg is "worse" than Carver -- Carver may have ruined lives but Krieg ended them, Echo could've come back from Carver's violation but she will likely never recover from what Krieg did -- but still: Did you really mean it to come across that Carver's intelligence and insight, however twisted, made him somehow redeemable or sympathetic in a way that Krieg wasn't? That was part of the feeling I got -- that Carver may have fallen as far on the evil end of the spectrum as a person could get but was still a *person* in Allen's eyes, but Krieg was somehow not, just a force of nature.

I was really hoping for some subversion of that -- some acknowledgement that Carver's penile philosophy is just an elaborate rationalization for the fact that deep down he's not actually *different* from "If some girl doesn't wanna fuck me I'll just make her" Krieg -- but the fact that Allen actually does seem to divvy out his empathy for monsters based on whether those monsters are intelligent enough to have had "thoughts worth thinking" seems to say the opposite, and thus sticks in my craw a bit.

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Re: Tangent about R,O!
[info]adamcadre
2009-06-29 05:12 pm UTC (link)
I think the main difference is that Fringie used to be someone Allen could relate to and Krieg never was.

In the paperback edition that'll be coming out in tandem with the hardcover of the next book, it should be clearer that Allen isn't always 100% reliable and that there's a real question as to whether Fringie's actual actions map onto Allen's interpretation of them.

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Re: Tangent about R,O!
[info]arctangent
2009-07-01 01:42 am UTC (link)
Well, the words we hear from Fringie's own mouth describing his own philosophy are pretty damning.

That's actually an example of where R,O! felt hyperreal rather than real, along with the crazy Eyes Wide Shut-style party scenes and whatnot; Fringie sounds like a psychopathic version of what a feminist thinks of as the unconscious social forces that motivate pickup artists, not like what an actual pickup artist would say to justify or defend himself. He's like Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead or the "anarchists" in The Man Who Was Friday or Satan in Paradise Lost -- someone who actually buys into the protagonist's belief system and consciously chooses to embody the bad-guy side of that belief system ("God exists and is the source of all light and good and I choose to defy him"; "I understand that normal social mores stultify and wither the independence of the creative mind and I want to stultify and wither it"; "Girls are pretty and boys are gross; thus, male rape of the female is a nihilistic celebration of the entropic reality of grossness triumphing over prettiness"). The sort of guy who doesn't really exist but Christians or Objectivists are always afraid might. Etc.

A many-years-later deconstructionist take on that that shows that the Fringie rant is more Allen's take on who he thinks Fringie is than Fringie's take on what he thinks of himself might be interesting, though I don't know if that's where you want to go with it.

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Re: Tangent about R,O!
[info]ballykissinger
2009-07-01 08:07 am UTC (link)
Should we expect many substantial revisions in the paperback? Of course I'm going to buy it and I would probably reread it without substantial revisions, it's just been at least 3 and a half years since I've had a copy of RO on hand, so I'm wondering how alert I should be for differences. ("I don't remember Echo being a cyborg!")

Also, any idea on when we can expect to see these projects in stores?

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Re: Tangent about R,O!
[info]adamcadre
2009-07-01 08:18 am UTC (link)
At this point it's looking like the paperback will basically be a different book.

Target date for release is, uh, 2011? Though saying that aloud probably means 2015 at the earliest.

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[info]sylvanus_urban
2009-06-30 07:39 am UTC (link)
I am still mulling over the fact that when I first saw Fight Club I liked it enough to add it to my "Favourite Media" lists, while this time I just felt affronted by it.

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