Consume

Social Gaps and a Dead American Dream: Tyler Durden’s Lessons to the Common Man A Close Reading of a Cultural Text: Fight Club (The Film) Anne Chen Fall 2009

“God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas and waiting tables; they’re slaves with w Advertisements have us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy sh need. We are the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no great w depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression… is our lives.”

- Tyler Du

white collars. hit we don’t war, no great

urden, Fight Club

fter the news report announces in uncut detail Project Mayhem’s latest act of public vandalism, the scene in Fight Club shifts to a spacious ballroom, dimly lit and adorned with baroque pillars, gold, streaming curtains, and carved panels—a setting of old decadence and cool collectiveness reflected in both its intricate architecture and its well-composed inhabitants. At the podium, a speaker is addressing a solemn audience, touting the steady progress the city was making in “the war against crime”. During the speech, Chief Police Commissioner Jacobs arises from his seat, hissing to a fellow guest: “I gotta take a piss.” He strolls down a long, white corridor to the restroom, stopping briefly to admire himself in the hallway mirror.

He fails to notice the group of disguised “Space Monkeys”, Tyler Durden’s self-proclaimed “Army” of middle and lower-class laborers and “nobodies”, following him. And when Jacobs finally reaches the bathroom, the door swings suddenly open, bringing him face to face with the awaiting Durden. The camera quickly swings back and forth between the shocked confronted and his devilish confronter, with a swift blow from Durden immediately merging the rapid sequence shots and breaking Jacobs’ look of utter bewilderment. Whooping excitedly, the Space Monkeys shed their waiter costumes and pull on black ski masks as their leader drags the screaming commissioner backwards into the empty bathroom, past rows of spotless urinals and marbled stalls.

Jacobs, with mouth now roughly duck-taped and testicles tied painfully with a rubber band, looks miserably up at Durden, who leans forward and speaks:

“Look. The people you’re after are t your meals, we haul your trash, we ambulances. We guard you while y

the people you depend on. We cook e connect your calls, we drive your you sleep. Do not fuck with us.�

he binary between the rich and the working class is prominent in Fight Club’s infamous banquet scene. As the drama unfolds, the distinction is first apparent through the stark differences in attire. The guests at the lavish event are all garbed in black, with the men dressed smartly in dark tuxedos and the women wearing shimmery ebony dresses, with delicate jewelry completing the ensembles. The waiters, actually Tyler and his army in disguise, are all wearing identical white uniforms and matching black pants, the stuffiness of their servitor outfits appearing quite comical when juxtaposed to many of their distinctly bruised faces. And as they patrol the tables with pitchers in hand, they stand out strikingly from the seated guests. The contrast of color—the black versus the white—is not the only difference between the two social statuses. The wealthy, sitting comfortably in their cushioned chairs and revelling in their own elitism as they sip champagne and nibble on hors d’oeuvres, are all markedly older than those who are attending to them. The Commissioner, a prime example, is balding and heavily marred with wrinkles—his double chin and paunch belly also convey his age (and lack of exercise).

Tyler and his “Space Monkeys”, however, are younger, cooler—and fitter, in a sense, despite the smattering of black-eyes and bruises from previous fights—a recalcitrant, self-made guerilla gang of incendiaries prepared for social revolution at a single notice from their sexy leader.

n this strong contrast between the wealthy and the “common man”, other binaries emerge. We can identify the gala guests to be the “law enforcers”, or the “law abiders”; the speaker addresses the crowded room in promising tones as he defines the progress made in the “war against crime”. At the main entrance, a giant sign proclaims “End Crime in Our Time—Take Back Our City”. This is a gathering of police and the social elite - the aristocrats and the lawmen who they easily bend to their will—all sitting in the same room and united under a common goal: the extermination of illegal activity in their city.

And their objective clashes unduly with Tyler’s aims—his Project Mayhem proposes a completely different agenda. As the speaker calls upon “new beginnings”, “hope” and “safer streets”, Tyler preaches something else entirely. His homework assignments seek to create chaos in the city, to throw civilians into utter disarray—via acts of vandalism, destruction of private property, and very public explosions, Tyler’s anarchist movement is exactly what Jacobs and his officers are battling.

This calls into question the relationship between social status and crime—are the proletariat more prone to law-breaking actions? Is their location on the lower rungs of the social ladder a cause for their illegal activities, or just an excuse? And if it is a cause, than is it a justifiable one? Or are wealthy citizens just as susceptible to crime as their poorer counterparts? As Fight Club progresses, we begin to realize that the well-to-do, although on the surface, carry the air of law-enforcers and community leaders, aren’t as pure as the mission they homilize.

h lo o t a e s

he power role shifts after Commissioner Jacobs leaves his seat to visit the restroom, however. Indeed, as Jacobs lies prostrate and completely vulnerable on the tiled floor, he is no onger the confident, vainglorious police officer the audience had been introduced to in the opening of the scene. Trembling and uttering panicked, incoherent groans through the duct tape slapped roughly over his mouth, Jacobs’ disposition and the loss of his “holier-than-thou” attitude is even comical. With his testicles held at knifepoint, the man in charge of the city’s entire police force is reduced to nothing but a desperate man, stripped entirely of his title and social standing.

With such evidence from the film, a broader message can be inferred: when it comes down to it, we all feel pain, experience suffering and torment, face consternation—and we will all inevitably meet the same end, reuniting with earth as mere corpse or ash, only fading remnants of flesh and bone.

King or serf. Cop or criminal. Boss or employee.

And Fight Club reveals that while some of us, like Commissioner Jacobs, fear physical injury and shrink away from the very thought of death, others crave torture and torment in order to simply feel alive—to have some physical, carnal confirmation of what otherwise feels like a nugatory existence. So they welcome the sensation of battered flesh, of experiencing another man’s fist pummeling their bodies, shattering bone and ripping tissue.

Because in a money-driven society that idolizes “millionaires and movie gods and rock stars”, what’s to become of the “average Joe”?

In the film, the pitiful proletariat have only willingly accepted their imminent destiny— that they will continue to be slaves to monotony and the mundane, forever leading fruitless lives and remaining socially immobile—that is, until they meet Tyler. And so through underground fighting groups, they find a new liberation—an escape through the empowerment that comes from causing—and receiving—bodily hurt. As Jack says:

“Who you were in Fight Club is not who you were in the rest of the world. You weren’t alive anywhere like you were there.”

e may find it intriguing, yet disquieting, how these male characters must resort to such desperate means to somehow merely feel an ounce of significance. Throughout the beginning of the movie, for another instance, Jack frequently tours various support groups—for testicular cancer, lymphoma, tuberculosis, etc.—to achieve this same type of euphoria. It seemed that only by surrounding himself with the dying, the sick, and the terminally ill, could he finally appreciate his own existence:

“Every evening I died, and every evening I was born again. Resurrected.�

ne can wonder if these tendencies of hopelessness and despondency are a fated consequence of a materialistic society, one spurred by unrealistic, unachievable desires and fueled by paper currency, credit cards, and, at a skyrocketing rate, consumer debt. Indeed, the film depicts individuals constantly defining themselves through objects—through IKEA catalogs, condo furniture, and what’s in their closet—to the unfortunate extent that, as Tyler puts it, “the things you own end up owning you”. It seems that in this product-technology-corporation-dominated world, self identity is delineated by material possessions—by answering absurd questions like

“ What kind o

of dining set defines me as a person? � —and financial assets. And Tyler speaks to such issues:

“

God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas

Advertisements have us chasing cars and clothes, working

We are the middle children of history

We ha

s and waiting tables; they’re

slaves with white collars.

g jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t

y—

need.

No purpose or place.

ave no great war, no great depression.

Our great war is a

spiritual war.

Our great depression…

is our lives . ”

ronically, the huge chasm which separates the common man from his “superiors” captured in the banquet scene seem to oppose the popular ideology of the famous “American Dream”, in which hard work and decent, honest living are taught to yield future rewards and guaranteed success.

But the working class in the film is shown as stagnant—so how can they possibly ever attain any of these social dividends? Veritably, it appears that these men have too long been fed a falsified version of an unattainable fantasy—that for them, climbing up the social and economic pyramid is an unfeasibility. And so consequently, their frustration and dissatisfaction with their lives are released through violence and malfeasance, activities that the wealthy, who are quite comfortable and content with their pedestal placement,, regard as hostile and unwarranted. Perhaps it is this conflict, between the struggling poor to achieve purpose out of their limited resources and the rich to control their seemingly “dangerous” counterparts, which Fight Club addresses. On the surface, it is a film which stars a beloved Hollywood heartthrob and boasts a cast of exceptional actors, but dig a little deeper and you’ll find that it’s actually a serious social commentary which critiques modern consumerism. Why? Because the blue-collar versus the elite is a cyclical feud, with no compromise; unequal income distribution versus the over-preached “American Dream”, the common folk versus the noblesse, social promotion versus a rigidly fixed social hierarchy. In the end however, Tyler spreads a new philosophy, one in which the individual can no longer determine his true worth and self-value via consumer products:

“You are not special. You are not a beautiful or uniqu organic matter as everything else. We are the all

We are all part of the sam

ue snowflake. You are the same decaying l singing, all dancing crap of the world.

me compost heap. �

nd despite the pessimistic outlook and even absurd nature of such beliefs, perhaps some of the audience, like the numerous “Space Monkeys” who begin to devote their lives to Tyler’s projects and preaching, can see that such a cynical mindset may in fact hold much more truth than a dead American Dream.