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Journal of American & Comparative Cultures, Fall-Winter 2002 p418(6)
Virtual violence in Fight Club: this is what transformation of masculine ego feels like. (Critical Essay) Terry Lee.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2002 Popular Press

Our culture and its apparatuses--literature, movies, advertisements, employers, educators, government--all work to set out and sustain a series of roles that men are expected to fulfill. Post-structuralist sociology explains that our culturally normative ideas of masculinity are sociologically constructed sets of rules that govern male behaviors, from authorizing male emotions--tough emotions are okay; emotions of vulnerability are not--to authorizing male sex roles, the heterosexualization of desire, for instance. The masculinity that men enact has been developed and packaged by our culture, which insists that men perform it. Men have been conditioned to think that certain behavior is naturally masculine or not, and therefore abhorrent. They do their best to measure up.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, boys were socialized to male sex roles based on the prevailing ideology of the time, which believed that "Real men held their emotions in check, the better to channel them into workplace competition" (Kimmel 128). Men could have emotions, as long as they were socially useful, catalyzing business pursuits, for instance. One dominant paradigm of masculinity in this period was the "public man," a bourgeois money maker, whose desires were focused on achieving success in the marketplace, which demanded his all, even his sexuality. One's manhood, understood from then current beliefs about sociology and biology, was finite, moreover, something that could be used up. A man was to direct his sexual ardor into his work, into his art, or into his productive bourgeois marriage. Draining one's bodily fluids through "self abuse," or masturbation, threatened masculinity, so the cultural fathers of the time worked to restrain it. Advice books warned that self abuse led to "depravity. .. . unbridled lusts that the young man could no longer contain, and ultimately insanity and early death" (Kimmel 128). J. H. Kellogg designed a food for men, Corn Flakes, as "a massive anaphrodisiac to temper and eventually reduce sexual ardor in men" (Kimmel 129). The underlying ideology of manhood was, in all things, to exercise self-restraint, with male violence being socially enjoined, except when it was socially useful (war). At the turn of the twentieth century, "the working male organized team sports such as football and baseball," James Doyle explains, which created acceptable sites for new ways to prove one's manhood, as men became factory and office drones with no activity to allow individuals to "bolster their sagging sense of masculinity" (Doyle 37).

In David Fincher's film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club, one can trace social construction of contemporary manhood, as well as a psychological dimension of masculinity. In the Fight Club film, from a sociological perspective, Kellogg's Corn Flakes are replaced by IKEA furnishings: In both cases, consumer-materialist culture defines masculinity and what men desire. In J. H. Kellogg's generation of men, boys could eat Corn Flakes to help channel sexual energy into manly efforts to be mature, to be responsible, to be breadwinners in the public sphere, where self restraint was championed. In the IKEA generation represented by the protagonist in the film, sexual energy is also restrained. The male protagonist, Jack, substitutes a desire for consumer objects--IKEA home furnishings--for sexual desire and for emotional connection to human beings. Like Jack, men (and women) want things because the free enterprise, consumer-materialist culture they live in benefits from their desiring things. In Fight Club, Jack unconsciously substitutes the near-perfect IKEA sofa for human relationships. He obsesses over his domestic sphere and its furnishings, which IKEA epitomizes. Like many of the film's viewers, its protagonist suffers "gender role strain" (Doyle 86), an inimical effect on men who necessarily fail as they try to live up to the culture's measure of masculinity, its "compliation of gender-typed behaviors learned by a male in order to adapt to situational demands and social pressures" (Doyle 87). Men cannot possibly meet the expectations, fulfill all of the various and often contradictory roles: they can fulfill some of the culture's expectations for masculinity, but never all of them. Men, therefore, feel always inferior, feel like they come up short of meeting the cultural fathers' expectations. As Doyle aptly suggests, in his discussion of the gender role paradigm developed by Joseph Pleck, (1) men who achieve a certain consciousness about their failure to measure up "may develop serious psychological problems or behave in antisocial ways simply by trying to live up to unrealistic and, more often than we might think, overly risky role expectations" (88). Jack comes immediately to mind, as does another desperate man, Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Hamlet exemplifies a rather extreme case of sex-role stress: Hamlet, a student, becomes suicidal when he is forced to choose one masculine role over another. David Rosen argues persuasively in The Changing Fictions of Masculinity that Hamlet wanted a domestic masculinity--wanted to love Ophelia--and, perhaps, wanted an intellectual life. But the culture, represented by his ghost father, demands that he fulfill a different and competing masculine role--the role of the avenger, the hero, the killer. The sex-role stress on Hamlet to fulfill competing models of manhood is so extreme that he becomes suicidal. "[T]he play," Rosen says, "depicts men as trapped in violence flowing from a perverted reproductive activity that cannot achieve either growth [mother] or order [father]" (84).

In order to satisfy the cultural demands on his masculinity, Hamlet must kill, and this killing will itself destroy him. Throughout the play, Hamlet acts deranged, especially in relation to Ophelia, who is completely puzzled by his rejection of her. It is only at the end, just before he dies, that he can finally be candid about his emotions. As Rosen suggests, "only in the grave can Hamlet declare his love for Ophelia" (75). Only in his dying can he reconcile the conflicting demands on his masculinity. Hamlet's case gives us a perhaps exaggerated, but perfectly valid, picture of the problem men face today in measuring up to the gender roles the culture sets out for them. "[U]nder the burden of the fictions of manhood, men are restless, confused and grieved," Rosen suggests (xviii). A man today has reason to be confused. How do men today fulfill their culture's contradictory expectations of masculinity? How many of the conflicting gender-role paradigms can any one man expect to meet? Consider the following con tradictory roles men may be required to perform to conform to masculine roles:

* displaying their "natural superiority" over women and treating them like sex objects and empowering women and treating them as equals;

* demonstrating their pity and disdain for homosexuality and empowering gay men and treating them as equals;

* proving their manliness with physical labor and demonstrating their rational and intellectual abilities;

* not showing emotion, bucking up (only women and sissies cry) and being the compassionate house-husband, sharing the emotional burden of the family;

* being a Boy Scout or an athlete, demonstrating their muscular masculinity and being a clergyman or thinker, probing the spiritual and meditating on the afterlife;

* leaving home twelve hours a day to be the breadwinner, striving until midlife to be on top of the business world heap and staying home and raising children so their partners can develop their careers;

* letting the government draft them and living up to the warrior role in Vietnam and conscientiously objecting and going to jail, or going to Canada.

Could a man hope to meet even half of those expectations? When we look for answers to conflicts that gender-role stress creates, we can learn what not to do from models such as Hamlet, who is a negative analogue, an example we don't want to follow: he became violent, but in an unhealthy way. He identified with, became unconsciously one with, "self-destruction and death" (Rosen 75). There is, however, a kind of violence that can be productive, useful to individual men, what we might think of as "virtual violence." We see it enacted in myth, story and film. In Hamlet, we see a man who becomes caught up in real violence, a kind of violence that makes Hamlet the tragedy that it is. In Fight Club, however, we see violence that must be interpreted from a psychological point of view. And, from this position, Fight Club enacts a masculine role model that we can embrace, a model that lets men destroy harmful masculine gender roles, rather than letting harmful masculine gender roles destroy them.

Fight Club appeals to us on two levels--one purely physical or sociological, one purely psychological. Let's look at the sociological level first. The Narrator, or Jack, is blown out of his IKEA-furnished apartment--quite literally, when his gas stove explodes--after living an empty consumerist life where he gets his emotional needs met vicariously at self-help group meetings. IKEA furnishings just are not working for him anymore: he restlessly searches out some other way to find meaning in his life. Another restless "tourist" at the meetings is Marla Singer, to whom Jack is unable to connect in any healthy way, though there is a mutual attraction. Jack then meets soap salesman, Tyler Durden, with whom he co-founds the fight club. Tyler lives life on the edge, on the dark edge. He fascinates Jack. The fight club grows, then gets out of hand when Jack discovers one day that the fist fighting has evolved into a larger, much more destructive force called Project Mayhem. Jack, who has been fairly passive up to th is point--he has reacted to Tyler, but has not initiated action himself--now goes into action, tracing down the origin and extent of Project Mayhem. He learns that the fight club drones have planted explosives all around the city. Jack realizes this is insane and tries to stop it. The bombs do detonate; the skyscrapers fall, but not before Jack has shot himself in the head and, mysteriously, in shooting himself has killed Tyler Durden--but not himself. The film closes with Jack and Marla poised to have a normative relationship, as they look over the destruction.

Film critic Gary Crowdus offers a convincing interpretation of what happens in the film at a physical, sociological level. An avowed afficianado of Fight Club, Crowdus suggests that the film is "darkly satiric" and absurd in its violence. Jack is "dehumanized" and enslaved to "lifestyle consumerism," Crowdus says. The fight club that Jack/Tyler establishes in the basement of a bar, at first, provides a temporary "physical and emotional release" for men. As the film continues, however, it enacts an "increasingly violent quest for self-redemption" as Jack struggles to awaken his numbed sense of self, his half-hearted humanity, and his deadened masculinity.

Crowdus provides an insightful summary of the film's social criticism:

What truly distinguishes Fight Club...is its pungent satire, whose numerous targets include the soul-deadening consequences of excessive materialism, cynical corporate policies based on an indifference to human life, festering workplace discontent, repressed male rage and gender-role anxiety, class resentment, New Age psychobabble, the emotional legacy for a generation of young men of physically or emotionally absent fathers, and a critique of the personality types who are attracted to political cults.

Crowdus, however, never addresses one of the bigger problems in interpreting the physical level of the film, what he calls the "bizarre plot twist late in the film [which] confronts [Jack] with a startling self-discovery." To understand that, we need to move from the sociological to the psychological.

The film itself clues us to its psychological message. Early in the film, just after his apartment is blown up, Jack fights with Tyler outside the bar where the two have met (DVD time cue: 34:07-35:50--Jack & Tyler fighting outside the bar). (2) Much later in the film, Jack learns that he's fighting himself--that this conflict is going on within his own psyche (DVD time cue: 1:53:43-1:54:58--Tyler fighting himself; Tyler and Jack unraveling this mystery of identity as Jack/Tyler flashes back to a moment in a hotel room). Perhaps the most valid way to approach the surrealism of Tyler Durden is psychologically. That is, Jack and Tyler are clearly the same person, with Tyler acting out the doppelganger role to Jack: Tyler is an external manifestation of a character in a drama occurring within Jack's psyche. The ego, which is the personality that we identify as our self, and the unconscious, which is the dark, unknown aspect that includes what psychiatrist C. G. Jung called the shadow, are the large, constitutive parts of the psyche. The shadow is comprised of "what we're least willing to consider a part of ourselves," but what we often need, for brief periods, to balance our lives (Whitmont 162). In Jack's case, the shadow contains a tough fighter who thrives on being bad, not good; on living in a dirty pit, not an IKEA palace--on having women, not sofas. Tyler has just what Jack needs. And Tyler, of course, is a part of Jack (DVD time cue: 1:52:08-1:53:43--Jack first begins to understand that he and Tyler are the same person). Tyler, then, embodies Jack's own repressed strengths, qualities that are useful, when contacted for short periods in the service of making transformative change, but which cannot be--or shouldn't be--acted out in everyday life. Jack needs to awaken from his consumer numbness, his deadened, emotionless life: the old Jack needs to die, so a new Jack can come to life. This is something that Jack does come to realize, but not until very late in the film. From a Jungian perspective, Jack's agonist ic struggle with a powerful, transgressive part of his self outwardly enacts the internal drama of the psyche in its self-correcting work as it re-establishes equilibrium in a psyche that has gone out of balance, as Jack's has. He has substituted IKEA furnishings for legitimate human relationships and the unconscious spontaneously begins compensating for the imbalance, or neurosis, throwing up compensatory symbols. Jung describes this process:

The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains its equilibrium just as the body does. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably calls forth compensations... (The Practice of Psychotherapy, par. 330) (3)

In Fight Club, the unconscious throws up flashes of Tyler Durden (DVD time cues: 5:55-6:18--doctor's advice for insomnia; 7:26-7:33--at men's group; 12:30-12:35--watching Maria go down street after cancer group meeting; 19:30-19:45--Tyler on the moving sidewalk at the airport; 21:56-22:56--Jack and Tyler on the plane). To his credit, Jack acknowledges this symbol, this offer of help. After some prompting from Tyler, Jack is able to ask for help, a key step in his progress away from the old, harmful IKEA-boy masculinity, a sociologically constructed masculinity that has thrown Jack out of balance psychologically. Tyler can help Jack, but he has to want the help (DVD time cue: 31:20-32:05--"Just ask, Man," Tyler says, prompting Jack, who had trouble asking for help).

The fighting and destruction in much of the film is an external manifestation of an internal destruction of Jack's old ego position, of his socially constructed masculinity. The violence is "virtual violence," and it serves a specific, short-lived purpose in Jack, as it does in any man undergoing a significant change in his life. This is how it feels to undergo a transformation--or "changeover"--from IKEA boy to a more balanced, adult masculinity (DVD time cue: 41:33-46:42--the brutality of the first fight club). The violence in the film, as well as the novel, of course, is visceral--tough to take. But the work underway in the male protagonist's psyche is itself tough work, even dangerous work, because Jack has become pathological in his substitution of things for human relationships, for instance. The unconscious, Jung suggests, "does not harbour in itself any explosive materials unless an overweening or cowardly conscious attitude has secretly laid up stores of explosives there" (The Practice of Psychothera py par. 333). As mythographer Joseph Campbell explains in his seminal work The Hero With a Thousand Faces, a man in Jack's position must undergo an annihilation of self--of ego--if he is to move out of a stagnant, paralyzing ego. Campbell says, "[T]his requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself, and that is what is difficult" (130). Like an initiate in a religious order who must leave the illusory material world for the real spiritual world, Jack must transform one ego position into another. He must detach himself from the delusion of consumer materialism, from the delusion of the bankrupt masculinity that is paralyzing him (Campbell 165). This process occurs within an individual's psyche, within the dark, unconscious aspect of the psyche. The film makes this process visible, representing the unconscious as Tyler Durden's dark world.

In this dark setting, we are drawn into Jack's internal struggle, a psychodrama. In fact, the film offers a classroom lesson on the desirability of loss of ego for men in one particularly brutal scene, in which Tyler illustrates to his fight club initiates how losing a fight to Lou, the bar owner, enables one to abandon his ego--to abandon an inimically violent masculinity. It is profoundly ironic that passivity and defeat empower. Jack himself then uses this new-found power to terrify--and blackmail--his boss (DVD time cue: 1:09:43-1:18:55--Fight with Lou, the bar owner; Jack's brutalizing himself in his boss's office). In these scenes, both Tyler and Jack are arguably neurotic, imbalanced in their brutal self-victimizing. But this kind of "[n]eurosis is really an attempt at self cure," Jung asserts. "It is an attempt of the self-regulating psychic system to restore the balance" (The Symbolic Life, par. 389). Both Hamlet and Jack are neurotic: Jack, however, is able to effect the self cure that Hamlet cannot .

The producer of Fight Club, Ross Grayson Bell, suggests that "the underlying theme [is] that you have to break yourself apart to build something new" (Fight Club DVD-liner notes). Chuck Palahniuk says, "My hope was that the film ... would offer more people the idea that they could create their own lives outside the existing blueprint offered by society" (Fight Club DVD-liner notes). The ad copy on the DVD jacket tells us that the protagonists "channel primal male aggression into a shocking new form of therapy." These assessments are accurate, but do not go far enough in explaining the therapeutic dimension of the film.

It is essential to note that Jack does finally become conscious of his psychodrama and, at the right time, works consciously to stop the flow of potent energy from his own dark side. As Luke Skywalker learned in the Star Wars triology, one must never identify with the dark side. In myths and religion, there are countless stories of heroes who descend to a darker, dangerous world to slay a monster and then return. Returning to the world, returning to a new ego consciousness, is never easy. In fact, it comes at a very high price: death, or, what we might think of as "virtual death." Mortally threatened, Tyler reminds Jack that he has been his mentor, that he has led Jack through his "changeover." Jack responds, however, that it's time to leave his own dark side, that it's time for Tyler, who has served his transformative purpose, to leave (DVD time cue: 2:11:20-2:13:50--Jack realizes he has control of the gun that Tyler holds). "This is too much," Jack says, in this epiphanal moment.

As Joseph Campbell says about the hero's quest:

The hero...discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed.... He must...submit to the absolutely intolerable. Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of differing species, but one flesh.

The "final work" of the neurotic self cure, of the hero's quest, is the return to the world of light and consciousness. Campbell says that "the hero [must] re-emerg[e] from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection)" (246).

The return to consciousness for Jack is as risky as it is for any hero. As Campbell puts it, the question is, "Can the ego put itself to death?" (109). The answer for Jack is, yes.

Fight Club may have already achieved something of a cult-film status. It resonates with something in men, particularly younger men. How many times have men you know seen Fight Club? Perhaps they see it again and again because it serves an important psychological function, what Marshall Alcorn Jr. and Mark Bracher have called a "narcissistic alliance" (349). The film keeps cropping up in our consciousness like Tyler Durden keeps popping up in Jack's consciousness--and for the same reason. Like Jack needs to undergo dramatic transformation to rescue his masculinity from the culture that cripples it, perhaps male viewers need to, as well. The symptom of a "narcissistic alliance," or compensatory need, is an irrational desire, or even a compulsive need, to see that particular film, again and again. One wants to see it because, unconsciously, one knows he or she needs something that this particular story offers. We keep seeing the film because we are in a holding pattern; we are not ready to act on our need yet. A film can point the way for future possibilities, while also serving as a "buffer" between a viewer and his psychic need (Alcorn and Bracher 349).

At the sociological level, the violence in the film reminds men that they can fight against harmful models of masculinity. From the psychological perspective, Fight Club, acts for men as a surrogate mentor, as a surrogate wise man leading one to and through one important stage of life. The film's violence is a projected picture of the "virtual violence" that one can enact within the psyche to destroy harmful gender-role paradigms to make room for healthier masculinities. If Hamlet could have harnessed a "virtual violence," he could have destroyed the ghost father, not himself, and married Ophelia at the end.

The ghost in Hamlet is a good analogue for Tyler Durden in Fight Club. Both Hamlet's father's ghost and Tyler have a psychological existence. Both are external manifestations of some potentially transformative force from the unconscious. Both represent a powerful aspect of the male psyche that, for short periods, he must visit as he crosses a dangerous bridge to a more enlightened ego position. At the end of the film, Jack does arrive at a new, enlightened consciousness--albeit a bit roughed up for the wear. And, unlike Hamlet, Jack gets his Ophelia. She has accompanied him on his strange and difficult journey and borne witness to his neurotic behavior (that is, his "self cure"); she has stayed with him and, significantly, holds his hand in the closing scene. Enlightened and freed from his IKEA-boy masculinity, Jack understates the pain and danger of his transformation. As the skyscrapers of capitalism fall and a bubbling gunshot wound on Jack's cheek oozes, he looks at a bewildered Marla and tells her, "You' ve helped me at a very strange time in my life" (DVD time cue: 2:15:11--end). Perhaps the film itself can do as much for men who are drawn to it.

Notes

(1.) See The Myth of Masculinity, Joseph Pleck. Cambridge, 1981.

(2.) I have included time cues to the DVD edition of Fight Club. The precise scenes are easily accessible by using the "menu > time" or "time" feature on a DVD player. The time refers to hours, minutes, and seconds elapsed.

(3.) Jung's Collected Works are cited here, as they customarily are, by paragraph number.

Works Cited

Alcorn, Marshall W., and Mark Bracher. "Literature, Psychoanalysis: New Directions for Reader Response Theory." Publications of the Modern Language Association 100 (1985): 342-352.

Bell, Ross Grayson. Liner Notes. Fight Club DVD.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973.

Crowdus, Gary. "Getting Exercised Over Fight Club. Cineaste 25 (Fall 2000): Infotrac Expanded Academic Database. Online.

Doyle, James A. The Male Experience, 3rd ed. Boston: McGraw Hill, 1995.

Fight Club (Special Edition). Dir. David Fincher. Perf. Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter. DVD. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 1999.

Jung, Carl G. The Practice of Psychotherapy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1966. Vol. 16 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, trans. R. F. C. Hull, 20 vols. Bolligen Series XX 1953-1983.

-----. The Symbolic Life. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1954. Vol. 18 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, trans. R. F. C. Hull, 20 vols. Bolligen Series XX 1953-1983.

Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America. New York: The Free Press, 1996.

Palahniuk, Chuck. Liner Notes. Fight Club DVD.

Rosen, David. The Changing Fictions of Masculinity. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993.

Whitmont, Edward C. The Symbolic Quest. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969.

Named Works: Fight Club (Motion picture) - Criticism and interpretation

 
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