The drapes of wrath

Is interior home design responsible for the downfall of American masculinity?

By Sarah Vowell

Oct 20, 1999 | The first half of "Fight Club" feels like a remake of Woody Allen's 1978 film "Interiors" with the genders reversed. Where Allen's vanilla ice cream-looking study of Geraldine Page's cold beige rooms contrasted her womanhood (or lack thereof) to that of joke-cracking, red dress-wearing life-force Maureen Stapleton, "Fight Club" throws a squeaky clean corporate mouse played by Edward Norton into the grimy macho world of Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). You know Pitt plays a real man because his hair's messed up and he lives in what Norton's character calls "a dilapidated house in a toxic waste part of town."

Norton is psychologically castrated because of his office job, condo ownership and addiction to catalog shopping. Fincher's hilarious tour of the condo pans the living room and floats the Ikea catalog description of tables and chairs above the pieces, so that the catalog copy becomes the air Norton breathes. Similarly, Geraldine Page in "Interiors" arranged perfect white flowers in perfect white vases because she was a repressed aesthete, and Maureen Stapleton knew how to have a good time since she knocks over one of said vases -- drunk and dancing. If both maddening films are partly about gender, they are also partly about housewares. Namely, the neuroses not just of ownership and consumer goods, but the supposed spiritual void symbolized by a nice-looking room.

The difference between exploring overboard feminine home decoration and male domesticity is of course that the home front is the female domain. The catalyst for Norton, whom Pitt nicknames "Ikea Boy," to dump his cozily crisp Scandinavian modern digs for Pitt's rat-hole, where even sheets on the bare stained mattresses would be too soft, is an exchange the two men have when they meet on an airplane. Pitt asks Norton if he knows what a duvet is -- he does -- and poses the philosophical inquiry, "Why do guys like you and I know what a duvet is? Is this essential to our survival in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word?"

That the word "dude" doesn't crop up in this dialogue is some kind of miracle. And thus Norton's horrifying textile awareness -- call it the embarrassment of stitches -- sends him to the rest of the film, which is all about bloody male bonding and hitting and is more or less furniture-free. (On the duvet question, my friend David blurted, "I'd rather know what a duvet is than an Abdominator, which is clearly all Brad Pitt did to prepare for his role.")

I called John Christakos, a co-founder of the delightful Minnesota furniture design company Blu Dot, and asked him if he supposed his shelving and coffee tables were contributing to the downfall of masculinity in America. He said, "I hope so. That is our goal." I asked him about his son, pictured in the Blu Dot Web site's very manly recipe section, and his son's mother. Are his wife's girlfriends jealous of her having a husband with a sense of the domicile? "Yeah. Chicks dig that. I'm a designer," he laughed. "It's like being a rock star."

One of the most horrifying aspects of "Fight Club" is that the transformation of Norton from nerd to asshole is not motivated by the most proper reason for a young straight man to change his life, which is of course to impress girls. If he wanted to attract more women (or at least women other than the movie's sole female star, the skittish mascara vamp Helena Bonham Carter), he would have become himself, but more so -- better house, better furniture, better job. He would have turned into Chris Noth's infuriating charmer Mr. Big on HBO's "Sex in the City." Because when Big breaks the heart of Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), the viewer isn't wistful because she'll miss a shallow cad like him but because now she's going to have to settle for sleeping with guys with lower thread-count sheets. What if, heaven forbid, her future boyfriends' bedding will be part polyester percale? It could turn into one of those princess-and-the-pea situations, you know?

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