Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
The late-'90s crisis of masculinity has arrived in pop culture with a vengeance.
Oct 15, 1999 | There's a pattern here -- every time Americans get really fat and self-satisfied, we start feeling miserable about ourselves. "Fight Club" is at least the third major Hollywood film of the year to hunt for the hidden meanings beneath our affluent consumer society, after "The Matrix" and "American Beauty." It introduces a memorable turn-of-the-century masculinity guru whom you might call the post-boomer generation's answer to Robert Bly. Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is a dissolute, mack-daddy hipster whose gospel includes such maxims as "You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not your khakis." Even the press kit handed out to reviewers of "Fight Club" is heavy with sanctimonious irony -- designed to resemble an upscale clothing and accessories catalog, it purports to offer sunglasses "inspired by styles favored by Pol Pot" and a '70s-style silk shirt "hand crafted in an Indonesian sweatshop by Frida, a single mother of seven whose monthly salary is equivalent to six American dollars."
As this would suggest, there's a lot of imagination and energy in and around "Fight Club," but imagination and energy are often not enough. On balance, this is the dumbest of the entries in Hollywood's anti-consumerist new wave -- there's something more than a little ludicrous about sitting in a theater while Brad Pitt preaches at you about the emptiness of materialism -- but it's still probably worth seven or eight bucks to find out what all the fuss is about. You'll see plenty of Pitt's impressive pecs and biceps, along with the trademark murky photography, decrepit urban landscapes and technical bravado of director David Fincher ("Seven," "The Game"). Maybe the ponderous, talky ideology of "Fight Club" represents Fincher's effort to answer critics who have called him a shallow style-monger. I say he puts on a hell of a show, and both he and we should be happy with that.
You certainly can't say that Fincher or screenwriter Jim Uhls (who adapted Chuck Palahniuk's acclaimed novel) hold back on the film's psychological subtext -- "Fight Club" opens with our nameless narrator (Edward Norton) tied to a chair with Tyler's, uh, gun in his mouth. The narrator then begins to tell us how he and the willfully destructive Tyler wound up in this compromising position. Maybe 1999 is the year of the extended voice-over flashback -- like "American Beauty," "Fight Club" is narrated by a man in extremis, whose true fate is not revealed until the end of the movie. There are other similarities between "American Beauty's" Lester Burnham and the narrator of "Fight Club" -- both are white-collar ass-kissers who rebel against the emasculating conformity of their lives as minor cogs in the great engine of consumption. Throw in journalist Susan Faludi's new book about men, and it looks like the late-'90s crisis of masculinity has arrived in pop culture with a vengeance.
The idea that the human male is an atavistic brute bred for violence and sexual domination, whose true animal nature lies just below a veneer of civilization, is nothing new. Ironically, it has gained credibility in our era partly through the efforts of academic feminists, some of whom have advanced the notion that men's inherent aggression makes them ill-suited for powerful roles in the information economy, and that the coming millennium will be female-driven. As far as I'm concerned, it's probably true that men need to get out of the fluorescent lighting, go on some strenuous hikes and get laid more. But then, so do women. Frankly, for all its strikingly contemporary imagery -- in animated microphotography, we see the insides of the narrator's brain, as well as his waste basket and his refrigerator motor -- "Fight Club" has nothing new to say about any of this. Tyler Durden's wisdom is mostly tossed-off Cliffs Notes Hemingway and Nietzsche maxims about self-destruction and the physical body, flavored with a coy homoerotic wink. "I can't get married -- I'm a 30-year-old boy," the narrator protests to Tyler, who is smoking in the bathtub. "I wonder if another woman is really what we need," Tyler responds.
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