Fight Club Brad Pitt

Fight club Brad Pitt

Fight Club
Director: David Fincher
Cast: Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter, Zach Grenier, Jared Leto, Meat Loaf
(20th Century Fox)

Fight Club's Utopian Dick
by Jonathan L. Beller
PopMatters Film Critic

Does capitalism have you by the balls? If you're feeling a little limp lately, a little flaccid, emasculated, or impotent, then David Fincher's Fight Club may just have your number. This film kicks butt, and in doing so it also manages to suggest that your need for it and for other butt-kicking films is a late capitalist symptom of contemporary psychosis.

In the universe of Fight Club, there are two options. Either you become an Ikea-Boy seeking your erotic gratification in the Horchow collection, or you seek out alternative male community. In this respect the film reminded me of Nicolas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause — its creation of intense relationships and of a hero critical of the social order depends upon its delimitation of homoeroticism via the narrative-prohibition of homosexuality.

The narrator, a corporate secretion stunningly played by Edward Norton, first compulsively attends meetings of AIDS patients and victims of testicular cancer. At one point he cries in the huge feminine bosom of Bob, a former body-builder and abuser of steroids (consummately rendered by Meat Loaf), who has recently lost his testicles. But in part because of the disruptive presence of a phallic woman (Helena Bonham Carter), the cathartic embraces quickly become beatings. There can be no Fight Club if male-male desire leads to gay sex. At the same time, the film suggests that only by blowing his brains out, or at least half of them, can a man have a satisfying heterosexual relationship. And given nuclear-family, two-career monogamy, maybe that's not too far from the truth.

Tyler has several activities and to each he brings a unique dickishness: As a waiter he urinates in the soup of fancy hotels, as a cinema projectionist he cuts a couple porn-frames of penis into children's films, as a vandal he furiously drills 1 inch holes into rows of new computers. What unites all of his phallic activities (including his formation of a terrorist army to blow up credit-card companies), and what gives him his extraordinary charisma, is a profound hatred of the castrating reality of bourgeois life.

Fight Club begins with a hyperreal journey through what first appears to be cosmic outer space becoming neuronal tissue becoming testicular vasdeferines. In positing the deep unity of these three elements, which are, in principle at least, differentiable, Fight Club organizes the transformation of the narrator from a white-collar wage slave into the leader of an anti-capitalist terrorist organization. His transformation, which involves rediscovering primal masculinity, is wrought through his identification with alter-ego Tyler Durgan, expertly played as the long lost rebel by Brad Pitt. In Fight Club, Pitt is literally the phallus, the film's image of male power. It becomes exceedingly clear that the narrator desires this stylized phallic image to combat the emasculation dealt out in daily life. Through a truly brilliant organization of image-clusters and narrative, the film thematizes the problematic of masculinity by seeing Pitt as the utopian dick he is.

Although the film is cynical, misogynist, homophobic and violent, with respect to American fantasy it has the virtue of clarity. It activates a structure of feeling while making it legible. Tyler's splicing of subliminal cock-shots into family entertainment (hilariously answered by reaction shots of various perturbed, aroused and balling viewers, some of them children, who see them but don't know they saw them) is the key to understanding his significance. He is the subversive masculine, internal to yet undermining the image of commodity culture. The film cuts to the core of straight white masculinity, powerfully activating in the space of the theater its homophobic and indeed racist dimensions and its simultaneous utopian aspirations for liberation.

The vector of desire sustained between the narrator and Tyler and thus between spectator and Tyler has its conditions of possibility in the exclusion of homosexuality and of an incipient racism (as made manifest by a scene where an Asian grocer is nearly the victim of "human sacrifice"), even as it is driven by its hatred of postmodernity's economic automation and its callous indifference to individual potentiality. A communist revolution organized to overthrow capitalist domination, tomorrow's revolution, not yesterday's, appears as a legitimate if vexed erotic and political option.

Tyler's army is not composed of mere spectators of phallic power, but of participants in it. You viewers aching to cease channeling your desire through designer dishes and minivans, in order to reach down to the real man lying dormant in your scrotum, are sick, and your sickness, according to this film is nothing less than the castrating anomie of corporate power and its consumerist disciplinary regime. The film appeals to you to consider and indeed to grasp the revolutionary potential of your manhood. Why?