The Ethics of Fight Club: A Lacanian Analysis Kenneth G. MacKendrick
Fight Club marks a return to violence. I should emphasize "return" because of the irony at work here. The members of Fight Club are returning to a place they have never been, yet it is a warm and ecstatic place somewhere deep within them. It is a recovery of masculinity that is assumed to have been possessed, now lost and recovered. Fight Club, in short, is a film about lost objects, lost objects that only appear to be lost in retrospect. It is a narrative about masculine (and feminine) identity in postmodern times. This should hardly come as a surprise. Fight Club is illustrative of the contemporary trend in both high fashion and in urban living: new simplicity. Unpretentious... style, self-expressive recycling habits... The new simplicity lets lifestyle accentuate the individual's inner qualities. The individual is promoted as a whole. Something which eventually gets tied up, in the bowels of the film, with the death drive: "This is your life, and it's ending one hour at a time." It should be noted, the untruth of this fiction of wholeness is revealed, of course, near the end of the film.
The movie is about Jack (as in, "You don't know Jack!"), a slave to the Ikea nestling instinct, working in an office, with a boss, and paperwork from here to the airport. Jack is repulsed by the corporate take-over of culture: "corporations that name everything" - the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Philip Morris Galaxy, Planet Starbucks. Yet, at the same time, he speaks into a phone while sitting on the toilet, "Yes. I'd like to order the Erika Pekkari slip covers." Ed Norton, as Jack, explains to himself: "I would flip through catalogs and wonder, ‘What kind of dining set defines me as a person?' We used to read pornography. Now it was the Horchow Collection." Life has become a work of art, to each their own "stuff." The subject is supposed to have every possibility to make of him or herself a beautiful work of art. Freedom through commodity exchange and commodified culture, with humilating labour the price paid for a "beautiful soul." Jack is worried here that life has a superficial, perhaps artificial quality to it. "What kind of dining set defines me as a person?" Life is a work of art, a dining set defines me. What am I, to let a dining set define me? The crude association of Fight Club and fascism is preemptive. It is not the Fight Club that reeks of fascism, at least not at first, it's the middle-urban-office-class commodity culture that is closely associated with the ego's flight from coherence. Fight Club might be read as a flight from fascism, from the culture industry of the Frankfurt School (Jack's "rebellious subjectivity" is indicated by the appearance of Tyler in single frames in the opening scenes) [remember, Fight Club depicts a postmodern response to the culture industry]. Consumerism is a lifestyle in Jack's world, a defining lifestyle. We can be reminded of Ernst Junger's fascist aesthetics here, in corporate/consumerist form. Jack longs for an escape, recognizing that the new Ikea duvet does not cover over the lack in the Other. Fight Club might best be understood as post-fascist, a rejoinder to fascism through psychosis, the response of a postmodern subject to the aestheticization of politcs (which might actually be the ongoing impact of late capitalism on subjectivity) [see Jameson].
The central theme of Fight Club is summarized in Lacan's famous saying, "I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you - the objet petit a - I mutilate you" (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 263). The psychoanalytic notion of desire is very much linked to non-satisfaction, which means that we desire things because they are unavailable; and to keep desire alive, the subject needs to prevent it s fulfillment. Paradoxically, in this love, this desire, the subject must destroy what he loves most. Fight Club illustrates a radical change in Jack's identification with the symbolic order, the so-called big Other. In Fight Club, the men no longer believe in the fiction of the big Other as they did in a pre-Fight Club reality (the "good life" of urban living). But this disbelief, or disillusionment, does not simply bring liberation for the subject; it also triggers regression into violence and self-mutilation [see Renata Salecl, (Per)Versions of Love and Hate for details]. The "return" to something more primal: to the bloodied knuckles, the swollen purple eyes, broken teeth, chemical burns. These wounds are specific ways in which Jack deals with his lack, as well as the lack in the Other. The fights, the Fight Club, which is an exercise in bodily mutilation, is a symptom of the radical change that has affected subjectivity, prompted by the psychotic break out of cultural assimilation.
We should note, from the very beginning, the film is gendered. Jack, in a voice over notes: "Somehow, I realize all of this -- the gun, the bombs, the revolution -- is really about Marla Singer." Jack experiences his reality through Marla Singer, the femme fatale. From a Lacanian perspective, woman as a symptom of man. Marla is the traumatic kernel of Jack's life, her presence is so traumatic, in almost every instance and every scene, that it disrupts his fantasy life at every turn; interupting his communion rituals in the melanoma, tuberculosis and testicular cancer group therapy sessions. Of course, soon, Marla assumes the place of Jack's object cause of desire, in the cave (a return to the womb, which is, in this instance, frigid). Jack loves her, which is why he must also hate her. For Jack, woman is the alien Other, Jack articulates: "She'd invaded my support groups, now she's invading my home."
Jack finds liberation in attending the various self-help groups. All terminal, pathos and communion toward thanatos. He is set free, to weep "in the company of men" [remaining men], but is overwhelmed by guilt, heightened by the presence of Marla. His own self-incomprehension and self-contradiction is projected onto Marla, "You're a tourist" says Jack, dying in the "Sylvia Plath philosophy way" but not really dying. Jack's jouissance is generated in these various groups by his desire for recognition: to be heard, for someone to listen, to really listen. This is what has been lost early on, a sounding board, an Other that cares (in Lacanese: the paternal metaphor). Outside of these groups, Jack's life is compartmentalized: "Everywhere I travel, tiny life" - single-serving sugar, single-serving cream, single pat of butter, single serving friends. Through the beginning, images of Jack's alter-ego emerge: surfacing. Tyler Durden and Jack meet on a plane ("we have the same briefcase"), just after a particularly vivid fantasy about a violent plane crash. Tyler hands Jack a safety instruction card, and talks about the effects of oxygen: "Suddenly, we become euphoric and docile. We accept our fate." Tyler Durden comes to be what Jack finds most attractive in a life not "properly" lived: being toward death - as hear later in the film from Tyler, "Self-improvement is masturbation. Self-destruction is the answer." Jack's interest in Tyler is a sublimation of his experience in the self-help groups. What he was lacking while participating in these groups was an "actual" dying. Jack was dying, but he was not terminal in an immediate sense. Jack, in other words, is predisposed to a more immediate experience of death, one which he associated with masculinity, communion, and death. When Jack lands, he finds that his apartment has been destroyed, an explosion in the building sent his "stuff" flying out all over the street. He calls Tyler, and they head out to a tavern. We find that Tyler is systematized angst, working several night jobs - pissing in soup, splicing pornography in movies for children at a theatre... small acts of vile resistance.
Jack and Tyler continue to talk about their "same-story" father who recommends marriage after college and a job. Tyler responds: "A generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is the answer we really need." It doesn't matter who says the line at this point, both Jack and Tyler are on the same page. Again, we have a central tenet of the film: the mother is to blame, just like Marla a few scenes before. Out in the parking lot, Tyler asks Jack to hit him as hard as he can. And the Fight Club is born: "It was right in everyone's face. Tyler and I just made it visible."
The first rule of fight club is -- you don't talk about fight club. The second rule of fight club is -- you don't talk about fight club. The third rule of fight club is -- when someone says "stop" or goes limp, the fight is over. Fourth rule is -- only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule -- one fight at a time. Sixth rule -- no shirts, no shoes. Seventh rule -- fights go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule -- if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.
Body mutilation, which is the entire point of Fight Club, symbolic scarification through fist fighting, is not simply a repetition of premodern forms of masculinist initiation; rather, fight club can be seen more provocatively as a way in which the contemporary masculine subject deals with the deadlocks of a postmodern society. Fight Club expresses sexual uncertainty and the fight becomes the gesture of initiation which is supposed to alleviate this doubt through bruises and blood, the threshold of pain as the signifying mark. The deeper the cut, the more permanent the wound, the more confirmation the subject receives from the big Other. The mark on the body is the answer of the big Other, the symbolic structure to the subject's uncertain identity. Men must remain men (which is why we also have such violence projected on to mothers, Marla, and the self-hatred expressed earlier on in the "sexually ambiguous" character of Bob). Here the feminine is the interruption of masculine functioning. Woman, obviously, is a symptom of man. Although Marla achieves a certain kind of subjectivity in her own right, it is on the terms of Jack or Tyler (her status as a woman defines Marla's character throughout). Fight Club illustrates the pathology of masculinity: the {apparently) deformed (read: feminine) masculine form is illustrated in the self- help groups that Jack abandons in favour of the Fight Club.
In contemporary postmodern society, there is a radical change in the organization of the family, from the patriarchy to the regime of the brother (see Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Regime of the Brother) which also entails a different relation of the subject toward the symbolic order. We find, in Fight Club, a turn toward brotherhood, fraternity - which appears as masochistic perversion (we might be reminded of the early ascetic martyr's in early Christianity). Attributed to the dissolution of the family, which is acknowledge by Tyler and Jack:
Jack: I didn't know my dad. Well, I knew him, till I was six. He went and married another woman, had more kids. Every six years or so he'd do it again -- new city, new family.
Tyler: He was setting up franchises. My father never went to college, so it was really important that I go...
According to Renata Salecl and MacCannell, there is a structural change in the subject's relation toward authority, which means that the subject nowadays appears as someone who is in a position to freely choose his or her own identity, not unlike multi-user domains in virtual reality. The father in the patriarchal structure, is now unmasked. The father is revealed to be impotence. As a consequence, there is no internalization of the paternal metaphor (which acts as a safety net between psychosis and neurotic attitudes). This has profound implications. Lacan's famous definition of psychosis is that what is excluded from the symbolic returns as the real. Psychotics are the ones who do not identify with the fiction of the symbolic order, since for them the symbolic falls into the real. A psychotic, for example, does not believe in the fictional character of the Father, but has direct contact with the Father (the Law). The resulting failure to internalize the paternal metaphor compromises access to the symbolic order. In effect, the denial of castration (which is why castration becomes the ultimate threat to Jack/Tyler). Because of this failure, the subject continues, without knowing it or itself. In Fight Club, Jack no longer knows what he is saying in what he utters. In language, subjective activity says something completely different from what we believe the subject says when he speaks. This "something completely different" is installed as the unconscious that escapes the speaking subject because he is constitutively separated from it. We are subject to Jack's paradox: "Fight club wasn't about winning or losing. It wasn't about words." And we should recall the first and second rules of Fight Club: "Don't talk about Fight Club." The subject is separate from language.
Ironically, the viewer is then struck by the consistency of Jack's narrative and the simultaneous disavowal of language. Jack's voice overs serve as a Master narrative, yet at the same time the subject of these narratives is left exluded from them. What is missing here, what is strange about Jack, is the eclipse of a primal repression: the internalization of voice, the acceptance of castration as the entrance into language (the surrender necessary for the subject to gain itself by losing itself). The eclipse and disavowal of the very splitting of the subject, the split between the enunciation and the utterance. The Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed in the place of the Other, the paternal metaphor fails. The exclusion of the father, and the possibility of the symbolization of the law by symbolic castration, marks the advent of a schizophrenic syndrome - which is illustrated most succinctly in Jack's utter self-alienation (revealing that desire is always the desire of the Other): "I'm six years old again, passing messages between my parents." "I'm" six years old again, I'm passing messages between my parents. In short: I am the discourse of my parents. "I" [emphatically] do not exist.
The only thing unchangeable in Fight Club is the voice, which is illustrated by the ongoing voice overs throughout the film and Jacks obstinate refusal to give voice meaning. Jack's God-like intervention in the narrative (which is also illustrated by the ‘un-real' aspects of the film - when Tyler points up to the top of the screen at the ‘cigarette burn' to indicate the new reel). The body, in Fight Club, becomes obsolete. The consistency of the voice is gain by the disavowal of the body and the unknown character of the voice to its own consciousness.
We find elements of vampirism here as well, "You can swallow a pint of blood before getting sick." Jack is caught between two deaths. His chronic inability to sleep and his fabrication of an authority figure, the Imaginary friend (which Marla actual points out to Jack after Jack says, "I don't understand. Why does a weak person have to go out and find a strong person... to hang onto?" to which Marla responds, "What do you get out of it?"). As the film progresses, we are further and further dragged into the two lives, one, Tyler, literally the death drive (as literalized in the car crash, after which a series of plans are made without Jack's knowledge).
The metonymy of desire is progressively more aggressive throughout the film. Starting with the Fight Club expanding to ever growing (and more secret) terroristic (Space Monkey) activities. Of course desire this desire is psychotically displaced, always taking place in the Other (Tyler). Jouissance, enjoyment, takes place in the Other.
"Suicide is the only completely successful act" - Jacques Lacan
The final scene of the film introduces the ethical dimension of Fight Club. Lacan's phrase, above, expresses completely an intention which is both conscious and unconscious, the conscious assumption of the unconscious death drive. For Lacan, an act is an ethical concept. The fundamental quality of an act is that the actor can be hold responsible for it. Near the end of the film, Jack assumes responsibility for the non-existence of the Other. Tyler accuses Jack of not taking responsibility for his own creation and Jack responds, "I am responsible for all of it. I accept that." This is further evidenced when the gun appears in Jack's hand and disappears from Tyler's: "The gun is in my hand." Jack, with the gun to his own chin, speaking to Tyler, "Really listen to me. My eyes are open" and pulls the trigger. Jack assumes the non-existence of the Other. And, true to Hollywood form, Jack survives but Tyler is killed, disappearing. When Marla enters Jack's voice is hoarse and distorted, the God-like voice over is finished. A penis is spliced into the final scene, indicating symbolic castration and Jack's emergence from psychosis into "normalcy." Now we can talk about Fight Club.
Yeah, I know, it ends too quickly, you want more. Next time.