CINEMA OF THE VOID

THE FILM THAT HATES ITSELF: FIGHT CLUB AND THE INVERSION OF CORPORATE FASCISM

"It's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism."
-Slavoj Žižek

Fight Club represents a historic point of inversion in the perception of capitalism in cinema and culture. It is the point at which capitalism has consumed its opposition so successfully that a major corporate studio like 20th century fox funded a big budget film which plays like a glamourized recruitment video for disaffected anti-corporate terrorists. It has by some been labeled 'gleefully fascist ' ( -Roger Ebert), misogynistic, and adversely genius by many others. it may very well be all of these things, but first and foremost, it is a kind of tipping point in big budget Hollywood cinema. It represents corporations subsuming their opposition so thoroughly that the farce becomes majestic, a kind of apocalyptic death song. Wielded by Fincher, the film feels self-aware, and thus gets away with harboring vast contradictions. However, it ultimately represents something terrible, and should hold an infamous place in the history of cinema.
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Many years later, it appears even stranger to hear Brad Pitt confidently utter the lines "we were all raised to believe we will be millionaires, movie gods, rockstars, but we won't." As he speaks it, he passes by Jared Leto, who would go on to establish a career as a rock musician after the film. Brad Pitt is of course one of the biggest movie stars of our time, so the farce rings even more loudly. He is the antithesis of the character he plays, he is the wealth, the glamour, the culturally sanctioned and acclaimed --- but in image he is the opposite, a counter-cultural anti-hero. This is the image of the contemporary inverted corporation, and philosophically the beginning of something like Google, who has the notorious slogan "don't be evil." The assumption is corporations are evil, but that Google somehow is not. It already assumes public knowledge of corruption , moral degradation , and it subverts it by brazenly presenting an image of anti-corporate anti-establishment self-satire --- which may or may not be accurate. Corporations routinely churn out media that is anti-corporate. A film like Avatar is the most brazen and crude example, post-Fight Club, I can think of. Wielded by filmmakers within the studio system, who may or may not authentically hold these anti-corporate perspectives, the films still exist as vehicles for the empowerment of the very corporations they may critique. This is at the heart of what allows capitalism to thrive even as it proves to be a destructive force on the planet. It subsumes opposition.
Fight club represents an unprecedented point at which the opposition became so grittily and fully realized that it seems uncanny and bizarre. After 9/11 such a film could not exist in its same gleeful cynism, for the frame of opposition was changed: The American public was made to focus primarily on the Other of rogue international terrorists, while corporations and greed ran amok free of meaningful regulations, leading up to the housing crisis of 2008, corporate bank bailouts, and the present age of Trumpian class division and gross inequality. At one point in the film, Tyler says, "you are the all-seeing, all-dancing crap of the world," and indictment of culture that frames people as utter pieces of (omniscient) shit. And in a way, this is a description of the film itself: The film is shit, because it is an anti-corporate manifesto funded by a horrendously unethical corporation (Fox). At the same time, the film is aware of this --- omniscient in its perspective of its place within the world.
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As the fight club transforms into project mayhem it also demonstrates the evolution of the very corporations it critiques. The members of project mayhem begin by being indoctrinated and submitting to authority, they give up individual autonomy and form one larger being that acts out violently to protect itself and to continue its agenda , which is less a pursuit of profit,  and more a frenzied pursuit power and control. Ironically this is the implicit horror of hyper-consumer capitalism made explicit. Indeed when jack says, "I felt like destroying something beautiful," his nihilistic and rebellious sentiment can also been interpreted as an absurd justification for the way multinationals destroy our environment in pursuit of inconceivable and uneccessary scales of wealth. Jack and Tyler in ways act as not merely the thematic opposition, but concurrently the voice of the corporation and its invisible subconscious, its mind, personified and self-aware.
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"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake." Here Tyler's words suggest the implicit values of the modern corporation. Whereas explicitly corporations market many flavors and options for the individual, the implicit understanding is that products are not made for ONE of us, but for a nameless, faceless mass, a population, or at best, a demographic. Another parallel of late capitalism can be recognized in Jack's search for Tyler when he disappears. He goes everywhere searching for Tyler, whose influence now seems to be everywhere ---but can't find the person. This is an apt metaphor for the corporate person, whose influence and strange rituals riddle society, destroying and homogenizing culture globally from the inside out, but whose face is nowhere --- except for perhaps as the film suggests, in the mirror. What is a corporation but many people cooperating and believing it is real.

Fight Club more than a decade and a half after its release remains a curious and subversive film, while also being a good approximation of that which is opposes. In its irony, the film is sort of self-loathing. For these reasons and more, it is something to be thought of and picked a part in the search for what is beyond capitalism and how to extricate ourselves from what seems to be terminal death spiral exacerbated by hyper-consumerism.
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