The return of the Toxic Male
‘Don’t talk about Fight Club!” That facetious marketing tagline was a “first rule” designed to tease naïve hipsters. Now, despite all the extra pixels in the new 4K ultra-HD re-release of Fight Club, David Fincher’s most popular film still doesn’t help us see masculinity clearly. So it fails again, especially in the millennium when an activist Supreme Court justice, during her confirmation hearing, refuses to define “the meaning of the word ‘woman,’” and progressive politicians and social engineers attempt to redefine sexuality.
Perhaps the confusion derives from Fincher’s 1999 “cult classic” in which the nameless Narrator, a mild-mannered insurance adjuster (Edward Norton), relates his pathological attraction to alpha male Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). These roles became archetypes for the ambivalently sensitive Norton and the feral Pitt, who have never gone beyond playing variations of these characters in their succeeding careers. Fincher stages their definitive moment on a city bus: The actors discuss Tommy Hilfiger fashion, then observe a Gucci advertisement, and Norton asks Pitt, “Is that what a man looks like?” The student–teacher inquiry is as striking as the emotional gap between Norton’s open-mouthed yokel and Pitt’s stud.
That’s the moment Fincher reveals the cards shuffled in his slick, advertiser-turned-auteur legerdemain. Fight Club, based on Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel of the same name, sells the sexual ambiguity that’s often promoted in tradesman artifice — cryptic, even fascinating ideas about identity, glamour, and attraction regularly commercialized since the sexual revolution’s impact on advertising, publishing, and cinema. And now in journalism and politics.
Fight Club adapts Palahniuk’s cynical, postmodern literary style that’s so self-conscious, it’s specious. Palahniuk uses social trends for shock, which is the métier that defines Fincher’s stylish technological newness. Fight Club remains his most fully accomplished dystopian film — the urine-and-bile-colored visual schematics are matched to the utter deprecation of Narrator’s inability make up his mind about the kind of person he wants to be. He upchucks (confesses) in Palahniuk’s voice (scripted by Jim Uhls) only the worst things he can imagine about mankind’s potential, whether passive-aggressive sexual relations with Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) or ideas about self-destruction and annihilation as depicted through Fincher’s edgy compositions: a 3-D tour of purchasable catalogue items, a passenger plane obliterated in midair. These are essentially big-screen versions of tropes from TV commercials.
As part of the excessively self-conscious, preeningly meta games that Fincher plays, the unidentified Narrator — Fincher’s EverySoyBoy goes by assorted doofus names such as Rupert and Cornelius — rebels against his middle-class white male social role, making cynical, absurdist, misanthropic, anti-capitalist comments. It’s routine, indie-movie nihilism (“This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time”), except that it’s presented as dark satire. Ad man Fincher condemns consumerism (“The things you own end up owning you”) by appealing to hipster sarcasm: conjuring professional “recall coordinator” Tyler Durden as Narrator’s self-defense, a doppelgänger who rules his subconscious and pops up everywhere.
Fight Club isn’t powerful enough, or good enough, to be called “prophetic,” even in the Luigi Mangione era that would seem to endorse the misanthropy of Narrator/Tyler. Instead, think of it as one of the ultimate products of 1999, a turning point in indie cinema when audiences got caught up in diverse visions of Y2K panic (The Matrix, The Virgin Suicides, The Insider, Girls Don’t Cry, Ghost Dog, Magnolia, American Beauty, The Sixth Sense, Girl Interrupted, The Blair Witch Project, American Movie, Analyze This, Summer of Sam, 8MM — and these weren’t even the good films from that year). Fincher’s contribution to that annus mirabilis comes in Tyler’s boastful anarchist response to cinema: Working as a movie house projectionist, he splices bits of pornography into family films, a jest that Fincher repeats by twice intersplicing a sprung phallus into his own feature.
What Fincher cultists don’t talk about when they don’t talk about Fight Club prevents any possible claim that the film might make on influencing contemporary sexual anxiety. Fincher’s peekaboo phallus represents a meaningless sexual tease. The opening scene shows Narrator fellating Tyler’s gun. In their meet-cute flashback as strangers packed together in an airline’s economy class, Tyler flirts, “Now, as I pass, a question of etiquette: Do I give you the ass or the crotch?” It’s as obvious as the current TV commercials featuring interracial couples. Fincher mocks homosexuality for shock value (Bonham Carter’s alien Brit slut is not a love object but appears as a prophylactic apparition). The film’s only quizzical element is Meat Loaf’s cameo as a big-breasted steroid addict — a pathetic proto-trans activist — who joins Tyler’s underground fight club where nameless white men duke out their aggressions and shame. (“We’re a generation of men raised by women. I wonder if a woman is what we need?”) The montage of an immature, Toxic Male, homosocial revolution — erecting a billboard that boasts “we can use old motor oil to fertilize your lawns” — works only because of the terribly sexy image of a suedehead Pitt sporting Durden’s vermillion-red leather jacket.
Fight Club’s failure is exposed by the timing of its re-release. Fincher’s allusions to Millennial anti-capitalism is disconnected from the moral and sexual confusion experienced in these Mangione days. (It turns out the Mangione fan club/fight club is mostly female.) Weak-willed Narrator distances himself from the exploitation plot turn in which Tyler’s specialty of making soap from human liposuction creates nitroglycerin. Tyler and his soy boys create an Antifa-style army that attacks capitalist institutions. They bomb appliance stores and vandalize corporate icons (from TRW and the Sears tower to the Geffen company logo) as part of movements named “Project Mayhem” and “Operation Latte Thunder,” coincidentally similar to the recent “Crossfire Hurricane” attempted coup. Fincher’s shift into fabulism à la Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and even Ari Aster falls short of poetry when Narrator exhorts, “You just had a near-life experience” or “I ran until my veins pumped battery acid.” Fight Club dissolves into scared soy boy sexual hyperbole, a series of FX problems to solve (blowing off multiple heads). Fincher has polished more turds (bad ideas) than any other director alive.
