Fight Club: Not nihilistic

*SPOILER WARNING* Major spoiler is same color as background.


I meant to reply to this in another thread, but I was busy and didn't- and now I forgot which thread it was in. I was going to put it in Jake's thread since it reminded me of it, but then someone got all huffy about being serious so I guess I have to start my own thread.

I'll restate the topic and then my response.

The original poster said that Fight Club was nihilistic because Tyler says, "Self-improvement is masturbation."

That's totally out of context and I think the poster missed the entire point of the story (side note: I had the distinct impression that the poster was female, so that could be a major contributing factor to why they missed the point-- and no, I'm not saying females are stupid by any means, just that they aren't experiencing a loss of identity in the same way as men, so their first intuition about the story might be way off base).

Fight Club is not about nihilism, it is about reclaiming and redefining masculinity in a world that has separated man from himself through aggressive marketing and emphasis of the feminine while demonizing manhood. Man has been separated from himself and defines himself by what he owns. Thus, “our war is a war of the spirit.”

Saying that Fight Club is about nihilism is like saying war is about killing civilians.

What Tyler is saying when put in context of looking at an advertisement in the bus is that when you waste time improving yourself to fit an image, you are truly masturbating because you could die at any moment and could have been using your time to accomplish something meaningful. If you don't know that you will die, not realize it, but KNOW that death is waiting, then you won't be acting with the whole of yourself and your true intent.

That is hardly nihilistic.

Robert Bly pointed out in his book, Iron John, that men have initiated other men into manhood for thousands of years with a ritualized wound. But in today’s world where men are distanced from both others and themselves, men don’t know where they belong or even what they want. That was the whole point of the crucial scene in Fight Club with the kiss on the hand. The kiss, something that is benevolent, was also a wound that can never be forgotten. Fight Club asserts that this wound, for men, is an ever-present reminder that we will die and, knowing this, we should strike out with meaning rather than piss our time away in confusion. It was an essential part of the story and essential for the transformation of the character into a “real” man (as opposed to one who is what he owns or one who is owned by society).

If you take Tyler’s words completely out of context and somehow manage to forget all of the philosophical interactions between Tyler and Jack, visual symbolism, and metaphorical symbolism (don’t forget that the story is completely different before and after you find out that Tyler and Jack are the same), then I suppose it’s possible to miss the entire point and structure of the film.

Fight Club is not a whimsical foray into nihilism, but it is the defining work of a generation of displaced men.

LINK

I dont think eggy is a female.

Other than that though, I can see your point.

you need a spoiler warning!!!!

Wahaha. Huevos con huevos. Hey, I just call 'em like I see 'em.

This is brilliant. And maybe it deserves its own thread.

Is this about The Big Lebowski?

the dude abides!

Indeed, I'd say the point of the movie is as far as nihlistic as it is to get; it's all about why nihlism is wrong. The narrator resolves the dilemma when he rejects the fantasy of Tyler and holds on to something real - Marla, however messed up she might be, is REAL. The "space monkeys" are as mindless and sheeplike as the society they appear to be protesting - just in a different direction.

It's also a subtle horror movie - Tyler is the narrator; he is fighting himself, his own id to get all pseudo-Freudian... and he fails.

Dude, I'm totally watching that right now too!

I wanted to clarify that Tyler Durden isn't a nihilist, lest someone misinterpret that that's what you're saying. Tyler Durden, himself, is anti-nihilist (which is why he rails against Jack's consumer values). What happens that causes a dilemma is that Tyler becomes an extremist, a fanatic, a messiah. When Jack destroys Tyler and accepts Marla, he isn't destroying nihilism (that's what both Jack and Tyler had already both agreed to do), he's destroying fanaticism because he realizes he needs to coexist with women, not push them out of the picture. Tyler only cares about himself, which is why he turned into a zealot and took his mission to set men free to the extreme.

I am master of the run-on sentence.

I'm sorry for being off-topic, but it's not often you see 'nihilist' in a thread title, or hear it mentioned, and it just made me think of The Big Lebowski which is one of my favourite films. It also turned me onto White Russians as well.

I guess it's just the parlance of our times

Aren't all Russians white? Or do you mean because of the asiatic intermixing...

Hmm, I'd like to think that was just a vehicle for the movie.

It could have been about anything that might inspire someone to breakdown, the war on the masculine spirit was just an excuse for the characters to exist.

And I'm not sure I have a message, like you do, but I have found as I've gotten older I tend to enjoy art and reading less because they're trying to make me believe something, but rather because they organize the universe in a delicious way that resonates with all of us.

What I'm trying to say is that the movie wasn't about the war on the masculine spirit. The movie could just be about this guy who is having a mental split, finds solace and peace in empathizing with the suffering of others, but when that is taken away from him he enters a psychotic stage and creates this group called fight club, and ends up trying to blow up lots of buildings. Or maybe it's could just be about how cool brad pitt is.

Is there actually a war on the masculine spirit? Is this wrong? Do we need to co-exist with women? Maybe. I think you're given the option of thinking about that yourself, but I think you need to keep in mind art is more of journey than a destination, and these are just one of many places you can end up going.

I had a very wise professor who once said, "A lot of people say art and poetry can mean whatever you want them to mean... but that's bullshit to make lazy people feel smart."

I disagree, I think attempting to summarize art into a naive thesis is the lazy part.

Fight Club is a 2 hour movie that cost tens of millions of dollars to be made with dozens of actors and a huge production crew and took weeks to make and probably months to preprare based on a book that was probably years in the making.

I think you can take parts of the movie, and say "this is what this subsection / perspective is" and then analyse that, absolutely. However, at the end of the day, you are one person with one perspective. Your analysis is just a tiny porthole into a huge ecology that is the Fight Club movie.

Go ahead, deconstruct, I don't think anyone is complaining. In fact, it was intuitive and interesting. But don't make the naive argument that you have summarized the movie.

You say the movie isn't nihilistic. That's as bad as saying it is.

I am aware of what goes into making movies. I understand that you are trying to make the point that movies are created by many different people, sometimes to the point where you cannot pin down one specific author and, therefore, an analysis of any film is invalid.

However, that point is irrelevant when tallking about the filmic text because what is there is there; the individual parts relate to the other parts within the text itself in order to construct the whole. The meaning it constructs doesn't cease to exist because many people came together to bring it to life. Just because Joe the spark was holding a broken egg crate to a kino flo behind the scenes when Tyler says, "We're not freeing 'em man, we're setting 'em free," doesn't mean the final product is meaningless. There is a distinction between what one goes for and what one achieves, and the final product can always be analyzed in terms of what it is in relation to itself and its zeitgeist (as popular art is always a product of its age-- if it wasn't, then it wouldn't follow any conventions at all because the viewer would be meaningless). What someone could have been aiming for is irrelevant because the result is a separate thing from the creator. If we're going to take a super liberal view and consider every possible thing something could mean at any point in history and in any situation, then there's really no point in listening to the dialogue at all. Hell, why watch movies? Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes would turn from an amusing international allegory for World War II to just a bunch of people running around on a train and Fight Club becomes just some meaningless story about a guy with self-control problems.

I'd agree with you if movies didn't follow structural, visual, editorial, storytellnig, and sonic conventions, and if I could ignore everything the characters said and did. So the movie made XX amount of money and used XX amount of resources, who cares? Can art only have something to say about itself and the world it was created in if a single auteur created it? That would be impossible anyway, if I got your meaning, so I guess art has no hope of saying anything at all (which is funny because artists who succeed at their creations often "let the art speak for itself," meaning that the creator's explanations and views are not needed).

I know that I know what I'm talking about without even considering labelling you or myself naive. But I do think you are incorrect about film as an art form because you are giving too much weight to the importance of intentionality of authorship (which is a view that fell out of favor about a century ago), probably because of a disillusioned personal view of auteur theory. Now if we were talking about who has the right to claim OWNERSHIP of films, I'd have good cause to consider your point about the resources it took to create them. But we're not, so I don't have to.

I am not female... and I don't usually read posts longer than my hand either.
I already posted my pic a thousand times: http://eggstasy.netfirms.com/jorge.jpg
That pic is now 4 years old, btw.
Oh, and I absolutely loved Fight Club, watched it multiple times.
Whoa, check this out, the wikipedia entry on Nihilism mentions Fight Club
"Another American author who is commonly believed to deal with themes of nihilism is Chuck Palahniuk. In his 1996 novel Fight Club, for example, the ultimate goal of the book's 'project mayhem' is the destruction of modern civilization in order to rebuild humanity. Palahniuk, however, claims that he does not deliberately focus on the subject."

All this talk of Fight Club and not one person has mentioned Meatloafs Moobies. Stick with the issues that matter people!

Wikipedia.

Meatloaf's moobies make me wet.

Such an interesting quote.

Is Fight Club really about pointing out how feminism did not succeed, then?

Females are frequently cast as being materialistic.

I must have really missed something: I thought it was an investigation into what sort of dining set defines me as a person. Come to think of it, I thought that's what the Critique of Pure Reason was about, too. Maybe I should go re-read at least one of them.

What do you mean by that?

Well, we are living in a material world.

That it was a brilliant argument. Keep up the stellar work.