Have you seen Fight Club?  Of course you have!  It’s over ten years since it was released.  We were all blown away by its anti-consumerist message.  Its belated success convinced many of us that we were really starting to make some headway against our current, soulless zeitgeist.  We devoured every word of Palanuik’s novel; sucked down the essence of his delicious sense of irony and let it weigh heavy on our conscience.  We went back to our jobs and domestic lives with new eyes and greater resentment.  Fight Club closed out a decade that had turned a suspicious eye over everything sanctimonious that had been fed to us since our childhoods.  The lie was exposed.  We just had to figure out with what it should be replaced.

Then something fairly typical happened.  America elected a conservative president.  We all went to war against an enemy that can never be beaten.  The dot com bubble burst, and then re-asserted itself only a few years later.  Now we all have Facebook and Twitter accounts.  Social Media marketers data mine our tweets to protect and assert corporate branding.  Bloggers whore themselves as affiliate salesmen.  We “fan” our favorite products and memes and serve as viral hosts for their distribution.  Marketers have cracked the holy grail – the keys to the kingdom of word of mouth trust and authenticity.  Never does a day go by that I don’t here someone shill for an iPad or some other brand or another that infects their self identification like an indefatigable weed.

And we’re all still working jobs we hate, to buy shit we don’t need.

Except, it’s no longer the advertising that has us enslaved.  It’s ourselves.  We bought in – 100 percent.  We are the fallen generation.  Authenticity itself is now just a buzz word marketers use to enhance their brand penetration.

Maybe we saw Fight Club, but didn’t really SEE it.  Maybe there was more to it than we appreciated at the time.  So I’m going to revisit it now.  Maybe Fight Club was never really a call to arms against the consumer society.  Perhaps instead its an essay as to why we have no choice but to follow it through to it’s final, all encompassing realisation.  That’s the angle I’m going to explore.  So let’s begin.

 

If you haven’t seen the movie at all then you have some catching up to do. You can get it here (sponsored link): Fight Club (Two-Disc Collector’s Edition)

 

What’s the ID?

When I’m reading a book or watching a movie I always like to play a game I call:  ”What’s the ID?”  Let me explain the game.

The idea of the ID that Freud formulated involves the deeper primal aspects of our nature.  The ID drives us to according to a hunger for pleasure and an aversion to pain.  It is illogical and unreasoning, selfish and innate.  It is tempered the ego and super ego, the former of which subjects the ID to reality, the latter to social conventions and mores.

Freud’s conceptual architecture is not often invoked anymore in serious psychology, but I do think it’s a useful heuristic in understanding narratives and our interactions with them.  The reason for this is that any story which attracts a wide audience usually appeals to some particular manifestation of the human ID.  The ways in which a story does this varies, but the most common method is by virtue of the protagonist or hero.  This character will embody or acquire qualities desirable to the intended audience – power, fame, beauty etc.

Now it’s not the only reason why a person might enjoy a story.  Perhaps the story is suspenseful.  Perhaps it has some great action sequences that provide a nice little dose of adrenaline.  But if it doesn’t get this ID component right, it has to do a huge amount of work in other areas.  It’s extremely important not to let the ID go dissatisfied.  If you don’t believe me – think about how men are so uninterested in romance novels, or how women yawn at the thought of watching predator.  There are always plenty of exceptions but the generalisation is true enough to be useful.

The game – “What’s the ID” – simply involves seeking out and identifying the particular ID  that a story aims at and keep a running list of all the stories in which you’ve seen it before.  For example, a lot of science fiction and fantasy stories involve a plot concerning a young, maligned, often orphaned, nerdy etc boy who goes on to discover he has superpowers of some sort or another and that he is the most important person in the universe.  Hence we have the basic plotline for Harry Potter, the Belgariad series, the Wheel of Time series, The Riftwar Saga, The Lord of The Rings and The Matrix to name just a small few.

Why would you want to play this game?  Well, think of your ID as a really easily manipulated child.  You get sucked into these stories, spend time thinking and fantasising along with them.  You pay money to enjoy these cultural products.  That’s hard earned.  That’s time spent pushing papers around for the man.  That’s time you could have been using to ACTUALLY satisfy your primordial desires.  In a certain sense then, the degree to which a fantasy ensnares your ID, is the degree to which it exploits your ID for the benefit of the creator.  They lead your ID round by the nose with a tasty sausage, while stealing from its pocket – your pocket – your valuable capital and taking it as their own.  Understanding  how your ID is being manipulated in this way, is the first step in freeing yourself  from the clutches of fantasy.  That’s the reason why you should want to play this game.

The ID of Fight Club

So what has all this to do with Fight Club?  Well, one way to view the story is as an allegory for just this process of playing the game “What’s the ID?” and using that to free oneself from the enthralling fantasy.

Tyler Durden is obviously the ID of the narrator Jack.  The narrator has to learn that he is not really in control of his actions, but is instead in thrall to a fiction.  He has to develop this self-awareness in order to ultimately free himself from the illusion.

Let’s explore this in more detail.  One of my claims is that the ID is manipulated by creators of fiction to – in a sense – enslave you.  You end up spending your life dreaming a fiction as opposed to really trying to satisfy your desires.  Hence you end up tied down in dead end jobs without the energy or time to really pursue your ambitions.  You become a slave in the corporate consumer machine.  These fictions are used in marketing campaigns all the time.  They associate some ID like desire to a product such that one irrationally comes to think that the product will actually allow one to satisfy that desire.  Hence we all end up chasing after shit we don’t need – as Tyler Durden points out.

But irony of Fight Club is that Tyler Durden presents himself as the liberator from this enslavement.  But at the same time he is the ID itself.  This is something of a contradiction.  We are trapped by our irrational desires in this soulless consumerist society.  We are raped by fictions into the false satisfactions of these desires and become slaves to the machines.  And here we have Tyler Durden, another realisation of the ID promising to free us from just this situation.  But how could the ID ever get us out?  It’s the thing that gets us into the mess in the first place.  The answer is that it can’t.  Tyler Durden is a false liberator.

The number of subtle ways in which Palanuik symbolically foregrounds this fact is truly astonishing.  The narrator, for instance, in realising his ID persona has to give up his own conscious being.  He is only liberated from his IKEA nesting instinct by ceasing to be.  If Tyler Durden is analogous to the fictions that are fed to us to keep us merely dreaming of desire satisfaction, then it’s only appropriate that the narrator would be asleep and unconscious when acting out as Tyler.  Hence what are actual experiences for Tyler Durden, that of having sex with Marla, and blowing up the society he detest, are DREAMS for the narrator.  This is directly symbolic of the fact that narratives are like the dreams we have of real experiences, of real desire satisfaction.

But there is more.  Palanuik crafts his narrative in such a way so as to gradually remove the layers of subtle symbolism to eventually whack the viewer over the head with it.  Tyler presents himself as the liberator – as being free in all the ways the narrator is not – and yet he ends up dehumanizing and enslaving all the members of project mayhem.  They are expected to obey without question, they are stripped of their names and individuality, they are not special, they are just part of the same compost heap of decaying organic matter.  Tyler encourages them all to “let go”, to “hit bottom” – to give themselves up to his identity and his dominion.  What’s more, the narrator never gets to enjoy the fruits of his tyranny.  He is told that Fight Club doesn’t belong to him, that both he and Tyler are not special either.  Hence, by following Tyler, the narrator and everyone else lose all sense of self.  It is total abandonment to slavery.

Note also that the narrator ultimately begins to break away from Tyler when the latter actually stops fulfilling his supposed ID role – that of desire satisfaction.  As a father figure he begins to pay more attention to other members of the group.  Tyler gets the credit for being the inventor of Fight Club – he is the great man, not the narrator.  And the narrator gets excluded from the decision making process in the institution of project mayhem.  Hence he loses the sense of power that the masculine ID craves.

This fits with the fact that the way narratives are used in the entertainment industry to satisfy our ID drives actually doesn’t result in satisfaction at all.  It robs us of the time and energy we need to truly break free of our humdrum existence and truly live fulfilling lives.  So is born in us the iconoclastic, Tyler Durden like ID that wants to tear the whole societal edifice down.  But since Tyler is just a dream (as are all narratives) it results in just more slavery.  This is why the narrator ultimately breaks from Tyler and tries to reassert control.

Many commentators read this as the ultimate rejection of Tyler Durden’s iconoclastic value system.  But this reading is superficial.  Rather, the narrator is continuing his path of ID satisfaction.  He now becomes Marla’s protector, and tries to save the city from Tyler’s violence.  He shifts from anti-hero to hero – but this implausible shift is all just a continuing part of a never ending cycle wherein the ID is trapped by dreams and fantasies.  It’s not that the narrator rejects Tyler Durden’s iconoclasm.  He is just trying to stop and tear down whatever edifice arises to chain him, not realising that these edifices arise out of his own nature and psychological reality.

A Game You Can’t Win

Just as the narrator becomes aware of his ID persona, he immediately traps himself in another.  As such, the conclusion I draw from the story is a pessimistic one.  You can play the game “What’s the ID” – you can try to spot the narratives that try to trap and enslave you.  But when you do, you’ll only succeed in replacing them with something else.

This brings us right back to the historical context in which I situated Fight Club at the beginning of this review.  Fight Club itself was taken at the end of the nineties to be a kind of awakening.  We apparently saw through the lies – the narratives of id manipulation – of our consumerist society.  But then we just replaced that with a new lie – the war on terror, the dot com bubble, the housing bubble and now the current economic recovery.

As I said before, it’s no longer just the marketers feeding us these lies through the television – it’s primarily ourselves who spread the message.   We adopt these narratives and spread them on behalf of the corporations.  We become fanboys for this, that or the other product or service.  Rather than talking about our own successes and achievements we talk about those of the heroes we see at the cinemas.  We seem destined to chase our tail like ID as far as can be envisaged.  We cast our own shackles and put them on willingly.

We are the fallen generation because we are the perfect embodiment of the current paradigm – the current lie.  We are fallen because being so ensnared, we are also the most frustrated.  We are like Fight Club’s narrator who follows Tyler Durden, only to realise he has been left out in the cold.

What is the end result?  Our eyes open only as the dream is crumbling around us – only after an event of extreme violence that tears the edifice asunder.  The ID erupts in a frenzy – a furious and confused anger that lashes out at everything around it.

The result is war, revolution and misery.

Nihilism’s Rebirth

Niezsche wrote this passage in his preface of ‘The Will to Power’ some twenty six years before the first world war:

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.

What gave Nietzsche this prescience? His critique of nihilism was a critique of Christian values. He saw their collapse as being born of aspects within the Christian moral edifice itself. Christian morality gives us an antidote to nihilism – the view that we are just arbitrary clumps of matter. A belief in god gives us a reason to believe in ourselves as more than just this. But also embedded in Christian morality was a reverence for truth and honesty: ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbor.’ A love of truth leads to the realisation that all morality is a fiction we bring to the world. Nietzsche casts this as our great need for untruth. When he announced that God was Dead, he was talking about the tearing down of one value system for another. And that process could only be borne from a period of intense suffering and calamity.  The ID finds itself trapped in a lie… a fiction… so it finally explodes.

One can wonder if we are now heading straight into another calamity.   When the new consumer society arose at the turn of last century and cemented itself after the war, it seemed as though the trans-valuation from a god fearing, to godless paradigm was complete.  Worship was something that became a token effort.  We went to church, but didn’t really incorporate it into the rest of our lives.

But now the consumer paradigm is also falling apart – and everything with which we might replace it also seems like just another fantasy.  Political discussion becomes increasingly fractured.  Two party systems across the world are fraying at the seems.  Corporations exact ever more draconian controls, even while we steal from them with ever an ever greater sense of impunity.  Frustration on all sides is mounting.  It all just feels to be a matter of when it goes pop.

I don’t think there is any better symbol of this coming catastrophe than the image of Edward Norton – the hero that manages to save the girl from his alter ego – watching the buildings collapse around him.  It’s as though we will come to tear down society and engage in great destruction, even while we imagine ourselves as heroes, saviours and liberators.

Ah, but of course – that’s always how we imagine it.