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A Student Writes an Argument
11m
As an undergraduate at Purdue
University, Jacob J. H.Warrington
wrote the following argument
about the film Fight Club for a film
course. One of his goals was to
draw from what others had written
about consumerism and film interpretation as he built his argument
that Fight Club is an effective critique of modern capitalism.
Warrington 1
Jacob Warrington
Professor Felluga
Eng. 373
November 19, 2005
Postmodernism and the IKEA Nesting Instinct:
Consumerism and Commodification in David Fincher’s Fight Club
“That condo was my life!”
Narrator, Fight Club
As the narrator of the 1999 film Fight Club succinctly illustrates,
the definition of human existence via commercial purchases is an
increasingly common occurrence in our modern culture. The film has
as one of its central explorations this notion that acting the part of the
consumer is a viable means of self-expression. More accurately, Fight
Club challenges this typical notion, suggesting--and questioning--the
possibility of rejecting a lifestyle so ingrained into capitalist culture as
to border on subconscious instinct. This work seeks to analyze Fight
Club’s commentary with the aid of postmodern theorists, in order to
understand what the film communicates about the consumerist trend.
For a preliminary exercise, I should first carry out the important
task of defining the central concepts of this work as they will be put to
use. In this context, consumerism is a general theory of seeking
gratification and/or stature through the act of making purchases. One
can say, alternatively, that consumerism believes “my purchases define
me.” A complementary concept, and another central point of Fight
Club, is that commodification is the seizure of benign goods (i.e., art),
generally by corporations, in order to transform them into a
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marketable commodity capable of producing profit. Finally, there is
the realm of postmodernism itself. While a discussion of what
defines postmodernism is well beyond the scope of this endeavor, it
is nevertheless useful to point out that postmodern theory is often
interested in the rise of capitalism and the development of
multinational corporate entities. Likewise, postmodern thought tends
to be wary of humanity’s ability to alter the ideologies that govern
our everyday lives--these are the aspects of postmodernism that prove
most useful in the analysis of David Fincher’s Fight Club.
Consumerism as a Lifestyle, Commodification as Common Practice
Early in the film, as the narrator is describing the effects of his
insomnia at work, we see a camera shot from the bottom of a trash
can, pulling upward, while the narrator notes that the combination of
deep space travel and corporate sponsorship will lead to realities of
the “IBM Stellarsphere,” the “Microsoft Galaxy,” and “Planet
Starbucks.” This sequence vividly describes commodification at
work, developing a scenario of corporate giants capitalizing on what
is not even accessible with our current technology. The camera
motion itself becomes an analogue to the commentary: after the shot
begins at the center of this trash can “universe,” the camera slides
out, approaching the ends of the universe, capturing a gratuitous
display of corporate logos as it travels. This general implication of
growing corporate power is parallel to what Fredric Jameson
described as “a network of power and control . . . difficult for our
minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global
network of the third order of capital itself” (37). The scope of
commodification is on display; it reveals the reach of a process
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Audience and Purpose
Who seems to be the audience for
this paper? List the features that
lead you to this conclusion. How
would you describe the paper’s
purpose?
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where, as Dino Felluga puts it in his discussion of similar concepts in
The Matrix, “the consumer product, itself defined by an involved
commercial campaign, takes the place of ‘the real thing’” (76).
Whereas the trash can sequence provides a keen description of
commodification, the following scene addresses equally well the
lifestyle of consumerism. The narrator goes so far as to describe his
motivation, saying “if I saw something clever, like a coffee table in the
shape of a yin-yang, I had to have it,” adding “I’d flip through catalogs
and wonder, ‘what kind of dining set defines me as a person?’” This is
precisely the cry of the individual caught in consumerism, searching for
self-realization in the pages of a quarterly catalog. Jameson notes in his
work Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, that
“what has happened is that aesthetic production today has become
integrated into commodity production generally” (4), and this suggests
how the narrator is satisfied to search for, simply, “something clever,”
purchasing these clever twists on true aesthetic work whenever possible.
In fact, Jameson adds, “The disappearance of the individual
subject, along with its formal consequence, the increasing
unavailability of personal style, engender the well-nigh universal
practice today of what may be called pastiche” (16). The Fight Club
narrator’s practice of pastiche reflects in his addictively purchasing
mass-produced décor based on hand-made creations of the past, or, in
Jameson’s words, his “neutral practice of . . . mimicry” (17). Again
exciting is how the film techniques used in the scene directly reflect
this condition. We do not simply have a shot of furniture in a
condominium, but rather a live-action catalog, with the narrator
walking inside the advertisement itself. He is living inside a construct
of commercial corporations: a furniture catalog, yes, but also
consumerism itself. The scene uses this technique to provide ironic
commentary, for while the narrator attempts to add commercial
products to his home in order to individualize it, he only succeeds in
making a more accurate copy of the mass-produced advertisements
he orders from.
In several ways, the Fürni catalog scene additionally
demonstrates Slavoj Z̆îz̆ek’s concept of “the world in which corporate
Capital succeeded in penetrating and dominating the very fantasykernel of our being” (73). After the narrator says “we used to read
pornography, now it was the ‘Horchow collection,’” we can re-view
the beginning to the scene, with the narrator in the bathroom, as
parallel to Z̆îz̆ek’s description. As he sits on the toilet leafing through
a catalog, we realize that this commercial tool has taken the place of
what would have been pornographic fantasy. As he throws the Fürni
catalog down, and the camera pulls into a photo with the tagline “Use
Your IMAGINATION . . . ,” we enter the narrator’s own fantasykernel, filled with kitschy furniture and advertising descriptions. Thus,
Fight Club proves its world is very much the one that Z̆îz̆ek
considered.
As a final exploration of Fight Club’s early introduction to the
theory of its postmodern world, one should consider the montage of
the film’s narrator traveling on the job. The film introduces “the
equation,” an algorithm using three variables to estimate settlement
costs of faulty car parts. If the costs of settlement are lower than the
cost to recall flawed cars, no recall is performed. The mechanic
actually at work under this veil of corporate villainy is the reduction of
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Reasoning and Evidence
What is the claim? What evidence
from the film and various outside
sources does the writer use? How
well do the examples used in the
first major section, “Consumerism
as a Lifestyle, Commodification as
Common Practice,” support the
claim?
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human life to a number--precisely, a dollar amount. The prevalence of
this postmodern symptom is brought up in Felluga’s overview of
exchange-value:
According to Karl Marx, the entrance into capitalist
culture meant that we ceased to think of purchased goods in
terms of use-value, in terms of the real uses to which an
item will be put. Instead, everything began to be translated
into how much it is worth, into what it can be exchanged
for (its exchange-value). Once money became a “universal
equivalent,” against which everything in our lives is
measured, things lost their material reality (real-world uses,
the sweat and tears of the laborer). We began even to think
of our own lives in terms of money rather than in terms of
the real things we hold in our hands: how much is my time
worth? How does my conspicuous consumption define me
as a person? (74, underlining added for emphasis)
In this sense, the understanding of life as a dollar amount is
symptomatic of modern capitalist culture, similar to the effect of
consumerism, wherein one’s worth is translated into the monetary values
or those commodities they have purchased. Not surprisingly, this point is
summed up nicely as the narrator reflects, in his skewed perspective, as
he waits for his luggage in an airport terminal: “I had everything in that
suitcase: my CK shirts, my DKNY shoes, my A|X ties . . . .”
terrorist of the food service industry,” Fight Club provides viewers
with a stance against consumerism. Primarily, we encounter Tyler’s
rebellious acts: splicing pornography into children’s films, befouling
banquet food with urine, etc. If he were asked the reasons for these
choices, he could potentially quote the logic of Michel Foucault, who
said “the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power
relations, and the ‘agonism’ between power relations and the
intransivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all
social existence” (218). Spouting catch phrases like “Selfimprovement is masturbation,” Durden is a vigilante against
corporate corruption, a sort of anti-hero for the disenfranchised.
The movie initially gives him latitude to convert mindless
consumers with his appealing brand of misbehavior. When a police
officer speaks with the narrator on the telephone about the explosion
that destroyed his condominium, Tyler repeatedly interjects his spin:
NARRATOR. Who would go and do such a thing?
DETECTIVE. I’ll ask the questions.
TYLER. Tell him. Tell him the liberator who destroyed
my property has realigned my perceptions. . . .
DETECTIVE. Have you recently made enemies with
anyone who might have access to homemade
dynamite?
NARRATOR. Enemies?
TYLER. Reject the basic assumptions of civilization,
especially the importance of material possessions! . . .
NARRATOR. Yes, it’s very serious. Look, no one takes
this more seriously than me--that condo was my life!
Rise and Fall of Rebellion
After the film’s narrator has been introduced to the character of
Tyler Durden, a soap salesman, projectionist, and so-called “guerrilla
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Rhetorical Appeals
What kinds of appeals does the
writer use—logos, ethos, pathos?
Which appeal predominates?
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Ok? I loved every stick of furniture in that place. That
was not just a bunch of stuff that got destroyed. It was
me!
DETECTIVE. Is this not a good time for you?
TYLER. Just tell him you f***ing did it! Tell him you
blew it all up; that’s what he wants to hear. . . .
While the narrator still plays the part of the devoted consumer (“I
loved every stick of furniture in that place. That was not just a bunch
of stuff that got destroyed. It was me!”), we see that Tyler exerts
influence on him. When the narrator realizes he is a suspect for the
crime, he accepts Tyler’s pseudo-wisdom even more readily. Later,
after we (and, concurrently, the narrator) realize that he did, in fact,
destroy his own condominium, we might assume that the movie
suggests this extreme rejection of consumer principles is a viable
reaction to the rampant cultural commodification individuals face.
When Tyler says we have become “slaves with white collars,” adding
“advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate, so
we can buy s*** we don’t need,” we want to believe his alternative
will change it all.
However, Fight Club undercuts this notion. Especially toward the
end of the film, we see signs that Tyler Durden’s vision is not the
perfect solution to all of postmodernism’s problems. First, we have
Tyler’s “you are not your job” monologue. It echoes all of his previous
condemnations of consumerism: “you are not how much money you
have in the bank,” and “you are not your car.” At the end of the
sequence, though, there is a strange occurrence. The frame blurs and
shakes, and as it shifts, we can see around the film, noticing the edges
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of the frame, the reel tracks, and the light behind it. We are informed
that, although Tyler speaks to us of shirking our reality of
consumerism, it is through one branch of this reality, the mass media-the motion picture industry--that Tyler speaks to us. While he claims to
be above and outside this realm of capitalist consumer concerns, he is,
on the contrary, directly in the middle of it. It is essentially the same
contradiction as in Linda Hutcheon’s discussion on metafiction, where
she notes “it always works within conventions in order to subvert
them” (5). Here, the film has chosen to make viewers aware of Tyler’s
complicity with movie in order to question his reliability.
Further, as the development of Project Mayhem continues to
expand the role of the “Fight Club” (this, the entity inside the
movie), it becomes more apparent that Tyler Durden is unable to
escape the ideology of consumerism. In Louis Althusser’s discussion
on ideology, he is able to point out that although individuals may
wish to be outside systems of ideology, this is an impossibility (246).
His understanding of how one acts in contradiction to ideology--“As
is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to
others, never to oneself” (246)--is remarkably similar to how Tyler
Durden treats the members of his Fight Club; while Tyler seeks to
cure disillusioned men from “false consciousness” (borrowing a
phrase from the Marxists), he is yet still caught in the commercial
ideology himself.
So, what would Fight Club have us believe? Is there hope of
escape from the lurking commodification of our culture? . . .
Essentially, no; only awareness. Continuing with Althusser, the
subjectivity of individuals is inherent: “Before its birth, the child is
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Effectiveness
Do you find the argument effective? Why or why not?
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therefore always already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by
the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is ‘expected’
once it has been conceived.” This trait subjects us to the ideologies of
the culture in which we live. As Althusser summarizes, “I only wish to
point out that you and I are always already subjects, and as such
constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition, which
guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual,
distinguishable, and (naturally) irreplaceable subjects” (245). In this
context, we see that Fight Club admits we are all a part of the
postmodern consumerist tradition, just as Tyler Durden remained a
part, but it strives to make us aware of the condition. Although
Althusser acknowledges the rarity with which individuals can
consciously state “I am in ideology” (246), I argue this is precisely the
conclusion Fight Club wants its viewers to reach. According to
popular postmodern theory, though we might currently be unable to
alter the ideological structures within which we live, awareness is a
prerequisite of change. Although David Fincher’s Fight Club may not
have all the answers, it certainly has the presence to lay bare some of
the central issues of the postmodern condition. If viewers can read
between the lines (or perhaps, more accurately, see between the
frames), they will be able to learn a great deal more about the
commodification of our culture and the ideology of consumerism than
the majority of contemporary film has ever attempted to communicate.
Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”
Critical Theory since 1965. Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle.
Tallahassee: U Presses of Florida, 1986.
Felluga, Dino. “The Matrix: Paradigm of Postmodernism or
Intellectual Poseur? (Part I).” Taking the Red Pill: Science,
Philosophy and Religion in “The Matrix.” Ed. Glenn Yeffeth.
Dallas: Ben Bella, 2003.
Foucault, Michel. “The Subject of Power.” Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics. 2nd ed. By Hubert L. Dreyfus
and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory,
Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
Z̆îz̆ek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the
Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.
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