How Fight Club Left Me Punchy
by St. Clair Carr, literary editor, NEW IMPROVED HEAD
The movie version of Fight Club appeared recently in the multiplexes of North America. Although it hasn't, to my knowledge, exactly been pulling in the crowds, there has been much excited and polarized critical commentary about it.
The basic premise of Fight Club, of young men rebelling against the boredom of their lives by organizing groups in which they beat each other up, did seem to me to have promise. The crushing boredom of contemporary life is an important social phenomenon which is bound to have important consequences. So Fight Club seemed worth looking into. There was a catch, though.
The catch was that I don't go to the movies. The environment is unpleasant and the attempt at entertainment is usually perfunctory. And if you're over seventeen the movies are likely to leave you feeling unsatisfied. Just in case you think I'm one of those middle-aged farts whining that the movies ain't like they used to be, let me say that I have felt like this ever since I outgrew the movies, which was roughly about the time Moses was in the fire brigade. The few cinematic developments which have actually been interesting – the oeuvre of Mr. Run Run Shaw, for example – have been ruthlessly stifled by the multinational purveyor of crushing boredom that is Hollywood.
However, Fight Club first appeared on this earth as a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, so I got a copy of that. The first page, although miles over the top (with, as it turns out, good literary reason), did reveal that Mr. Palahniuk writes engagingly and compellingly, so I decided to read the rest of his book.
Fight Club is ostensibly about how two young men organize brawls to overcome the pointlessness of their feminized lives and end up developing their fight clubs into a violent nihilistic movement whose goal is the destruction of civilization. In the end the book turns out to have been about something else entirely, but the twist which leads to this realization is deftly handled. The writing, although considerably padded to eke the novel out to 200 pages, is interesting and accomplished, and would have been more so if Mr. Palahniuk's editor had not been asleep at the switch a few times. The plot is compelling. In the end, though, I felt cheated – in fact, I felt as if I had been conned.
The problem is that Fight Club is not about those themes I had been led to think it was about. It is in fact about nothing. It is a literary exercise whose point is not communication but the frustration of it. It is an exercise – a deliberate one, I am sure – in futility. As I said, Mr. Palahniuk writes engagingly and compellingly, and in Fight Club he skilfully engages both your intellect and your emotions. He impels you through the pages towards his conclusion. However, unlike the conclusion of We Think the World of You, a similarly compelling novel which is reviewed in another article on this site, the conclusion of Fight Club is not a brilliant resolution of the themes of the book but instead a revelation that the whole discussion of themes in the preceding 200 pages was a sham. Mr. Chuck Palahniuk has been toying with you.
Of course, there is nothing necessarily wrong with that. One of the only two movies I know of which might legitimately be called works of art, Buñuel's Belle de Jour, does the same thing. However, Belle de Jour plays its version of this game with far more skill than Mr. Palahniuk.
By an adroit juxtaposition of contradictory scenes Belle de Jour raises important points about the role of the artist and of the consumer of art. Fight Club, on the other hand, employs a highly consistent and homogeneous narrative to demonstrate that Chuck Palahniuk has been wasting your time. The themes he raises all turn out in the end to have been red herrings.
I cannot go into much detail about the actual mechanics of this accomplishment of Mr. Palahniuk's without betraying his story. To be fair, in this, his first novel, Mr. Palahniuk demonstrates obvious talent. Furthermore, Fight Club is a highly engaging story, and I did enjoy reading it. As I sped through the pages (it's an easy read), my mind excitedly speculated about such things as (ahem) the status of the narrative (for example, whether or not it was meant to be read as if it were a report of things that actually happened) and the parallels of developments in the book with fascism (a comparison which Mr. Palahniuk clearly wants you to make). Of course the result of all this speculation was that at the end of the book my mind felt as if it had been kicked in the nuts, but then perhaps that's the effect a book so obsessed with violence should leave you with. Perhaps that was the point of Mr. Palahniuk's joke.
Nevertheless, the ending just left a bad taste in my mouth. Fight Club is the literary equivalent of amphetamines. It gives you an exciting rush, but afterward you come down extremely hard. Good people: speed kills, and if you read a lot of books like Fight Club eventually the frustration will kill your brain.
[P. S.: The other movie I know for which an argument could be made that it's a work of art is Barbara Kopple's Harlan County U. S. A.]For a great article about a real fight, click here. How Fight Club Left Me Punchy © John FitzGerald, 1999
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