CRITICAL APPROACHES 1 : Giroux ( anti-capitalism, gender)

We will be discussing the following article on Fight Club's response to  in our lesson on Friday.  Make sure you have looked at it and summarise your own response.


Giroux  full article



We will be exploring the following questions .




Do you think Fight Club can be classed as a radical or anti-capitalist film ?
If not, why not ?


Does Fight Club provide coherent and  inclusive  longterm solutions  to the problems caused by capitalism ? (  inequality, lack of workers rights, individualism, social breakdown, alienation)


Do you think Fight Club is simply an entertaining mainstream  film which just  pretends to deal with  major themes  such as masculinity in crisis , consumer culture and global capitalism or a subversive message which managed to be released to a wide audience ?


Does Fight Club's  use of cinematography , editing and sound   support serious discussion of its themes and  any messages the film has,  or prevent it from being taken seriously ?


Do you agree with all or any of Giroux's  main points ?






      GIROUX :   Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders:

Fight Club, Patriarchy, and the Politics of Masculine Violence

MAIN CRITICISMS


The ascendancy of neoliberalism and corporate culture into every aspect of American life not only consolidates economic power in the hands of the few, it also aggressively attempts to break the power of unions, decouple income from productivity, subordinate the needs of society to the market, and deem public services and amenities an unconscionable luxury. But it does more. It thrives on a culture of cynicism, boredom, and despair. Americans are now convinced that they have little to hope for--and gain from--the government, non-profit public spheres, democratic associations, or other non-governmental social forces.


It is against this ongoing assault on the public, and the growing preponderance of a free market economy and corporate culture that turns everything it touches into an object of consumption that David Fincher’s film, Fight Club, must be critically engaged. Ostensibly, Fight Club appears to offer a critique of late capitalist society and the misfortunes it generates out of its obsessive concern with profits, consumption, and the commercial values that underline its market driven ethos. But Fight Club is less interested in attacking the broader material relations of power and strategies of domination and exploitation associated with neoliberal capitalism than it is in rebelling against a consumerist culture that dissolves the bonds of male sociality and puts into place an enervating notion of male identity and agency.

 Contrary to the onslaught of reviews accompany the film’s premier that celebrated it as a daring social critique,Fight Club has nothing to say about the structural violence of unemployment, job insecurity, cuts in public spending, and the destruction of institutions capable of defending social provisions and the public good. On the contrary, Fight Clubdefines the violence of capitalism almost exclusively in terms of an attack on traditional (if not to say regressive) notions of masculinity, and in doing so reinscribes white, heterosexuality within a dominant logic of stylized brutality and male bonding that appears predicated on the need to denigrate and wage war against all that is feminine. In this instance, the crisis of capitalism is reduced to the crisis of masculinity, and the nature of the crisis lies less in the economic, political, and social conditions of capitalism itself than in the rise of a culture of consumption in which men are allegedly domesticated, rendered passive, soft and emasculated.

Rather than turning a critical light on crucial social problems, such films often trivialize them within a stylized aesthetics that revels in irony, cynicism, and excessive violence. Violence in these films is reduced to acts of senseless brutality, pathology, and an indifference to human suffering.


TYLER DURDEN

 Tyler represents the magnetism of the isolated, dauntless anti-hero whose public appeal is based on the attractions of the cult-personality rather than on the strengths of an articulated, democratic notion of political reform. Politics for Tyler is about doing, not thinking. As the embodiment of authoritarian masculinity and hyper individualism, Tyler cannot imagine a politics that connects to democratic movements, and is less a symbol of vision and leadership for the next millennium than a holdover of early-twentieth century fascism.



REPRESENTATIONS OF CLASS

Fight Club largely ignores issues surrounding the break up of labor unions, the slashing of the U.S. workforce, extensive plant closings, downsizing, outsourcing, the elimination of the welfare state, the attack on people of color, and the growing disparities between the rich and the poor. All of these issues get factored out of Fight Club’s analysis of consumerism and capitalist exploitation. Hence, it comes as no surprise that class as a critical category is non-existent in this film. When working class people do appear, they are represented primarily as brown shirts, part of the non-thinking herd looking for an opportunity to release their tensions and repressed masculine rage through forms of terrorist violence and self-abuse.

CAPITALISM , ETHNICITY AND CHOICE

There is one particularly revealing scene in Fight Club that brings this message home while simultaneously signaling a crucial element of the film’s politics. At one point in the story, Tyler takes Jack into a convenience store. He pulls out a gun and forces the young Indian clerk to get on his knees. Putting the gun to the clerk’s head, Tyler tells him he is going to die. As a kind of parting gesture, he then asks Raymond, the clerk, what he really wanted to be in life. A vetinarian, Raymond replies, but he had to drop out of school for lack of money. Tyler tells him that if he isn’t on his way to becoming a vetinarian in six weeks he is going to come back and kill him. He then lets Raymond go and tells Jack that tomorrow morning will be the most important day in Raymond’s life because he will have to address what it means to do something about his future. Choice for Tyler appears to be an exclusively individual act, a simple matter of personal will that functions outside of existing relations of power, resources, and social formations. As Homi Bhabha points out, this notion of agency "suggests that ‘free choice’ is inherent in the individual [and]...is based on an unquestioned ‘egalitarianism’ and a utopian notion of individualism that bears no relation to the history of the marginalized, the minoritized, the oppressed."¹⁹

CAPITALISM AND GENDER

Consumerism in Fight Club is criticized primarily as an ideological force and existential experience that weakens and domesticates men, robbing them of their primary role as producers whose bodies affirm and legitimate their sense of agency and control. The importance of agency is not lost on director David Fincher, but it is restricted to a narrowly defined notion of masculinity that is as self-absorbed as it is patriarchal.²¹ Fincher is less interested in fighting oppressive forms of power than he is in exploring the ways in which men yield to it.