David Fincher (dir.), Fight Club (1999 film)

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  • Jeanne Hamming. "The Feminine 'Nature' of Masculine Desire in the Age of Cinematic Techno-Transcendence." JPF&T—Journal of Popular Film and Television 35.4 (Winter 2008):146-153. download
  • Goodlad, Lauren M. E. "Looking for Something Forever Gone: Gothic Masculinity, Androgyny, and Ethics at the Turn of the Millennium." Cultural Critique 66 (Spring 2007):104-126. PROJECT MUSE or download
  • Abstract: "In this essay I describe two popular modes of gothic masculinity as a prelude to discussing recent theories of gender. Over the past twenty years or so, gothic narratives of masculinity have had a noticeable impact on mainstream youth culture. In the 1980s and early 1990s such narratives were visibly influenced by goth, a subculture that emerged from Anglo-American punk music in the late 1970s and, since that time, has provided stylistic and cultural alternatives to youth of both sexes in many countries. Nonetheless, gothic nar-ratives of masculinity resonate beyond the limits of a particular subculture. Indeed, such narratives have been germinating ever since the culture of the Enlightenment began to impose new and deeply gendered understandings of heterosexual coupling, reproductive difference, and ethical dividedness onto the Western experience of modernity. The gothic narratives I describe in this essay obsessively rehearse a male desire for completion, dramatized by a male experience of pain. Such narratives, I suggest, are motivated by a desire for androgyny, a term that in recent feminist..."
  • Dussere, Erik . "Out of the Past, Into the Supermarket: CONSUMING FILM NOIR." Film Quarterly 60.1 (Fall 2006):16-27. download
  • Ta, Lynn M. "Hurt So Good: Fight Club, Masculine Violence, and the Crisis of Capitalism." The Journal of American Culture 29.3 (Sep 2006):265-277. BLACKWELL SYNERGY or download
  • Elliot, Paul. "The First Rule is…. Images and Reflections of the Rhizome in Fight Club." Postgraduate English 12 (September 2005). read online
  • Rehling, Nicola. All and Nothing: White Heterosexual Masculinity in Contemporary Popular Cinema. Dissertation. 2005. read online
  • Per Serritslev Petersen. "9/11 and the ‘Problem of Imagination’: Fight Club and Glamorama as Terrorist Pretexts." Orbis Litterarum 60 (2005): 133–144. download
  • Stirling, Kirsten. "'Dr Jekyll and Mr Jackass': Fight Club as a Refraction of Hogg's Justified Sinner and Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde," pp. 83-94. Onega, Susana (ed. and introd.) and Gutleben, Christian (ed. and introd.). Refracting the Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2004. (IBIT: ang 657.1 CP 1391)
  • Redd, Adrienne. "Masculine Identity in the Service Class: An Analysis of Fight Club", 2004. read online
  • Westerfelhaus, Robert and Robert Alan Brookey. "At the unlikely confluence of conservative religion and popular culture: fight club as heteronormative ritual." Text and Performance Quarterly 24.3-4 (July 2004):302-326. download
  • Abstract: "We argue that, in campaigning against homosexuality, political and religious conservatives benefit from the familiarizing heteronormative discourse of the very culture against which they have declared war. To illustrate, we offer an analysis of David Fincher's Fight Club in which we show how the film's narrative is structured around a quasireligious ritual that reaffirms heterosexuality at the expense of homosexuality. This ritual, informed by Freud's Oedipal myth, takes the form of a tripartite rite of passage that provides the film's core audience temporary liminal license to explore the homoerotic attraction that lies just beneath the film's celebration of homosocial bonding."
  • Gold, Steven N. "Fight Club: A Depiction of Contemporary Society as Dissociogenic." Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 5.2 (7/13/2004):13-14.
  • Abstract: "It is argued that a major theme of the novel and film Fight Club is that contemporary technological society fosters dissociative modes of experience. Examples are provided of how the content and style of Fight Club are designed to convey the detachment from subjective experience, interpersonal disconnectedness and fragmented sense of self fostered by influences such as consumerism, technology, and rapid mobility. In this way Fight Club illustrates how social, cultural and interpersonal forces can promote sub-clinical and even normative forms of dissociation that, although less extreme, qualitatively approximate floridly pathological manifestations of dissociation. This perspective helps to de-marginalize dissociation, fostering appreciation of the continuity between its non-pathological and clinical manifestations."
  • Grønstad, Asbjørn. "One-Dimensional Men: Fight Club and the Poetics of the Body." Film Criticism 28.1 (2003): 1-13. download
  • Excerpt: " We can also read representations of consciousness, self-consciousness, articulacy and inarticulacy in men's texts as claims about men's subjectivity, and examine them for consequent aporias.
    (Peter Middleton)
    One of the most memorable performances of masculine bravado in classical Hollywood cinema occurs in John Ford's "Irish" epic The Quiet Man (1952), in which the character of Sean Thornton (John Wayne) instigates a mock fistfight with his brother-in-law Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen). As the two men pummel each other around haystacks, streams, and hillsides, even stopping for a pint at a nearby pub, they seem to respect what I believe is the seventh rule of Fight Club: "fights will go on as long as they have to." Conceptually as well as rhetorically, this particular sequence from Ford's movie comes across in retrospect as a narrative blueprint for the masochistic spectacle of excessive corporeality which constitutes the centerpiece of David Fincher's visceral tour de force. Though Gavin Smith has proclaimed it "the first film of the next century" (58), Fight Club may also be appreciated as the logical culmination and synopsis of a century-long discourse in American arts and letters on the meaning and substance of violence and masculinity. The notion of split subjectivities which undergirds Fincher's narration exteriorizes the schizophrenia afflicting the male protagonist of countless Hollywood fictions. Fight Club lays bare the identificational rift that has remained implicit or unpresentable in preceding exhibitions of violent masculinity. From Scarface's Camonte to Reservoir Dogs's Mr. White, the characters' perspective has tended to be that of Fight Club's Tyler Durden, and the constructedness of this fantasy is rendered explicit by Fincher's film. One of the reasons that makes Fight Club such a landmark event in the cinema of violence is that it represents the acme of a tradition in which the awareness of the artificiality and performativity of this violent Other has emerged only slowly and tentatively.
    As both a practice and a sign, violence in Fight Club is poised between being and nothingness. "You just had a near-life experience," Tyler Durden tells Jack after he has poured an acid solution on the latter's wrist, thus implying a conflation of the particular mode of pain and the general mode of existence. Unwittingly, the Durden persona formulates an ethical philosophy that in some respects is indebted to Levinas' postulation that suffering implies "the impossibility of nothingness" because pain means to be "directly exposed to being" (40). For the characters in Fincher's film, the experience of agency..."
  • Nelson, John S. "Four Forms for Terrorism. Horror, Dystopia, Thriller, and Noir." Poroi 2.1 (August 2003). read online
  • Friday, Krister. "'A Generation of Men Without History': Fight Club, Masculinity, and the Historical Symptom". Postmodern Culture 13.3 (May 2003). download
  • Abstract: "There is a brief but suggestive moment in Chuck Palahiuk's popular novel, Fight Club, in which the first-person, unnamed narrator describes how Tyler Durden splices tiny pornographic frames into film reels. In the scene (dramatized in David Fincher's largely faithful cinematic adaptation of the novel), the narrator describes how Tyler, working as a projectionist at a public theater, comes to splice the image of an erection into a family film: You're a projectionist and you're tired and angry, but mostly you're bored so you start by taking a single frame of pornography collected by some other projectionist that you find stashed away in the booth, and you splice this frame of a lunging red penis or a yawning wet vagina close-up into another feature movie. This is one of those pet adventures, when the dog and the cat are left behind by a traveling family and must find their way home. In reel three, just after the dog and cat, who have human voices and talk to each other, have eaten out of a garbage can, there's the flash of an erection. Tyler does this. (29-30) Significant in its brevity, this recollected scene comes as close as any in encapsulating Fight Club's narrative logic and its complex, imaginative imbrication of identity and historical..."
  • Palladino, P. and T. Young. "Fight Club and the World Trade Center: On Metaphor, Scale, and the Spatio-temporal (Dis)location of Violence." Journal for Cultural Research 7.2 (April 2003):195-218. download
  • Abstract: "In this essay we examine the metaphorical rendition of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, which took place on 11 September 2001, as attacks on "civilization." Our principal aim is to understand how it has proven to be as affective as it seems to have been thus far. We do so by turning to film, a medium that is quintessentially metaphorical and whose own affective power rests on the reconfiguration of time and space. More specifically, we do so by turning to David Fincher's Fight Club (1999). In contrast to the textual approach offered by Slavoj Zizek (2002), we explore how the formal play of different temporal and spatial scales, which would articulate a trenchant critique of alienation, in fact reproduces an understanding of the subject that is deeply complicit with capital. The play of time and space, on which the affective power of the film rests, articulates a rejection of the fundamentally schizophrenic nature of the subject of capital. Our claim is that this exploration of time, space, and political critique illuminates how the elisions of the historical and geo-political that characterize the metaphorical rendition of the attacks on New York and Washington might easily be overlooked. This essay also advances our more general understanding of both the articulation of time and space within the dominant form of metaphorical representation and how this enacts and consolidates a particular politics."
  • Kusz, Kyle W. "Audio-Visual Review: Fight Club and the Art/Politics of White Male Victimization and Reflexive Sadomasochism." International Review for the Sociology of Sport 37.3-4 (2002):465-470. download
  • Lee, Terry. "Virtual Violence in Fight Club: This Is What Transformation of Masculine Ego Feels Like." The Journal of American Culture 25.3-4 (2002):418–423. download
  • Clark, J. Michael. "Faludi, Fight Club, and Phallic Masculinity: Exploring the Emasculating Economics of Patriarchy." The Journal of Men's Studies 11.1 (Fall 2002):65-76.
  • Abstract 1: "Both Susan Faludi's Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (text) and the film Fight Club (image) insist that men have been emasculated by consumerism; that the post-war legacy of the so-called good life has shifted men from active, heroic, confrontational roles into the passive, ornamental roles usually assigned to women; and that, without a Great Depression, or Great War, or any other dragon to slay, emasculated men have become imprisoned in their job cubicles and possessed by their possessions, often with not only negative, but even violent repercussions. Ecofeminism and ecotheology provide the tools for better understanding this idolatrous false god of consumerism, as well as for beginning to explore how the economics of plenty affect seemingly privileged men. Importantly, however, this study does not further privilege the already privileged, but seeks instead to understand how the globalizing economy negatively impacts both the human poor and the nonhuman ecosystems which altogether constitute our fragile planet (including population growth and environmental racism). Finally, the essay pushes beyond deconstructive criticism to explore "green" alternatives—at once returning to the masculinity/economics issues in popular culture, insisting on the need for both an economic theory and a value system that do not reduce all value to monetary terms, and seeking a renewed commitment to relational justice in ecosystemic communities. Here, Faludi and Fight Club part company, the latter focusing not on community but upon the heterosexist isolationism and individualism which others argue is a symptom, perhaps even a cause, and certainly not the solution for our current economic and environmental woes."
  • Abstract 2: "The article explores the economics of patriarchy based on the book "Stiffed, the Betrayal of the American Man," by Susan Faludi and the film "Fight Club." It insists that men have been emasculated by consumerism; that the post-war legacy of the so-called good life has shifted men from active, heroic, confrontational roles into the passive, ornamental roles usually assigned to women; and that, without a Great Depression, or Great War, or any other dragon to slay, emasculated men have become imprisoned in their job cubicles and possessed by their possessions, often with not only negative, but even violent repercussions. Ecofeminism and ecotheology provide the tools for better understanding this idolatrous false god of consumerism, as well as for beginning to explore how the economics of plenty affect seemingly privileged men. Importantly, however, this study does not further privilege the already privileged, but seeks instead to understand how the globalizing economy negatively impacts both the human poor and the nonhuman ecosystems which altogether constitute our fragile planet (including population growth and environmental racism)."
  • Brookey, Robert Alan and Robert Westerfelhaus. "Hiding homoeroticism in plain view: the Fight Club DVD as digital closet". Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.1 (March 2002):21-43.
  • Abstract: "The DVD format has emerged as the dominant digital means of repackaging films for home consumption. In this essay, we theorize this new viewing experience and identify some of the challenges it poses for the media critic. We argue that the additional material DVDs typically offer, coupled with the format's interactivity, constitute a rhetorically powerful means of directing the consumer's viewing experience and protecting the commercial viability of the product. To illustrate, we offer a critical analysis of the DVD release of the controversial film Fight Club . Our analysis suggests that Fight Club 's DVD "extra text" dissuades the viewer from acknowledging the film's homoerotic elements as representing homosexual experience."
  • Deacy, Christopher. "Integration and Rebirth through Confrontation: Fight Club and American Beauty as Contemporary Religious Parables." Journal of Contemporary Religion 17.1 (January 2002):61 - 73. download
  • Abstract: "This article discusses the religious significance of two recent American films which raise pertinent questions about the nature and quality of human existence, its anxieties and aspirations, at the turn of the millennium. Both David Fincher's Fight Club and Sam Mendes's American Beauty wrestle with the efficacy of confrontation as a means of attaining redemption from the disconnectedness and estrangement that characterise the lives of the protagonists in each of these pictures. The import that the trajectories of the characters have for the film audience will also be examined, insofar as the films are accredited by some viewers with helping to facilitate a remedy to the malaise and disaffection in their lives, which the protagonists exemplify."
  • Giroux, Henry A., and Imre Szeman. "Ikea Boy Fights Back: Fight Club, Consumerism, and the Political Limits of Nineties Cinema." Lewis, Jon, ed. The End of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties. London: Pluto, 2002. 95-104.
  • Henry A. Giroux. "Breaking into the Movies: Pedagogy and the Politics of Film." JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 21.3 (2001):583-598. download
  • Giroux, Henry A. "Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders: "Fight Club," Patriarchy, and the Politics of Masculine Violence." JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 21.1 (Winter 2001):1-31. read online at Henry A. Giroux's website
  • Abstract: "Analyzes the narrative structure of the film "Fight Club," addressing its critique of consumerism and its celebration of masculinity. Addresses the representational politics that structure the movie, especially its deeply conventional views of violence, gender relations, and masculinity. Considers the role that "Fight Club" and other cultural texts might play as public pedagogies that can be read against themselves. (PM)"
  • Hoss, T. "Machismo as societal criticism: 'American Beauty', 'Fight Club', The 'Sea-Wolf'." ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ANGLISTIK UND AMERIKANISTIK, 49.4 (2001):350-360.
  • Crowdus, Gary "Home Video: Getting Exercised Over 'Fight Club'." Cineaste - America's Leading Magazine on the Art and Politics of the Cinema 25.4 (September 2000):46-48. download

Debate

  • On Chuck Palahniuk's novel:
  • Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential Literature 2.2 (Fall/Winter 2005). read online
  • WVU-CMU Colloquium, March 2000: "A Two-Headed Monster: Sadomasochism and the Specularity of the Male Body in Fight Club"
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