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Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume 4
Fall 2005
By Frankie Dintino
Mr. Dintino's contention about the significance of Fight Club 's finale is also partially tied to his neglect of the film's chauvinism, in addition to some hopeful projecting on his part. He concludes, "[T]he ending of the film suggests [that] fascism can be overcome internally." Describing and analyzing the final scene, when the credit card buildings crumble, he writes:
[Jack and his lover, Marla] hold hands in a silhouette against a backdrop of collapsing buildings, juxtaposing love and destruction. This makes for a powerful scene, and though the conclusion is left open, it is suggested that - with Tyler gone and the Blackshirts out of the picture - love will win out over death, and something new will be built in the wake of the film's destruction.
Tyler and the Blackshirts are the least of anyone's problems by the end of the film. The debt record has supposedly been wiped out, which Mr. Dintino writes "would have far-reaching consequences." Are those consequences necessarily good, though? The author seems to envisage the finale as the commencement of the realization of some vague anarchist dream, imagining that, in chaos, we will come together just as Jack and Marla have - that "love will win out over death." But Mr. Dintino also writes that there is uncertainty as to whether Jack and Marla's relationship will survive. That is an understatement when considering Marla's recent discovery that Jack was schizophrenic for their entire relationship until that point, and that the man who made love to her has essentially gone the way of Tyler Durden. This does not seem to matter much to her, which makes sense, for their "love" is incredibly shallow; Jack has undergone so much self-discovery while Marla has remained a static freak prop who seems to be lucid at the end only because the focus is supposed to be on the crashing edifices. The symbolic value of their touching hands is thus meaningless because of the story's sexism. Also, even with Jack's "defeat" of Tyler , he is still unable to stop the buildings from collapsing; fascism is not, in fact, overcome internally. Before the Blackshirts disappear, their goal is set in motion and achieved. The viewer is only given Jack's perspective of the collapsing buildings, and has no idea what it must look and feel like for people on the ground, the rest of society in this "socially relevant" film. In his conclusion, Mr. Dintino offers optimistic reasons for why college-age males like Fight Club . Personally, I have never heard a fan of the film discuss "the end of history," "control society," or "the institution of debt," but maybe those topics resonate in an ineffable way for most people. It will be nice if the destruction is eventually of a creative kind, as Mr. Dintino believes, but one might just as easily see the finale as a prequel to Battlefield Earth.
The title of this publication is the reason I have concentrated on problematic aspects of Mr. Dintino's paper. This commentary could easily have been an encomium to the author's skill at communicating the significance of most theories he discusses; to his analysis of the way in which language is used (or not) in the fight club and why; and to his connection between the "theatre of cruelty" and the rebirth of history in the film, among many other excellent features. Doing that, however, would have merely merited a thank-you note from Mr. Dintino, not a meaningful response to continue a dialogue in which I am proud to participate.
Response
Frankie Dintino
The film Fight Club has offered up an uncharacteristically wide array of divergent interpretations for a film of its popularity and budget. These readings range from Diken and Lausten's analysis of the Zizekian implications of the film to Terry Lee's analysis of the film's portrayal of psychology vis-à-vis gender roles . The former of these focuses on the political and ignores the psychological, while the latter commits the reverse error. My paper, for its part, falls into the first camp: it views the phenomena of the film through a historico-political lens. A corollary of this perspective is that the event ontologically precedes the subject. While this may explain my seeming ignorance to the film's misogyny, for instance, it still demands further explanation.