The End Of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties

9. Ikea Boy Fights Back: Fight Club, Consumerism, and the Political Limits of Nineties Cinema

9 Ikea Boy Fights Back Fight Club, Consumerism, and the Political Limits of Nineties Cinema Henry A. Giroux and Imre Szeman IF IT HAS now become easier to imagine the end of the earth and of nature than the end of capitalism, as Fredric Jameson has argued in The Seeds of Time, it is due in large part to the redoubled efforts of a global, neoliberal capitalism.1 The breathless rhetoric of the global victory of free market rationality spewed forth by the mass media, right-wing intellectuals , and governments alike has found its material expression in an all-out attack on democratic values and on the very notion of the public. In the discourse of neoliberalism, issues regarding persistent poverty, inadequate health care, racial apartheid in the inner cities, and the growing inequalities between the rich and the poor have been either removed from the inventory of public discourse and public policy or factored into talk show spectacles that highlight private woes bearing little relationship either to public life or to potential remedies that demand collective action. As the laws of the market take precedence over the laws of the state as guardians of the public good, the state increasingly offers little help in mediating the interface between the advance of capital and its rapacious commercial interests, on the one hand, and those noncommodi- fied interests and nonmarket spheres that create the political, economic, and social conditions vital for critical citizenship and democratic public life on the other. In the prevailing discourse of neoliberalism that has taken hold of the public imagination, there is no vocabulary for political or social transformation, no collective vision, no social agency to challenge the ruthless downsizing of jobs or resist the ongoing liquida95 tion of job security, no spaces from which to struggle against the elimination of benefits for people now hired on a strictly part-time basis. In the midst of this concerted attack on the public, the market-driven consumer juggernaut continues to mobilize desires in the interest of producing market identities and market relationships that ultimately appear as, in the words of Theodor Adorno, nothing less than “a prohibition on thinking itself.”2 It is this context of the 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 (1999) needs to be considered. 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. It seems to be opposed to capitalism and consumer culture in a direct way that is seldom if ever seen on the big screen in America, which is no doubt why the premiere of Fight Club was accompanied by an onslaught of reviews that celebrated it as a particularly daring example of social critique—the filmic equivalent of magazines like the Baffler or Adbusters , or even of the protests in Seattle, Washington, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.3 But Fight Club ultimately manages to offer a critique of the social and political conditions produced by contemporary capitalism only in a way that confirms capitalism’s worst excesses and legitimates its ruling narratives. Fight Club is, finally, less interested in critiquing 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. As much as the film invites cultural critics, art house sophisticates, and academics to read it against the grain, in the end, Fight Club has nothing substantive 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. Fight Club, along with films such as American Beauty (1999), Rogue Trader (1999), The Big Kahuna (1999), American Psycho (2000), and Boiler Room (2000), inaugurates a new subgenre of film narrative that combines a fascination with the spectacle of violence, enlivened through tired narratives about the crisis of masculinity, with a superficial gesture toward social critique designed to offer the tease of a serious inde96 HENRY A. GIROUX AND IMRE SZEMAN pendent...