Escape into the Future: Cultural Pessimism and its Religious Dimension in Contemporary American Popular Culture

Chapter 4 God's Unwanted: Fight Club and the Myth of "Total Revolution"

87 Chapter 4 God’s Unwanted: Fight Club and the Myth of “Total Revolution” “Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer. . . . Maybe self-destruction is the answer.” —Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club “We are God’s unwanted children. So be it!” —Tyler Durden, Fight Club Introduction—Illegimate Children Many Americans do not fit into any of the ironic categories thus far described. Instead, an ironic rage fills them that has neither official rhyme nor corporate reason. It seeks the destruction of the given order, perhaps with the ghost of primeval hunter-gatherer life hovering in the air. But this too is illusory, both in empirical politics and in compensatory fantasies that may mislead the unaware into taking their narrative universes literally. Thus the protagonist in the sensational film Fight Club at least seems irrevocably to abandon even the nostalgic ideal of reintegration into bourgeois normality and instead cultivates rage, frustration, and fantasies of the utter destruction of the entire economic and security apparatus. And for good reason: he initially suffers from insomnia, enslavement to corporate consumerism, and extreme deprivation of affect and vitality—in other words, from an extreme case of defective human agency— same song, different verse. The protagonist, however, passes into full-scale dissociative disorder and so makes contact with what remains of his will and his libido—and with it a growing group of similarly deprived followers who, once awakened from their zombie-like existence, dream of replacing drone society with clan-like groups based on primal instincts of male bonding. 88 Escape into the Future Those bonds are cemented by savage initiation rites centered on ritualized physical violence and brutality. So do the followers regain contact with human passion and human boundaries, all shown as retrievable on the individual and immediately interpersonal level. But in so doing, intoxicated by the rush of feeling and sense of empowerment, they abruptly blossom into a nihilistic movement that wanders off course, misunderstands the nonpublic point of experiential violence in a society where all sexes are castrated, and ultimately passes into fascist overdrive as its stored-up rage finally erupts to the untoward and unanticipated end of senseless violence provoking ever greater violence, all the while losing sight of the underlying, original sociocultural concerns. Far from being a threat, however, this film and the novel behind it suggest that real revolt can result only in sustained episodes of individual and collective delusion. The power of the film is only enhanced when the further realization dawns that the despair of Fight Club leads only to an exhilarating re-creation of the carnivalesque feasts of misrule that once served as safety valves and fantasy leveling tools in premodern society—a kind of re-creation of the feast of fools for contemporary purposes. In short: the compensatory fantasy of anarchy and the empirical retreat from real reform and real revolution are the message here. Yet the whole business simultaneously suggests the limitless capacity of Americans for combining despair with reasons for hope. Fight Club: The Protagonist[s] and the Plot[s] The protagonist of the work is—at least in his “normal” life—essentially nameless: “Jack,” as he comes to be known, works for a major automobile manufacturer. He must estimate product liability totals for particular models in order to decide (on purely financial grounds) whether a recall is advisable . Oppressed by job and boss, increasingly washed out due to chronic insomnia, isolated from companions of all ages and sexes,1 he takes refuge in high-end, upper-middlebrow yuppie consumerism (such as Ikea) in order to pin down an otherwise fleeting sense of identity. The plot of the work centers around Jack’s search for a good night’s sleep and some reality of existence, some satisfaction in life, some capacity to register feelings. Increasingly troubled by insomnia, although basically healthy, he becomes a nightly “tourist” at emotionally charged support groups for the severely ill or disabled. There he poses as a victim (sometimes under the name Cornelius) to gain recognition and sympathy from others and to bring repressed emotions to the surface. They emerge only in the cry-and-hug-on-command sessions God’s Unwanted 89 that conclude each group meeting. Only with this release (otherwise denied) can he sleep and ward off his growing tendency toward waking hallucinations, a release all the more important as conventional healthcare professionals fail to take him seriously. Even this solace, however, is...