A Marxist Analysis of ‘Fight Club’
The movie Fight Club directed by David Fincher is a 1999 drama about two men who form an underground club and fight other men with similar hopeless outlooks on lives while abiding by strict orders and rules from the club. The movie was adapted from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel. Fight Club is a significant movie to analyze with the use of Marxist criticism as the movie’s plot mirrors American values and exemplifies how people attempt to fill voids in their lives through consuming materials and earthly possessions. Marxist criticism argues that, “everything is shaped, ultimately, by the economic system of a society” as well as the idea that, “Capitalism is not only an economic system but also something that affects attitudes, values, personality types, and culture in general” (Ott & Mack). In this paper, I argue that the movie Fight Club signifies how our modern society is consumed with material products rather than fulfilling oneself mentally, attempting to overcome alienation, and signifying how the five mass media filters can be applied to how our modern society operates.
In the movie Fight Club, a depressed insomniac attends a myriad of random support groups to subdue his mental state. In one of these groups he meets a woman named Marla who is also a fake attendee of support groups. Marla seems to make his emotional state a little better, but when he meets a strange soap salesman named Tyler Durden, everything changes. When the nameless man’s perfect apartment is destroyed, he finds himself living with Tyler in his run down house that gives him a new perspective on how other people live their lives. Tyler and the man couldn’t be more opposite, but together they form an underground club for bare-knuckle fighting. The group grows and creates more and more of these secret fight clubs start to appear. The clubs begin to take on an anti-capitalist and terroristic attitude, and when Tyler and Maria grow closer and start to leave the man on the outskirts while the group spirals out of control, he knows he must find a way out.
Fight Club shows how our society is consumed with material products and places extreme value on the possessions that one collects throughout their lives. An example of this is when the narrator’s perfect apartment explodes. At the beginning of the movie, the narrator is depicted as a cog in the system of society. He takes pride in his appearance and his possessions, but everything changes when his apartment is destroyed. Since he placed extreme value on his apartment since he worked so hard for it, it felt as though his whole life was over. This signifies a typical Marxist idea that the ruling class (in this case, typical American ideals) convince the working class that they must slave their life away in order to afford everyday material things. Blackwell states, “the social world in a manifestation of the material conditions that exist at that particular moment” (Ott & Mack). Since the “ruling class” convince the working class to believe their ideology of spending your life working to afford material possessions, the loss of the narrators apartment exemplified extreme loss of not just the material itself but also a significant portion of his personal identity. When he moves into Tyler’s house, the narrator begins to rethink his way of life. In Tyler, he sees a freedom that he has never experienced in his own life. Tyler lives in a run down house with no restraints and nobody controlling him. Tyler owns very few material possessions, and yet he experiences more freedom from the tethers of society than the narrator ever thought was possible. This observation gives the narrator the power to join Tyler in starting the fight club as a way to fight back against the society that has ultimately failed him.
In Fight Club, the narrator must attempt to overcome alienation throughout the plot. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts states that alienation is shown through the idea that one’s work is, “external to the worker, that it is not a part of his nature, that consequently he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself…his work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour” (Marx, 1844). The idea that the fight club was created upon was a way for capitalist workers to get away from the stress and emotions of their life. Marx states that alienation from one’s work is proven because, “as soon as there is no physical or other compulsion it is avoided like the plague” (Marx, 1844). The narrator grows more aware of his alienation he experiences in his past life after he associates himself with Tyler. Tyler describes their generation as slaves who are, “working jobs they hate, just so they can buy shit they don’t really need” (Fight Club). The narrator begins to understand that his life before Tyler exemplified how the bourgeoisie expect the working class to live their lives. He and Tyler enjoy the rebelliousness of the act of fighting, but the fight club’s unified rebellion ultimately results in what repeated alienation and loss of faith in society turns into: a revolutionary group.
Marxist analysis explains how in our modern society, there are five mass media filters. These filters are, “ownership, advertising, establishing management and control, flack, and anti-(communism, socialism, terrorism)” (Ott & Mack). The idea of ownership means that large corporations and companies typically own many smaller corporations and censor the corporations that they own to protect the interests of the large corporation. The second filter is advertising, “as advertising funds media for audiences, the media sells you to advertisers as a product” (Ott & Mack). Establishing management and control means that the system we live in, “encourages complicity- push back and get pushed out” (Ott & Mack). For anyone who does push back, they experience flack. This is when, “they are discredited and viewers attention is diverted elsewhere: (Ott & Mack). The final filter is the “creation of a common enemy, aids in diversion and re-setting of the narrative” (Ott & Mack). The fight club itself shows the result of these filters at work through the use of strict rules that everyone in the club must abide by. This club, that was once a rebellion against the society that turned its back on its members, has become exactly what it set out to destroy. The club begins to use strategies that contradict Marxist theory. Durden names his army “space monkeys”, alienating them from their new rebellion work and turns them into numbers like they were in their capitalist job. Durden has complete power over the space monkeys, and if they push back then they get pushed out. They must follow all the strict rules of the club, just as they would have to follow obeys in their regular jobs.
Fight Club shows that people don’t need to follow the capitalist society, however they don’t need to follow the order of an anti-capitalist society either. The movie shows that the working class does in fact have invisible power over the bourgeoisie minority. The proletariat have the ability to revolutionize the society in which they reside in. The movie is significant to American culture by providing a hypothetical in which the working class take back the power that the minority government has taken away from them. It gives power back to the majority of society, and shows that the ruling class is not eternal. There is an alternative, and the ruling class can’t obtain the ruling ideas of a society as long as we as a society reject their capitalist notions.
