With a detailed analysis of one or two Hollywood films, apply and evaluate the relative merits of two different approaches that you have studied this semester.

Fight Club tells a story of a young confused man tied up in a culture obsessed with as he puts it ‘Ikea’. He believes everything is single serving ‘single serving friends’ for example. When Norton one of many actors without an official stage name, meets his alter ego Tyler, he starts creating a life for himself and others that goes against our globalist society and the increasingly feminine man. To analysis these concepts more clearly the approaches of Marxism and Psychoanalytic theory can be used.

Fight club is essentially a film noir or neo noir. This genre is essentially a French term, which simply means ‘dark film’. For example in ‘fight club’ low-key lighting is especially used when the lead protagonists Norton is visiting group help meetings. Fight club follows the conventions of film noir by reflecting a particular mood of the time there is a continued theme throughout the film of a crisis in masculinity and a backlash against feminism. There is a constant need to fight to prove your strength and masculinity. It also has elements of the film, which allows it to be a counter culture attraction, i.e. against society. It is against the rat race seen with Norton turning up to work scruffy and bruised. This film is also against the increased level of consumerism in our lives. These two key elements can therefore be analysed and evaluated using a Marxist approach and a psychoanalytic approach.

Many Hollywood films follow a typical capitalist ideal, essentially the American dream. The harder you work the more you gain. What fight club does is go against the traditional capitalist role and develops the idea of a revolution to overthrow the elite and be recognised. Norton, the leading character, plans an attack on society, a rebellion against conformist culture; he quotes ‘the revolution.’ This is the essential precept of a Marxist society. Karl Marx suggested that ‘eventually we will experience a revolution, whereby the working class would seize the state and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.’ Pg 327 Dictionary of Beliefs and Religions. What Fight Club continues to address is the need for change in society. It conveys how men have been losing their role in society; it asks society whether it is possible to call yourself a man? What is it to be a man? Fight Club suggests that for men to be something again in society there must be a revolution.

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Marxist ideals continue throughout Fight Club. Marxism is based on economics and production. Within this ideology there are two main classes: the Capitalists, the profiteers, the exploiters “owners of the means of production, and appropriators of the surplus product in the form of profit” Cottrell A, pg36, and secondly, the workers employed by the capitalist selling their labour “separated from the means of production and constrained to sell themselves to capitalist enterprises.” Cottrell A, pg36. We therefore have two powerful class divisions. “Society as a whole is splitting into two hostile camps, into two classes directly facing each other, ...

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What is interesting in fight club is that Norton and his army set out to destroy the bourgeois ethic, they want to overthrow the system. Throughout the film there are examples of Marxist ideas especially dominant within the sub-culture or group called project mayhem. We have issues of serving the bourgeoisie in restaurants and urinating in their soup, as an expression of disgust towards their riches. Norton narrates his Marxist ideas stating ‘A dinner like this, these banquet parties, they know the tip is included in the bill so they treat you like dirt.’ The language used here is the important element; he refers to social groups as ‘you’ and ‘them.’ This emphasises the difference between the groups he is now part of, the proletariat, serving the bourgeoisie. We witness the destruction of a credit card company, a business, which exploits the poor, and becomes increasingly rich. The film has constant anti-trans national company references, which include. ‘ Starbucks’ and ‘Ikea.’ The anti-company feeling continues with Norton threatening to reveal his company’s illegal business operations unless they continue to pay him without him attending work. The group project mayhem is fundamentally against capitalist society and what capitalism stands for.

Project mayhem is dedicated to the proletariat overthrowing the governing and controlling figures, that is the bourgeoisie. Norton states. ‘We are the people who do your laundry and cook and serve your food…we process your insurance claims and process your credit card charges. We control every part of your life.’ They are the proletariats and with the help of project mayhem they set out to devastate the bourgeoisie. This concept is the essential basis of the communist ideology set out by Karl Marx. ‘The workers of the land have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all lands unite!’ Pg 327 Dictionary of Beliefs and Religions.

Criticisms of this Marxist approach to Fight Club can easily be obtained. The idea of Marxists theory is that in future the proletariat will overthrow the bourgeoisie. There will be a revolution in which all and every member of the working class stands up and fights, the rising of the people. There is no leader everyone is equal, yet what fight club has is a leader. Tyler/Norton is the leader; he controls his army in a manner that has elements of a bourgeoisie personality. Tyler cross-examines a worker at a laundrette. ‘You are not special. You are the all singing, all dancing crap of the world.’ Tyler’s upper class prejudice is still prevalent. Questions that have to be raised are whether it is the workers rising up against the bourgeois? Or is it that the bourgeoisie is again controlling the workers? Essentially Tyler/Norton. It is possible to state that the film is anti capitalist and anti-globalist, causing a human loss of identity. We are one big product of a globalistic enterprise. But this does not mean it takes on a Marxist perspective. By using psychoanalytic theory we get a far different interpretation of the film.

Freud suggested that anatomy is destiny. What he meant by this was that your sexual organs determine who you are in society. You are either male or female and these positions will reflect your status in society. ‘Girls are more loved as being like their mother. Boys separation involves identification with the father and the symbolic phallus as the domain of social status, power and independence’ Pg 294 Barker, C. What Fight Club states is that men lack this feeling of independence and power. It seems that the film has this dated idea that a man you should be strong and ‘hunter gather like’, with the rise of consumerism men can no longer act this way. Do men need to act this way in first place? Perhaps it could be seen as anarchy against societies values. By fighting they allow themselves to enter a different world where they again can be respected. They are experiencing a world, which contains a culture that women are controlling. As Norton points out ‘we are a generation of men raised by women. Do you really think that women are the answer?’ Fight Club is trying to escape from this idea, fighting and anarchy allows these men to be who they are biologically programmed to be, anatomy is destiny. Effectively Freud’s Psychoanalytic theory in reference to Fight Club invites the question of where has the dominant male role gone? According to Freud there is sexual hierarchy a ‘Stress of masculine power and feminine passivity’ Pg 294 Barker, C. But does beating other men into a pulp actually a way of proving ones masculinity. Fighting does not create male supremacy, and proves nothing more than that you are stronger than your opponent. This idea of superiority would have only been relevant and useful in ancient cave men times.

But surely as a society we have moved on from this idea of male superiority, we increasingly live in a society, which is more equal, rather than having hierarchies. Women and men are almost equal in job prospects and pay etc. From this point of view it would seem that the psychoanalytic approach is dated, as it stresses a status quo of male superiority. In my opinion I do not think this is what the film saying. It is not only stating that men are no longer superiors; instead it is stating that men are now experiencing emasculation.

Fight Club is therefore suggesting that the male role has weakened and become more feminine. The men in this film lack something in their lives. When studying the Oedipus complex, it is vital that the male identifies with his father. Initially the infant will love his mother and fear his father castrating him. Freud suggested that failure to identify with the father figure is likely to cause homosexuality, but is Fight Club homoerotic? Two men fighting topless could be perceived as slightly homoerotic, it also displays many male relationships with little mention to female arousal. But in the sense of underlying emotional feelings Fight Club avoids this homoerotic concept. Yet it does have is a theme of castration. In the first counselling group we are shown a group of men who are all suffering from testicular cancer, many of whom have been castrated. Bob who later joins project mayhem states ‘we’re still men.’ But this is the underlying problem the film is portraying, the idea of what it is to be a man. Do these men still fear their father? Has the Oedipus complex been proved or disproved? Norton describes himself as ‘a 30-year-old boy.’ And through out the film he references how is father left him when he was young and how he had to pass messages between his arguing parents. To escape pain, there is mention of returning to the cave, a safe place. Symbolically suggesting returning to the womb. The question to be asked is has Norton not matured into a man and still faces issues that as a boy were unresolved.

Or is masculinity actually not the point of the film, it is not necessary in contemporary society to prove your manliness. Sexuality has become far more fluid, there is not necessarily an issue of whether one should be a man or not. Therefore to me it seems that this approach is slightly out of date and the point of the film is not necessarily just from this particular approach of psychoanalysis.

Fight Club has strong elements of both Marxism and Psychoanalysis, yet whether either of them is correct in terms of understanding the film is simply up to the individual interpretation of the reader. But what is clear is the film is against society, is against how the consumer society has created an emptiness in peoples lives. In relation to this film and its use of psychoanalysis Fight Club misses the fact that women will also experience emptiness created by corporate society. Yet women’s views are not in place as this is a film with the idea of man’s emasculation consistently in place.