Fight Club

The other day I was bumming around my room, doing my self-improvement routine (pushups and situps until my body tells me to stop), and I absentmindedly flipped on David Fincher’s Fight Club, which I had not seen for quite some time. It’s a puzzling movie in some respects, because I have trouble figuring out exactly what it’s pulling for. I love certain aspects of its value system, but abhor others. Since the parts I like are interesting (read: worth writing about), and the parts I don’t like are for the usual Christian “I didn’t need to see that” reasons, I’ll stick to the good parts.

What I absolutely love about this movie is its unabashed hatred for modern materialism and feel-good sentiments. Ed Norton begins his wild journey through insanity as a normal, white-collar guy who’s got all the marks of success: designer clothes, Swedish furniture, and insomnia. I like this last one because it does really seem to go with the territory; it reflects his deep-seated knowledge that he is somehow selling himself short with his lifestyle. As a member of the modern work force, Norton gets up and drives to work, where he sits at a desk and moves around pieces of information, in one form or another, eats some pre-fabricated plastic “gourmet” meals from some chain restaurant, then heads home for the night to lounge around his excruciatingly expensive apartment. It’s no wonder he can’t sleep; he never expends any real energy, so his body has no need to replenish itself. At the same time, he never really tires his mind out either, so it puts on a similar cowl of restlessness, and poor Ed Norton slowly goes nuts in the shuffle.

His first solution begins to get at the problem: his life leaves him completely numb. He never takes anything in, and he never lets anything out. Like a stagnant pool that sits and grows slime until someone shows up and breaks the festering stillness, Norton exists in a state of intellectual and physical limbo until he can find some way to get stirred up. So he goes to the testicular cancer group, and starts crying with the men who are actually in emotional pain. When he cries, he begins to feel something, and that somehow makes him less of a robot and more of a man. Sort of.

This emotional release does the trick for a while, but ultimately the insincerity gets to him (through the guise of Marla and her own insincerity) and he ends up in the same insomnia-ridden state as before. He needs some way to really feel pain, some way to really get out of the complete sterility of his life.

So he starts beating the shit out of himself. Of course, we don’t know that it’s him who’s doing the beating initially, but that’s kind of beside the point. I actually think the movie would almost as well without the whole surprise ending, or at least it would in the capacity I am here discussing. The point is that he’s getting away from the computer and the numbers and all the worthless paperwork that has consumed him for however long, and has replaced it with the utter simplicity of fists and footwork.

What I like is that this interest in fighting is so quickly embraced by all sorts of men in different walks of life. True, most of them are in the service industry and the like (i.e. not CEOs with yachts). We see snatches of the lives the other men lead, and they all seem as sterile and uninteresting as Norton’s, even though the details are variable. When they find Norton’s method succeeds in giving them a renewed sense of life and limb, the club takes on cult-like appeal. I wonder how true this really is. I know that, for myself, the prospect of letting loose some of the male aggression that sits pent-up in my veins is appealing, and I’ve often wondered what it would be like to actually get into a fight. I wonder how I’d do. Sure, I’ve sparred before, and I work out as much as the next guy, but I have no real concept of how competent I would be in an actual fight, i.e. one with consequences. I love the part of the film where Tyler is explaining his vision of the future to himself, a future where technology is a thing of the past, where people hunt and farm and wear “leather clothes that will last the rest of their lives.”

There’s something entirely comforting about the simplicity of such a life: when you’re hungry, you kill something and eat it; when you’re cold, you kill something and wear it; and when you’re angry, you settle your differences with knuckles and loose teeth, and not with thousands of pages of rules and laws and codes and procedures, with lawyers sucking their lives out of everybody’s wallets so they can buy a new piece of “flaming shit” that they don’t need and won’t appreciate anyway. There is something truly comforting about owning nothing. It really is freedom in a very basic form.

This brings me to the film’s concept of “hitting bottom” as being a good thing. At first, I kind of dismissed this as an overly romanticized version of freedom, but the other night it occurred to me how similar this is to the Christian worldview. As Christians, we very truly need to hit the bottom before we can get anywhere else, and as long as we fill our lives with “flaming shit” (I like that phrase), we never get to the real issues. Life doesn’t really begin for a man until he realizes what’s truly important, and that doesn’t come until all the unimportant stuff is forcibly removed. You lose a lot of stuff, be it in the form of physical possessions or intangibles, but you end up with a freedom you never had before.

The fighting stuff also fits with Christianity, I think. It seems to me that men are naturally aggressive, and deep down, most of us wish we had some legitimate outlet for that aggression (or if I shouldn’t speak for other men, then I certainly speak for at least myself here). I think it helps, or at least it has helped me, to see life as a war between good and evil that is waged on every level. In some instances it’s fought with fists or guns, in others it’s fought with words on a page and the ideas conveyed therein. We can’t get away from this, though I suppose the uninitiated can kind of ignore it with liberal ideas that allow them to accept everything as long as they don’t think about it with more than ten percent of their brains. We are soldiers in God’s army, and that position has many ramifications in our daily lives.

So Fight Club gets a lot of it right, in my opinion. A good Christian does hit bottom, and then he does have to fight. The difference is that when he fights, he fights with a purpose.