Although Giroux has a good point when he asserts that we should not overlook the pedagogical aspect of films like Fight Club, and the way its violence might potentially further numb our already malfunctioning (according to him) human sensibility, I too think his critique was a bit ‘over the top’. While I feel many of his interpretations of the film were justifiable, I want to defend the novel against some of his most harsh accusations. Could it not be that the point of its violence is to display how the capitalist system makes young men like Jack so completely numb that he feels nothing even when ‘destroying something beautiful’? In Fight Club the novel, it seems that the ‘two Tylers’ ultimate and impossible dream is to restore what is natural and beautiful, yet now tragically and for all purposes out of reach. Part of their frustration is the legacy their generation is left to deal with. A comparison between the scene in which Tyler, the human ‘trash’, turns his being fired into a blackmail and tells this boss “I am […] your responsibility” and the sense of unwanted responsibility in the following quote is telling: “For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up an trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone…And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born” (115). There is a strong sense of bitterness and a good deal of despair, therefore, in the want to destroy “everything beautiful I’d never have” – like an untouched Amazon rainforest or a clean ocean (115). In a sense, it does not matter what you do to the beautiful things of this world, for they are already gone,- and recycling is “like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed” (116).
Similarly, through the mention of whales sacrificed to make ladies perfume and through the brutal story of the origin of soap, the texts installs the notion that the production of consumer commodities is based on the sacrifice of living things. Hence in a typically anti-postmodern move, it turns the focuses back on the production process which, as Jameson pointed out, remains hidden in the capitalist culture of consumption. The making of soap and explosives are done boy-scout style, and without covering up the sacrifice involved. The production of soap demands not merely extracts from the human body, but also herbs fertilized by blood and bone. But this is small-scale production’s sacrifice. Jack’s job, on the other hand, is sacrifice systematized. Thus while society’s official ideology is one of security – of the importance of having health insurance and building a good ‘nest’ (which, as Giroux points out, is up to each individual) – its capitalist forces are systems of brutality. Caught between the two, you get stagnation and numbness. Or you get one personality for each irreconcilable part of the divide. Although the novel offers no real solution to this state numbness – only a demonstration of what the solution is clearly not – it can be argued that not all artistic expressions need to come with its own politics and suggestions for a way out of the crux. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground was also dark and marred by disillusionment, without this being a mark of poor artistry!
I think that as a critique of the destructiveness of neo-liberalist society, the fact that Fight Club portrays the desperation and disillusionment of white men who, as Giroux (and Julie!) points out, should have nothing to complain about, is significant. For whereas Jack can have no material complaints about the system, there is still something fundamentally wrong and dehumanizing about it that causes him to suffer. Something that cannot be explained as the result of poverty, racism, or other kinds of direct oppression, but must be the symptom of a more indirect and elusive kind.
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