This is an abbreviated version of our weekly Patreon show. To access the full-episode and support the pod, head on over to http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss this seminal David Fincher film starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton and its impact and reflection on the culture from which it sprang. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| I want you to hit me as hard as you can. | |
| This is how I met Tyler Durden. | |
| Come on, hit me before I lose my nerve. | |
| Ow! | |
| You hit me in the ear! | |
| You were looking for a way to change your life. | |
| You got it. | |
| God. | |
| You kids. | |
| This is too much. | |
| In the end, you will thank me. | |
| If you could fight anyone, who would you fight? | |
| Shatner. | |
| I'd fight William Shatner. | |
| Ah, you know what sound that is, Nick? | |
| That is the sound of holiday cheer. | |
| I'm Jared Yates-Axton. | |
| I'm here with Nick Halseman. | |
| This is your Christmas Eve edition of the Muckrake Podcast Weekender. | |
| I hope everybody's having a fantastic holiday, being safe, being good. | |
| This is, of course, a Patreon-exclusive episode, and we want you to go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast to go ahead and become a subscriber. | |
| If you are not already, you don't want to miss this conversation. | |
| We're going to celebrate the holiday by talking about the 1999 film Fight Club by David Fincher based on the 1996 book by Chuck Palahniuk. | |
| We're going to be discussing the movie, how it was made, what it does, but also what it means and what it represents in a very, very particular time in American history. | |
| What it says about neoliberalism and what it says about our future. | |
| So we're going to be talking about 1999's Fight Club. | |
| Oh, do you want me to start? | |
| Okay. | |
| I like to start with, you know, and the impressions I have when I think about this movie was I was living with my now wife, we were dating at the time, at her parents' guest house, in the back of their house, and we had seen the movie and there was an earthquake. | |
| Right after it happened, as we were getting home. | |
| So, the night was already, like, you know, this movie is like, you like download this movie, right? | |
| When we were in the theater and you're watching it, it's almost like you plug in and it just comes at you in waves for, you know, the entire time you're watching it. | |
| And we were in this, it was just a strange night, right? | |
| Strange mood afterwards. | |
| We don't know what's, you know, what is reality? | |
| Where are we? | |
| How do we all fit in? | |
| This is destroying our myths of everything. | |
| And then an earthquake happened. | |
| It was like, those are two inextricable moments now in my mind when I think about this movie. | |
| That's really interesting, like the tangential part of it. | |
| Like you're always going to think about this movie with an earthquake. | |
| That's fascinating. | |
| I watched it, so I was reading Chuck Palahniuk quite a bit before this movie came out. | |
| And I had read Phi Club, God, I don't know, two or three times. | |
| Before I saw this movie. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I just didn't go see it in theaters. | |
| I guess I was doing other things. | |
| Maybe it didn't come to my hometown. | |
| I don't know what happened. | |
| But I actually watched this, strangely enough, the night before I went to live in the dorm at my college. | |
| And that actually, so when I was moving into the dorm at my college was in 2001. | |
| It was about a month outside of September 11th. | |
| And so I watched this. | |
| Well, it was outside before or after? | |
| Right before. | |
| Okay. | |
| So I was getting ready to go and I started watching. | |
| It was like one of those movies that I turned on at my parents' house. | |
| You know, you turn it on at like 11 or midnight, you know, and you're not expecting to watch it. | |
| Back in the day, you know, with cable. | |
| And then you're just like, I'm not going to sleep. | |
| I'm going to watch this movie. | |
| And so I stayed up, watched it. | |
| And then I went the next day. | |
| And weirdly enough, I met one of my future roommates the next day as I was moving in to the dorms. | |
| And this would be a guy who was a Marine. | |
| He would go on to fight in Iraq after September 11th, which we're going to talk about. | |
| And September 11th obviously features into a lot of the conversation we're going to have about Fight Club. | |
| He would go and fight in Iraq, but he also was obsessed with Fight Club. | |
| And by obsessed with Fight Club, I mean that he watched it every single day, Nick. | |
| Every day. | |
| I mean it. | |
| Every single day. | |
| Weirdly enough, there was a moment, actually, he stopped watching it every single day and he started watching Moulin Rouge, which I don't know. | |
| I've never thought about the link between those two. | |
| But he was one of those guys, and I love him very dearly, he was one of those guys who watched Fight Club and he walked away with it with what I would say is a problematic idea from Fight Club, which is that White men have been oppressed, that they need to do something, and as a result they should probably join fight clubs and become radical extremists. | |
| Which we need to talk about its legacy with the alt-right, its legacy with the manosphere, how it has unintentionally and maybe in some cases intentionally radicalized people, but this movie has a really important place in American culture in inspiring people, framing people's ideas of what purpose is, what energy is, but it's also, and I would love to hear what you have to say about this, this is the perfect artifact | |
| of the pre-September 11th 1990s. | |
| It is a it's almost like a Jurassic Park insect caught in amber that is just from a moment right before September 11th that we have to think about, we have to dissect, we have to learn from, and maybe somehow or another this is going to turn out to be like a really important artifact for that reason. | |
| Well, what's fascinating about that concept is that, you know, I graduated in college in 94, and we had kind of unprecedented prosperity through that time with Clinton in office, before Monica Lewinsky and all this different stuff, where we actually kind of started to feel like, and even beyond that, even towards the new millennium, There was a feeling, I think, of like, hey, we're getting somewhere progressively. | |
| You know, there seems to be general peace across the globe. | |
| We're prosperous. | |
| You know, there are jobs. | |
| And, you know, it seemed like, you know, civil rights were going in a good direction. | |
| And then this movie hits. | |
| And it says, well, wait a minute, I don't know if you've been paying attention closely enough, and perhaps it is out of a decade worth of excess and not having to deal with much more serious issues like we're dealing with now, that we became sort of entranced in our own little cocoons of consumerism. | |
| Do you remember, when was the book written? | |
| 96 okay, so they made the movie pretty quickly after the book was written because so it captures what I would have thought would have would have been a feeling that would have only been what's more recent like Anybody living at that time. | |
| I would have assumed would have felt similar to me in theory and And wouldn't have gotten so disenchanted that quickly with that era. | |
| Clearly, the author does. | |
| That's when he wrote it. | |
| He was writing it in 94, 95, probably as he was finishing it. | |
| So that's fascinating to me that those ideas are already germinating in his mind and then culminating in this 99 movie. | |
| In a moment where you thought we would have had a few more years, and then certainly 9-11 changes things. | |
| But we'd have a few more years of enjoying that moment until we start to say, wait a minute, guys. | |
| This is excess, this is consumerism, and this is all bad. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So one of the things that is happening in Fight Club is we're actually talking about something that never, it never gets said. | |
| What I would say there's a lot of a lot of posturing in this movie and we can kind of you know Start to talk about some of the more memorable lines of course Brad Pitt playing the character Tyler Durden who has sort of He's become like one of those I think really really important cultural artifacts that that that has has maintained And a lot of these things that Tyler Durden says add up to something, which is what I would say is actually a vacuum. | |
| It's actually an absence of something. | |
| And that's something that is missing here. | |
| It revolves around a word that is never said once in this movie, but that this movie, I think, is wrestling with in a way that Americans didn't understand. | |
| We didn't have the terminology for it. | |
| We didn't have the understanding of it the way that we do now as we're removed years away from this moment. | |
| And that word is neoliberalism. | |
| And neoliberalism, to go ahead and put this into context, Fight Club is a reaction to what's called the end of history. | |
| And the end of history was this idea put forward by a guy named Francis Fukuyama. | |
| And Fukuyama was this neoconservative asshole, I'll just go ahead and say it, who, as the Soviet Union is falling, he's saying, you know, capitalism and liberal capitalism, as America personifies, is going to be the final state of the state. | |
| We've won. | |
| We won the Cold War. | |
| Now it's time to go ahead and frame the world basically as a reflection of what America is and what the American way of life is. | |
| And we start seeing this, of course, with the idea of the new world order, which is what George H.W. | |
| Bush called it. | |
| And eventually we get it with free trade, which is what Clinton pushes. | |
| And that's how you get this era of beneficial policies that make it feel like people are making money, like they're not struggling as much. | |
| A large part of it has to do with the fact that America opened up all of its markets, and we just became a completely consumer-based society. | |
| The problem here is, as you took away communism, who, you know, communism was the boogeyman, it was the devil, it was Satan, it was the evil that we had to destroy, the evil empire. | |
| That gave people purpose, right? | |
| If anything, like if at any moment you were like, I don't have purpose in my life, you could be like, but I am an American and I fight communism and I stand up for the red, white and blue and the stars and stripes and all of that. | |
| Once communism moved away, the entire projects becomes hollow. | |
| Like, why am I making all this money? | |
| Why am I buying all of these things? | |
| It doesn't feel like it has a purpose because it doesn't have a purpose. | |
| And so what you find is that neoliberalism hollows out any idea of purpose or creed or, like, reason for living and doing these things. | |
| And around this point in 1999, right before 9-11, is when that starts to wear thin, right? | |
| You start having so-called Gen X start to say, you know, I'm not my jeans, I'm not my sneakers. | |
| They start pushing back against this thing before, ironically, we're given a quote-unquote purpose, but we'll get to that in a moment. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, this is a thing that was brought up, like, in The Matrix, where they had created a perfect world, and it didn't work. | |
| Humans couldn't accept it. | |
| They couldn't take having a perfect world. | |
| They needed to have all this sort of, you know, there's always a general yearning for, you know, doom and gloom to some degree, which you can argue would then make us enjoy the good times even more. | |
| But yes, there's no question that that was a thing on everyone's minds. | |
| And I feel like, you know, ever since 9-11, when, like, I'll walk into a big box store, like, Whatever, what's it called? | |
| Walmart? | |
| Yeah, well, they don't have Walmarts around LA, really. | |
| They have, you know, not the other one, Costco. | |
| Costco. | |
| I walk in there and I feel like this is why Muslim extremists want to come and kill us. | |
| It's so much excess. | |
| We have everything we'd ever need. | |
| We have 25 of whatever we'd ever need. | |
| Times more than we ever need. | |
| And it's like you go into other countries that don't have anything. | |
| and it's just it really does and I wonder if Fight Club was part of this the germination of this idea when I do this or if it's 9-11 and only but either way it's now inextricable whenever I do that and I see such a huge incredible amount of excess in my face like that I can't help but think this is bad you know this is a problem this is what makes we are we are so overstuffed with things Well, I want to start, by the way, to clarify something. | |
| I do not think that the Cold War was necessary or good. | |
| get into this neoliberalism of, you know, we don't share a common goal here to live amongst each other. | |
| It's all about let's insulate ourselves. | |
| And so it's nefarious and it can eat your soul. | |
| Well, I want to start, by the way, to clarify something. | |
| I do not think that the Cold War was necessary or good. | |
| It wasn't organizing principle, right? | |
| It gave us a myth to unite around, right? | |
| In the case of what you're talking about, the entire purpose of consumerism is to sell to people, you need this product. | |
| Because it will help you have something that you don't have. | |
| It will help you in your relationships. | |
| It will get you where you want to go, where you want to be. | |
| You are missing something by this shirt, by this pants, by this yin and yang coffee table, right? | |
| What's it say about you? | |
| And what ends up happening? | |
| is you project to the world something about yourself that you want people to believe about you. | |
| And when we have in this movie, we have Edward Norton, who I the the performances in this movie are really good. | |
| Like they like I rewatched it for this podcast. | |
| They they're really good. | |
| And a young baby faced Edward Norton, who never actually gets a name is credited as the narrator at times is credited as Jack. | |
| But that's neither here nor there. | |
| Edward Norton is an office worker, right? | |
| And Edward Norton has this entire life set up for him. | |
| He has a condo that is just filled with things. | |
| I love, by the way, the reminder that you had to buy things off of a catalog. | |
| You had to give a quick little ringeting. | |
| Fantastic shot of him on the toilet. | |
| It was like perfect. | |
| He's sitting on the toilet looking through the catalog. | |
| And then, you know, it also just gives reason to have some terrific special effects. | |
| This movie had some special effects we hadn't really seen before. | |
| The opening, going through the synapses of his brain was like a million dollar effect that was, you know, a million dollars for an opening when you had just credits going was crazy. | |
| But, again, it really got you into that mode, like you were inside someone's brain. | |
| We're going to spend that time for two hours in someone's brain. | |
| Yes, love all of that. | |
| By the way, the opening shot really, after you pull out of the brain, is a gun shoved in this guy's mouth. | |
| If that's not a great way to start a movie, I don't know what is. | |
| Yeah, and so Edward Norton, we learn that he has this meaningless life. | |
| And the movie doesn't, it gets into it, but it doesn't really examine it that much. | |
| So his job is that he is more or less an actuary or an assistant actuary, right? | |
| He goes out in the world and he looks at wrecks that have taken place with automobiles that have had a defect, right? | |
| And his entire job is to go out and calculate whether it would be better for a corporation to recall a car or if they could just let people die and it wouldn't cost them as much. | |
| So I want to point out this book is written in 96. | |
| It comes out in 99. | |
| In that regard, Edward Norton's character is portraying a role in a job that doesn't exist anymore. | |
| Like, there are actuaries out there for sure. | |
| Most of this is done with an algorithm. | |
| And what has occurred here is that his job, he's sort of the fleshy connective tissue of neoliberalism, right? | |
| That he would go out and he would tell the machine what it's supposed to do. | |
| Now there's probably a computer program that takes care of that, right? | |
| So he's there, he feels useless, but what can he portray to the world? | |
| He dresses, and I love also in the 1990s, the blousiness of shirts. | |
| Every time I see that I laugh. | |
| Big blousy shirts, you know? | |
| And he can look professional, he can play the role, he can have the apartment, but deep down inside of him, he's alone. | |
| And he's desperate. | |
| And of course he goes to these support groups of people who are dying of cancer and other ailments. | |
| That's the only means that he has to have any meaning and to surround himself is to be around people who are dying and who think about the fact that life exists, right? | |
| They're living in their lives. | |
| It reminds him that he has to live because neoliberalism has completely sucked out any meaning from his life. | |
| Well, wait, before we get to that part, we have to remember that this whole thing is framed around the genius of the movie, and I don't even know if you get it until you watch it several times, is that he has insomnia, right? | |
| And insomnia is indicative of a lot of issues mentally that you are not functioning properly. | |
| and a lot of times, and maybe you don't even know you're not functioning properly until finally the insomnia hits, this is a big red flag, but what the beauty of this is, is that in reality, he's asleep, right? | |
| We are consumers asleep at the wheel. | |
| We're just sitting there every day in our own little worlds and we're all buying, buying, buying, we don't care about anybody else. | |
| So the idea that insomnia means that he cannot sleep, even though he really is sort of metaphorically asleep, I thought was a terrific sort of, I'm not even sure what that, it's a metaphor, | |
| It's a concept That is just it makes everything sort of make sense and also at unease you know that notion We've all had insomnia from time to time and I think this movie starts to make you feel like you are having some of those symptoms As well as they slowly drag you through this this whole the nightmare Well, I guess it's a non nightmare because he's not sleeping And that's, I think, one of the most genius parts of the whole thing. | |
| And it's directed by David Fincher, who is so good at that. | |
| One of the things that Fincher is really, really, what he excels at is he makes his movies feel the way that the action and the theme, the way that it's supposed to feel. | |
| In this, it makes you feel tired. | |
| It makes you feel like you've just pulled an all-nighter, and like sleep is just at the periphery and you're worn down. | |
| He's very obsessed with obsession, is what Fincher is. | |
| You know, he did The Social Network, which is basically, if you take Fight Club and The Social Network and put them together, they're in conversation with each other. | |
| Which is, what's important? | |
| Why do you do the things that you do? | |
| On one hand, it's a search for meaning in Fight Club, right? | |
| In Social Network, no, it's just endless striving. | |
| Right. | |
| It's just it's just accumulation for personal aggrandizement. | |
| Of course, he does Zodiac, which is all about being obsessed with figuring out something that you might not be able to figure out. | |
| Right. | |
| And what's that mean if you're not able to come to the conclusion? | |
| So in a lot of ways, his movies feel that certain way. | |
| And Fight Club, the way that the graininess of it, the lighting of it, the way that we move from one scene to another, it feels so disconnected. | |
| Because it's supposed to represent that sort of restlessness. | |
| us. | |
| of hyper capitalism like I always have to be working I have to constantly be accumulating somehow or another it doesn't matter how much money I have or what I have in my apartment or what I own I need more and why do I need it well no time to think about it keep going and you've been listening to a free preview of our patreon exclusive weekender show | |
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