Making Sense of Mind-Game Films by Littschwager Simin Nina;

Author:Littschwager, Simin Nina;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501337055
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Corporeal estrangement and embodied experience in Fight Club

Characterized by aesthetic innovation and narrative hybridity, Fight Club, like many other mind-game films, does not easily fit traditional labels and is hard to place within established genre categories (Ramey 2012: 47).19 Critic Amy Taubin describes it as “an action film that’s all about interiority” (1999: n.p.). But we can also call it the opposite: a mind-game film that is all about exteriority and embodied experience, a film that asks what it means to feel alive and in touch with the world. The most immediately apparent aspects of corporeality in Fight Club are the graphic depictions of sex, violence, and masculinity. Yet Jack’s mental crisis is rooted in a tactile alienation from the world that reaches down to the bodily depths of his entire self, and the film is interspersed with a wide range of ambiguously affective moments and sensuously charged situations that go beyond what is represented on the narrative surface. Moreover, the two main male characters, Jack and his alter ego Tyler, are not only distinct from each other through their political views and lifestyles but through their contrasting bodily styles and ways of being-in-the-world. The differences between them manifest in the surfaces, textures, and materialities they get close to, the activities and actions they take part in, and the deeper anxieties that drive them or that they are free from. However, it would be a simplified view to say that Tyler personifies lacking aspects of Jack’s life: more than merely embodying an opposite way of life, he also allows Jack to inhabit the world in ways other than his own and exposes him to new environments and new experiences, often pushing him—and us—out of the comfort zone.

Aside from the representation of bodies on-screen, Fight Club’s notoriety can also be attributed to its capacity to elicit bodily responses from its audiences. Perhaps the best token of the range of sensations of escalating intensity that Fincher’s film evokes are the ambivalent reviews of the film. At the time of its initial release Fight Club polarized opinions, attracting critical praise as well as “a sack-load of negative and sometimes hysterical critical comment” to almost equal measures (Ramey 2012: 45). On the one hand, much of the controversy was sparked by the graphic depiction of sex and violence, as well as by Tyler’s morally ambiguous philosophy. Roger Ebert’s much-cited account of Fight Club as a “cheerfully fascist big-star movie,” a “celebration of violence” and “macho porn” is exemplary for the way some critics perceived the film as a glorification of male brutality and misogynist behavior (1999: n.p.). Many of the more favorable reviews, on the other hand, often employed body-based metaphors in describing the film’s aesthetic. They mention, for example, the “blistering, hyper-kinetic style” (Smith 2009, quoted in Ramey 2012: 56); the “kinetic style, visceral approach” and the “marriage of adrenaline and intelligence” (Berardinelli 1999, quoted in Ramey 2012: 57); or call it a “sustained adrenaline rush of a movie” (Rooney 1999, quoted in Ramey 2012: 58).

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