Friday, 30 March 2012
Tuesday, 27 March 2012
FM4 - Single Film Critical Study: Fight Club
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Extract:
Cinematically, the film foreshadows the arrival of that narrator's alter ego, Tyler, by splicing in brief images of Tyler at specific points early in the narrative. In one such clip this insertion occurs when the narrator visits his doctor about his insomnia. The narrator beseeches the doctor to prescribe some medication for him. "But I'm in pain," he says to which the doctor replies, "If you want to see pain go to the testicular cancer support group…that's pain." Tyler Durden appears on the screen just as the doctor utters the words "that's pain." This juxtaposition equates Tyler with pain and prefigures the imminent development of the fight club. The subtlty of the almost subliminal splice illustrates the narrator's description of the pornographic splices Tyler inserts into films, "Nobody knows they saw it, but they did."
Monday, 26 March 2012
Wednesday, 21 March 2012
FM4 - Single Film Critical Study: Fight Club
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Edited extracts:
Fight Club is also about masculinity among a specific class of American men: the burgeoning gray-collar workers. There was a time when blue-collar workers could invest in a kind of honor and mythology of hard physical work, but "the world has changed" and now former steelworkers are parking cars, waiting tables, and watching security monitors. They have not even the solace of big muscles and the solidarity of unions from which to construct their identities and with which to salve their bruised egos. And as a character says in the film, they lack a great cause, like a war or depression, in which to test themselves.
Tyler Durden turns out to be a fragment of Jack's personality, but this is merely a device to have this mysterious and powerful character (and manifestation of wish fulfillment) appear in Jack's life. (An analysis of Tyler Durden's name reveals that in antiquated English, "Tyler" means gatekeeper or house builder. "Durden" has the word root dour meaning hard (as in "durable"). His initials, T.D., invoke Todd or death in German or perhaps D.T. (delirium tremens), since Tyler is a hallucination of Jack, the waking person.
Fight Club is really about what it is to be a man who serves others (as women have traditionally) and how such men construct identity and meaning in their lives. That women now can take most of the jobs that men can is certainly a background fact, but the film explores other issues or sources of masculinity. The first of three pivotal scenes in this film is a moment of intimacy between Jack and Tyler when they confide that their fathers are distant and disengaged.
Tyler says in his heart-to-heart with Jack: "We are a generation of men raised by women. Do you really think that women are the answer?" At the prospect of marriage, in hypothetical response to Tyler's questions of "what next?" Jack says, "How can I get married? I'm a 30-year-old boy." Not until Tyler becomes a threat to Marla, who has been Tyler's lover, does Jack take steps to protect her. In the final moment of the film, he can acknowledge that he has been part of this relationship (which he believed only to be between Tyler and Marla) and can be tender to her. By way of explanation, he says, "You met me at a very strange time in my life."
There are nagging fears of castration and mutilation that pervade the film. The first support meeting that Jack attends is a testicular cancer group where the members have had their testicles removed and commiserate, saying, "We're still men." One of the survivors of testicular cancer, Bob (Meatloaf), has grown huge breasts because of subsequent hormone imbalances, but there is no sense of his being effeminate. His breasts are almost incidental and (consistent with the rest of the film's dismissal of women) referred to as "bitch tits." After the Tyler personality blows up Jack's condo, he tells him that it could be worse: He could have had a woman cut off his penis as he slept and thrown out the window of a moving car. Castration is also a threat used against adversaries at other points of the film. Jack embraces and reintegrates Tyler in the final scene of the film when he shoots himself in the face, "killing" Tyler.
The other two pivotal scenes, with regard to exploring masculinity, are occasions when Tyler speaks to the members of fight club, saying, "We've all been raised to believe that we'll be millionaires and movie idols. But we won't!" This ties into the American dream and the mythology that anyone can become rich or become president. Part of the way that the working poor are lulled into cooperating and staying in the service of richer classes is by this unspoken promise that if they work hard they will ascend to higher security and status.
(c) 2000-2004 by Adrienne Redd.
Wednesday, 14 March 2012
FM4 - Single Film Critical Study: Fight Club
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Fight Club stands as a key text in a developing narrational mode of cinema that radically departs from classical Hollywood narratives through the use of dramatic deception of the spectator––yet manages to straddle both art-house and mainstream acceptance.
In the first part of this essay, I will attempt to define the general aspects of this narrational mode, and the mechanisms operating within the films that comprise it. These films share various normative qualities, such as extreme modes of character subjectivity (e.g., dreams, flashbacks, psychosis, etc.), a lack of narrative closure, and a dramatic manipulation of the spectator’s expectations that produces an enforced submission to the narrative. Following from the work of Gaylyn Studlar, I would like to argue that these unreliable narrative strategies result in an especially masochistic spectatorial pleasure that is in large part linked to the fundamentally masochistic diegeses of these films. Because of the way unreliable narratives use extreme subjectivity in order to tell their stories, identity becomes a very unstable concept on the diegetic level, reflecting not only the loss of identity/ego boundaries inherent in all cinematic spectatorship, but the loss of identity that is necessary to the special (un)pleasures created by the narrative strategies of these particular films.
In the second part of the essay, I will discuss the implications of these narratives’ diegetic masochistic qualities, featuring Fight Club as my primary example. I begin with thematic connections between film noirs, a series of films long associated with the displacement of men, and unreliable narratives, a more (post)modern series of texts which I believe echo similar concerns. In their masochistic portrayal of (predominantly) men with shattered identities and rampant paranoia, unreliable narratives appear to reflect the purported “crisis of masculinity” voiced by white, heterosexual, middle-class males during the 1990’s. While spectators of any gender can enjoy the masochistic spectatorial pleasures created by the formal qualities of these films, the diegetic content speaks more directly to the contemporary concerns of men.
Saturday, 10 March 2012
FM4 - Urban Stories: City of God/La Haine
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Thursday, 8 March 2012
Friday, 2 March 2012
FM4 - Spectatorship - Chris Hopewell: Experimental and Expanded Film/Video
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Chris Hopewell is an English music video director. He has directed videos for Radiohead ("There There"), Franz Ferdinand, The Killers, Scissor Sisters, Louis XIV, The Knife, and several other bands.
Over the last seven years Chris has directed over 60 promos and has worked with all the major international labels including Sony, Island, Warners both in the UK and the USA. He has worked with some of the biggest bands of the past decade including The Killers, Scissor Sisters, Radiohead, Franz Ferdinand, Goldfrapp and the Zutons and most recently Brody Dalle’s Spinnerette and Blur’s Graham Coxon.
His work has been described as “highly original story telling with a darkly atmospheric folksy leaning”.
In 2003 he won MTV’s big shiny moon man award for best art direction in Radiohead’s “There, There” a video which he also directed. It also picked up Video of the Year at the NME awards that same year.
Chris rambles – “I love the medium of the music video – there’s no better place to put forward your crazy, beautiful, f*cked-up ideas than to a soundtrack of music you love – it’s two totally disparate worlds that are made for each other and when it works there’s nothing to beat it”.
His most recent work is directing the video for The Offspring's "You're Gonna Go Far, Kid" (from the album Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace). He is currently working as co-director with Crispin Mills on the film A Fantastic Fear of Everything starring Simon Pegg.
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