FM4 - Single Film Critical Study: Fight Club

Click above to access 'Fight Club' analysis

Extract:

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.