First I though that it should take place in the modern society, not in the period before World War 1, like the original story. But soon noticed that the time and the surroundings have too much to do with the story and the meaning of it that I just started to do gather the main events and characters and developments of the story, keeping it in its original surroundings. Like it should be.
But today I started to think that If the story is put to present day, all the symbols and meanings had to be changed, all but the basic story of Sinclairs (main character) development as a person from displaced and scared, and somehow missled person to understanding his significance and true self, in the context of the state of the world around him, and finding the same patterns from the whole world that he finds in himself.
-- Now follows a long and possibly pointless comparison of a book Demian, and a movie, Fight Club. This is insane, I know. I should probably read the book Fight Club, but the point is, that if Demian should be translated into a film about this time, could it resemble Fight Club and is Fight Club somehow the Demian of the 90´s? I am not saying that Fight Club is as good as Demian, but examining their similarities just as a curiosity. The point might be that the basic story is somehow architypical (?) and thats the main and only reason for any similarities. One difficulty is that movies and books use different kinds of methods of expressing things, but thats partly what this is about. And just to point out: I am not over excited about Fight Club. This just came to my mind today. --
So in Demian the main things are Sinclairs religious up bringing and the struggle of the "light" and "dark" worlds. Meaning the traditional (way of the parents and teachers) and way of the "outsider"seen as dark and forbidden, alternate way of interpreting things and living ones life. And there fore the whole state of European culture at the time had the same arrangement in it self. Old traditions started to tear themselves apart until it all culminated to WW1. So there is all the time this situation with opposites, with out any synthesis.
In order to move this story to present time, we would have to find analogous phenomenon from the present culture, which could be presented as being on the verge of breaking down.
In Fight Club, there is the empty, clinical and shallow world of white-collar worker whit negligent father who has told him what to do, but not why and never really got to know his sons. It shows a whole generation, which is described in the film ; "We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. "
So there is the abstract culture of jobs for money, money for furniture and fun, but no deeper meaning. No knowledge of the spiritual side of life. Which could be seen as reverse arrangement, but also somehow similar to Demian, cause the old, firm religious tradition keeps young man from getting to know himself taking on a own perspective to life. Shallow traditional and restraining religion has changed into shallow restraining consumerism.
Next comes some obvious, or interpreted similarities, on factual events in the stories.
First, there is the Bully, Kromer, that keeps pulling Sinclair to the "Dark" side of life. In Fight Club, Jack is bullied by his insomnia which starts to notify that everything is not right.
The character arrangement is similar. While Sinclair is in school, he first starts to see Demian, not to talk to him, he just notices this boy with special substance. In Fight Club The Narrator, or Jack, doesn´t really see Tyler, but the audience sees him. On the one frame flashes and going past him on the escalator.
The first time Sinclair meets with Demian, He tells him that the story of Abel and Cain can be interpreted differently than the teachers want them to interpret it. ( Cain having the mark cause he is different and strong, not because he is evil). First time Jack and Tyler meet, Tyler tells him that the safety instructions are there just to give false hope and that one can make explosives from items found at home. Both tell a story which is about looking things in a different light, not the way we are thought to look. On both situations an important element of the story is introduced. In addition to the other character of course.
After this starts the journey for both, Sinclair and Jack, out of the past world to search for something new. Where Sinclair is tossed about in the life of a student, trying to fight his bad feelings and rip everything from the old person away from him, Jack starts literally to fight against the other people with same kind of problem, he fights with Tyler, and as we later on get to know, he fights with himself.
At this point the stories differ, cause Fight Club has taken more obvious view that Jack and Tyler are the same person, where in Demian, Sinclair is not so obviously "same" with Demian, but Demian shows the path and stays behind the curtains, but obsessing the mind of Sinclair. These 2 journeys are different, due to the different natures of the stories, but some similarities can be found.
When Tyler and Jack organize the Fight Club, they (or he) becomes some kind of icon or a celebrity. In Demian, because of Sinclairs "uncertainty" about his own personality and the world around him, he becomes, for a while, a daring "bar hero" drinking the most and talking the meanest things. And he is known to his entire school.
In Demian, dreams have an important role. and they tell us about the state of Sinclairs persona like in Fight Club scenes of fight or arguments with Tyler etc. Also the painting that Sinclair does in the story, which starts as a girl he likes, becomes Demian, then Demians mom Eva, then Sinclair himself, describes the lack of consistency of Sinclairs identity, or the path of finding the connection to his subconsciousness. And almost all the scenes in Fight Club can be seen from this angle.
Sinclair also often contemplates the fact that things that Demian says sound like answers to the questions an thoughts in his own mind. Much like the situation with Jack and Tyler. "Sometimes Tyler spoke for me.."
Cause Sinclair is a young student it is natural for him to paint and think and dream, as in Jack´s situation that would seem odd. So in FightClub the chain of events is presented by scenes of action and mischief.
Tyler saves a character named Marla from suicide in Fight Club. Marla has same kind of problems as Jack, and they form a problematic relationship together. Later on in Demian, Sinclair saves a young boy, Knauer, from suicide. The boy resembles himself when he was younger. In both stories the saving occurs unintentionally, or unconciously. Jack doesn´t remember that he went to Marlas place, cause it was Tyler, but he remembers the sex scene, but thinks he has dreamed of it. In Demian, Sinclair wakes up from a dream, goes out in the middle of the night and just walks "like a sleepwalker" to the place where Knauer is about to kill himself. Knauer develops an obsession to Sinclair for a while after this. Of course Marla plays a much larger part in Fight Club than Knauer in Demian...
Quote from Demian (translated from Finnish to English by me): "The most true calling for one is only this: To become your self. Should it be a poet or a madman, prophet or a criminal - it is not for us to decide, and at the end, it makes no difference."
From Fight Club: Tyler Durden: You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.
Fight Club is more individual based, in terms of content I guess. Demian gives a lot more spiritual and possibly hopeful view, where as FightClub is a lot more violent in its opinions and has more harsh tone. And because of the different time periods they deal with different worlds and ideas. Demian dwells in the depth of subconsciousness and the unified soul of the world, finding answers from staring to the fire and listening to music, where as in Fight Club there are the same themes, but answers are found in more concrete level, on the dark streets or basements, doing a thing that most certainly feels and is real, fighting.
Demian describes an end of an era, Fight Club is done in the end of a millenium. And both describe an end of an era on a person.
The scene where Tyler leaves Jack, resembles the scene where Demian is last seen in the book. Jack and Sinclair both lie almost unconscious, Jack after near fatal car crash, Sinclair after a near fatal explosion. Jack tries to speak to Tyler, but can´t, same with Sinclair and Demian. and in the mornign Demian and Tyler are gone. We get the impression that Demian is dead. Or is he?
Because of the War Sinclair is sent to the army. Scene before of the scene where we meet Demian for the last time, Hesse describes very beautifully and with many image-like descriptions that can be interpreted in many ways, the event of Sinclair almost getting killed by a bomb.
In Fight Club there is this cool slow motion shot about Jack shooting himself to the mouth. We can see the explosion in his mouth and everything.
So, in a way, both, Demian and Tyler are dead in the end.
In the book Demian, we are left with the strong message, that with a person or with the world, in order to become what we are supposed to be, like a bird must break the shell around it in order to get born, we must break the shell, the shell being the restricting and "old" ways of seeing our selves or the world around us, if we want things to change.
And in the end of Fight Club we see a total destruction of the person Jack/Tyler used to be, and the destruction of the basis of the current career and money driven culture; The exploding buildings of banks and credit records.
One important thing missing from fight club is the symbol of synthesis. In Demian it is the god Abraxas.
But in Fight Club there is numerous remarks that refer to god and making a synthesis; it is not wanted anymore. " Fuck damnation, man! Fuck redemption! We are God's unwanted children? So be it!" So at this time, we do not search for god anymore, we don´t care about those kind of thoughts, as long as there is something to believe in, something that is real.
Demian tells a story about a boy from 8 years old to 20-something. And Fight Club? About 25 to 30? maybe. So being done in a different time, it is only appropriate to tell about the next phase. Or is the culture today infantile? Tyler himself refers them selves, grown up guys to children. In both of the quotes I´ve written here.
The thing might be that this is no news for some, but for me it was some kind of revelation today. The stories and character arrangements are similar in many stories through out the history of literature and it is not a big deal. The things I´ve written here might come across quite shallow in terms of similarity. But what interest me the most is that Fight Club might well be a dated version of Demian. They are in many ways parallel to each other, just because of their differences. Differences caused by the time they were conceived and the way they´ve been made (book/film). These things have an effect on the way a story develops and where the emphasis lies. Is the similarity there just because of the 2 main characters and the story of finding your self in this messed up world?
I am also quite sure that there is a scene in Demian when Sinclair feels like destroying something beautiful and does some kind of act because of this, al tough I can´t remember/find it now.. In Fight Club Jack beats the face of this blond guy like a maniac and after this says "I felt like destroying something beautiful".
24/10/2008: I've noticed that many people come to read this post, It would be nice to hear your thoughts about it!
20 kommenttia:
Erinomainen rinnastus. Tosin juttuun voisi saada vielä enemmän syvyyttä ja yhtenäisyyttä, jos molempia tarkastelisi Jungin individuaatio-teorian valossa, joka ainakin Demianin taustalla tiettävästi on. Mutta yhtä kaikki, hyvä teksti.
Jep, kuten jo kerroinkin, ajatus olikin lähinnä näiden kahden teoksen rinnastuksessa. Ja jos tiedämme että se on Demianin taustalla, niin voimme olettaa, teosten samankaltaisuuden vuoksi, että ellei se ole tarkoituksenmukaisesti FightClubin taustalla, on Jungin individuaatio teoria halutessamme myös siihen sovellettavissa.
That was a really nice comparison. I felt compelled to comment since my own experience of Fight Club when it first came out was very different (from what you describe in your previous post). This might be a function of our slight age difference. At the time I had seen a lot of new “hip” films at festivals like Rakkautta ja anarkiaa, and for me Fight Club really represented an ultimate example of a certain 90s aesthetic. It was immediately recognizable to me. The slick MTV presentation, the gloomy faded colors and crumbling textures, the frenetic CGI enhanced camera acrobatics, the in-your-face violence, the jaded first person voice over, the surreal narrative twists, even the subversive politics (oozing nihilistic cool) all seemed very predictable. Now I can't say that it wasn't effective, but I remember bashing the film to my friends even as I defended it from critics who said it was ONLY fascist / nihilist / ultimately shallow. Now bear in mind that at this time films I liked most were classics of world cinema screened at Elokuva-arkisto. Maybe I was just rebelling against what I perceived as contemporary trendiness (I'm still baffled by the fact that the film was a flop until it came out on DVD.)
So, stylistically the film represented something that I was aggressively growing out of back then. Politically I thought it had an interesting commentary on social values (capitalism, consumerism, conformism, crisis of masculinity etc.) but thought that the visual flair got in the way of the message (clearly this was a highly designed product to be consumed). It had Brad Pitt at his most trimmed criticizing a Calvin Klein underwear add of selling us an certain image of masculinity: “is that what a man is supposed to look like.” Of course the self-aware irony of this comment becomes apparent when we realize that Brad is an idealized projection of the narrator's fantasy self. Though the film in the end turns into a cautionary tale about the problems of seeking freedom in an individualistic society (Erich Fromm comes to mind), it also unabashedly glorifies violence in such a powerful way that the conclusion will most probably fall on deaf ears. Even if self-actualization through self-destruction is disturbingly antisocial, and hence subversive, violence as an empowering force is a ubiquitous theme in our culture (not to mention films) and hence readily recognizable within a very conformist context. So to me the film ends up using visual and narrative devices that reinforce the cultural values the movie seems to critique. Somebody might say that it does this knowingly and ironically and blah, blah, blah (like Pitt commenting the CK add), but I don't know if this helps (FC also came out at a time when I thought the whole popular culture was OD:ing on irony in a big way).
You wrote about the themes of FC pretty thoroughly, so I'll just add my interpretation on couple of things. One of the big themes is the crisis of masculinity and its sexual ramifications. This is apparent from the first scene at a support group (men suffering from testicular cancer, thus literally emasculated). These men who have lost the grand narrative of what it is to be a man get their balls back by punching the shit out of each other. There also seems to be a semi-misogynistic latently homosexual attraction between the narrator and Tyler Durden (talk about self love) the balance of which is upset by the arrival of a woman (the narrator flies into a jealous rage).
I could also argue that this homosexual narcissistic jealousy rears its head again when the narrator beats the pretty (and feminine) blond to a bloody pulp, and reconfirms his position in the male hierarchy (obviously there is more going on here, as you noted, but it does put a different spin on the scene). Even as the film attacks dominant social norms by reclaiming the body through destroying it, it fetishizes the male body. Despite the all the blood spatters I've heard countless women and men comment longingly / admiringly on Brad’s six-pack.
The other thing I wanted to point out was the significance of the soap, which leads back to themes of corporeality and violence that transcend the “you don't own your stuff, it owns you” wisdom. I doubt it's an accident that the soap featured so prominently on the advertising. The pink soap represents socially acceptable and productive life nurturing forces: hygiene, health, healthy bodies (=healthy workers). The irony is that it is made from human fat, waste (or symbolic surplus) created by a social system that has become oppressive in its denial of certain aspects of our existence (to be unnaturally thin is to be healthy). The fat represents The Abject (see for example Kristeva), something that is cast off and has entered into the realm of the unclean. When we encounter something that was once a part of us (blood, shit, semen, fat) but now belongs to a separate order we feel horror. To turn this unclean matter back into the system is Tyler's ultimate coup, his ultimate act of rebellion. Actually this figures into the idea of individuation, since the continual act of abjection constitutes the process of individuation: by casting some things out and leaving some in we define ourselves. Fight Club plays with the idea of abjection by leaving “in” things that should be cast out. Similarly the violence plays against the politics of life, which capitalism turns into a system of domination. Destroying your body and shedding things you shouldn't, like teeth that clatter into the sink, are ways of reclaiming your body and your subjectivity from the oppressive system that you have internalized (be tanned, healthy, consume, work, improve yourself). In Marxist terms you are destroying your potential as a work force. This is best illustrated in the scenes where the narrator is literally coming apart (abjection) at his workplace, to the horror and disgust of his co-workers.
Hmm, maybe there's more to the movie than I initially gave credit for.
Well, that was long-winded. I hope you don't think I over-interpreted it too much.
I can't say too much about the Demian comparison since I read it ages ago. At one time it was among my favorite books though.
You are certainly right. And not at all over-interpreted, cause all your points are clear scenes and elements from the film.
The movie has a clear theme of the crisis of masculinity and its sexual ramifications and most certainly toys with homosexuality. There is also a line in the film where Tyler says "I am beginning to think that another woman isn´t the answer we need"..or something.
In fact, he same thing can be found in Demian also. There are many scenes in the book, where Sinclair admires Demian, his appearance and behavior.
Sinclair also falls in love with a girl who he repeatedly describes as being somehow masculine, her face having some strong, masculine features. This is mentioned so many times that it actually bothers me a little.
I can´t remember if it is said in the book or just in the subtext that Sinclair saw features from demian in that girl, and that was the reason for the attraction.
The men with no balls beating the shit out of each other to get their balls back is actually what the movie is about. It is hard to detach the themes of masculinity/identity/purpose in life/god.. from each other, cause one leads to the other, atleast in my eyes. "These men who have lost the grand narrative of what it is to be a man" because they all ready have all they are "supposed" to have, "good lives". And that has led to the point where all this is empty, so its back to basics -> to the (male) body, the one thing we all know is there for real. It maybe that the way it has been shot fetishizes the male body, but the characters are most certainly fighting or struggling with their bodies, not admiring them. which leads to sexual identity, (homo)sexuality and so on. I find it easy to sum all these in identity and individualization of a person..
the thing that FC is an ultimate example of a certain 90s aesthetic, is for me the fact that makes it a noticeable film, because even though, if the aesthetic is not pleasing, or what we think that movies should be like, it sums up what the 90´s was about, atleast from some point of view.
The Soap thing was really well put and I don´t have anything to add it. I can´t find any straight links to Demian from it, but what came to my mind is C G Jungs tale in "memories dreams and reflections", he tells about a dream he had while being a child where a load of shit fell on a church, and he was terrified about this dream.
The link is that the way Jung tells about his childhood is a lot like the childhood of Sinclair. The same themes of dark and light, clean and unclean, holy and unholy.
"something that is cast off and has entered into the realm of the unclean." and its an act of rebellion to be unclean. This is the dilemma of Emil Sinclair in the first part of the book the world he sees as "dark" is unclean and it seduces him..
Damn, you guys have gone deep in this one. To sum my initial reaction and current appreciation of the film, I agree with most of the criticism brought up here, but still, the shallow person I am, I have always found the "coolness" of the film just too entertaining to bother too much about the shortcomings. And while the solution the film offers to the postpostpostmodern identity crisis is far from constructive, I still find it interesting. Now, this may be because the themes of corporality have been such a revelation to me these past six years or something.
I think this leads us to the theme most interesting to me in both Demian and Juspe's splendid analysis of FC, the individuation. Avenius mentioned, that Abjection is part of the process of individuation or something like that. Now, from jungian perspective, the Abject certainly plays part in individuation, but the goal is certainly not to cast out any unclean matter, but rather to accept, to incorporate the matter that was once cast out, to one's system. Thus, in individuation, one has to grow beyond one's own self-image, to see that there are things that are unacceptable, unclean, even evil, but they are parts of the whole and must stay that way. Jungs famous quaternity, the 3+1 which symbolized completeness, can be expressed as The Father, The Son, The Holy Ghost and The Devil, for example. So in a way individuation is the opposite, or overcoming of individualization. It at the same time frees and re-attaches the individual to the collective.
Now this was just a clarification for themes that I think are very visible from both of your interpretations. This is especially visible in Demian, where Hesse even employs the same symbol as Jung to express the ideal of individuation, Abraxas, where the opposites are reconciled. As far as I remember, Demian was written during or after Hesse was Jung's patient, by the way.
"the goal is certainly not to cast out any unclean matter, but rather to accept, to incorporate the matter that was once cast out, to one's system. Thus, in individuation, one has to grow beyond one's own self-image, to see that there are things that are unacceptable, unclean, even evil, but they are parts of the whole and must stay that way"
That is what happens in the end of fight club when Narrator agrees to the fact that he is responsible for the things Tyler has done and to the upcoming explosions and destroys the imaginary view of himself. incorporates the matter that was once cast out.
Then he watches the buildings blow up and holds the hand of the woman he has had a difficult relationship throughout the movie. . .
Great discussion. I always concentrated more on the social critique presented in the Fight Club, so the individuation stuff gave a nice fresh spin on it for me. The psychoanalytical aspects of the film are pretty obvious so I don’t know why I never dwelled on them. The theme of reconciling of opposites is very clear to me and I think it’s the strongest link between the film and Hesse’s book. The whole split personality thing is of course a symptom of the narrator’s inability to at first bridge this gap, as Juspe pointed out. This schizophrenia is manifests not only at the level of individual psychology, but on a larger social scale, as the fight club is gradually transformed into a fascist institution (this is where Fromm comes into the picture). It's the paradox of unbearable lightness of autonomy in an individualistic society…
I’m no expert on the concept of the abject, but as I understand it part of it is the idea that it is necessary for us to create discrete symbolic domains and a separate self (one initial separation, much mulled over in psychoanalysis, is that between the mother and the child). In regards to the clean / unclean distinction, it is not so much about casting unclean things out, since it is the separation that renders them unclean in the context of a larger symbolic scheme. Thus filth or dirt is not defined by any intrinsic quality, but by its position in relation to other things. As Mary Douglas famously said dirt is matter in the wrong place. A simple banal example of this is food on a plate that, after the meal is finished, becomes dirt (dirty dishes are, by many, viewed as disgusting). The argument here is that it is necessary for us to create these distinctions in order to perceive the world as meaningful. It creates a symbolic order that opens up the world to us. The interesting thing, of course, is that the reconciliation of opposites (light and dark, male and female, holy and profane) through an encompassing order is a powerful theme found in many cultures (Abraxas). Classic example is the divine king who is at the same time masculine and feminine.
Oh, and I agree, the fact that FC is a kind of pinnacle of the 90s aesthetic can also be said to work in its favor. At the time though, I preferred Bergman and Kurosawa.
The masculine girl in Demian always brought to my mind some of the paintings of women by Gustav Klimt with the strong jaws, aloof expressions, and dark eyebrows.
I like where this is going.
Avenius wrote about creating discrete symbolic domains and a separate self for integrating the abject. Now as far as my recollection goes, this is almost explicitly expressed in Demian I think, where the protagonist feels the world split in two halves the light and security of home and the dark and evil world of his new friends (or something like that). I think he also feels the same division in himself. Well, all this is kind of basic Hesse-stuff, but it's nice to come back to these things. When I first read Demian (and other works by Hesse) I was just totally identified with what he was writing, so it's nice to consider these themes with a bit more distance now.
Now I would like to bring up another aspect of the role of the body in the film. While it may well be that the bodies of Brad Pitt & al are fetishized in FC (or at least in the minds of the viewers) the film still manages to present a distinction (I'm referring to Merleau-Ponty here) between "object body" (the body as showed/observed) and "subject body" (the body as lived).
When the admittedly trimmed characters are criticizing the CK ad, it certainly is ironic (and I certainly think that is intentional, and a bit annoying), but there is also the level of the distinction I brought up above. Instead of just showing their objectified bodies around, the characters are living their bodies, getting to the phenomenological core of being-in- the world. Now I think this is important to emphasize, because there is a lot of confusion concerning the position of body in the capitalist culture. Some say that the capitalism is too much about body and too little about the spirit. Well, as I see it, both the body and spirit are alarmingly absent in consumerist society.
The "body" that media sells us is just an object, "outwardly defined" , fixed piece of flesh, not the living, moving, mutating organism that links us to the world of matter and gives form to the spirit. I see this deeper meaning of corporality brought up in FC for example in the part where the narrator muses about plants etc. taking over the skyscrapers and cracking cement or something like that. I forgot how it goes exactly. The return to primal Being.
As I emphasized in my first post, the ways of FC are far from constructive. And while I feel certain sympathy towards the bodily themes in the movie, I do not say that violence is the only way, or the right way to reconnect to the body. This is where what Avenius wrote about the teeth in the sink and so on: If Tyler Durden had formed a "Jogging Club" or a "Dance Club" the film wouldn't been as intense, and even more so, there IS the danger of control in these kinds of accepted bodily practices or Life Politics (they CAN act as liberatory practices, as T.Koski has argued, but may also serve other ends). Same goes for the sex, by the way, which would have been most effective device about 60 years ago (not that this hypothetical version of FC would have been radically different to this existing one...heh).
Why is it, that violence is presented as the only way to claim back the autonomy of the body-as-lived? Why can't the society make it into commodity, as almost all other forms of corporality? Well, actually it has been done, considering all the violent entertainment we face every day, not to mention boxing etc. But still...I mean, I do NOT believe that violence is completely produced by the society, NOR is it the "natural" condition of man. Violence just IS, as everything else corporal. Of course, as beings living in a society there is the point of violence inherent in the structures of the society, and the ways society controls the expressions of violence. So violence just for the sake of it is an act of rebellion. Fine. But what about sex, jogging, dancing, even eating just for the sake of it? (An unexpected similarity with La Grande Bouffe here, apparently!)
Now what I would conclude from these ramblings, is that the violence in FC is in fact very vulnerable to criticism, because it strenghtens the control of expressions of violence by making it a form of entertainment. For a while I thought that it could have had some value as a device making the institutional violence visible, but then I realized that even Chuck Norris does it every time he appears on screen. Now that's the problem with irony as criticism: The things criticized are themselves their best parodies. And the way to make that visible is to show something different, to offer an alternative. So actually, I think "The Jogging Club" would have been a better choice. Anyway, my point was originally to separate the corporality from the violence, hope you got my point.
Enogh for now.
Great post. Had me chuckling (and I think I got the point).
“Now what I would conclude from these ramblings is that the violence in FC is in fact very vulnerable to criticism, because it strengthens the control of expressions of violence by making it a form of entertainment.”
That’s what I was trying to say in my earlier post when I stated that “…violence as an empowering force is a ubiquitous theme in our culture (not to mention films) and hence readily recognizable within a very conformist context. So to me the film ends up using visual and narrative devices that reinforce the cultural values the movie seems to critique.”
The real difference with FC in my mind comes from the fact that violence in it is empowering by virtue of being a device of bodily self-destruction NOT heroic self-preservation and annihilation of the Evil Enemy (a la Chuck Norris). This is why it presents a culture of death (in psychoanalytical terms the death drive), which is used to deconstruct the perverted politics of life that the dominant culture has indoctrinated us with (doesn’t Tyler say that self-improvement is masturbation). The only problem is that because it is so flashy (and fleshy) the movie blurs the lines between the object body and the subject body (as you pointed out) and hence one can be left with very conformist view of the violence / corporality in it.
There is something to be said for critical films that use the style or aesthetics of the things they parody so effectively that the audience is sucked in instead of left passive at a safe distance. Starship Troopers comes to my mind as an example. The reason I think it is effective in its portrayal of fascism is that it starts with clearly exaggerated satire but gradually gets the audience to identify with the perspective of the fascist heroes (only to pull the rug from under you in the end by reminding who you were actually rooting for). Of course this leads many critics to consider it to be actually fascist instead of being critical. Anyway I digress…
In the end Hollywood is all about anti-authoritarian fantasies of freedom. Dancing as a rebellious form of self-expression has been done a million times. But that’s kind of the problem, isn’t it? I’m just rambling now but the two movies I’m reminded of that effectively used dancing and running as metaphors in more subversive critiques are They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (dancing) and Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (running)…
Nuo deletoidut viestit oli muuten multa, koska jostain syysta lahetin kommentit vahingossa tuplana...
But then again, isn't there still a certain autonomy of interpretation and application? I mean, the whole palette of human life is more or less the stuff of Hollywood films (ok, this is debatable, but in theory at least!) so in a way ANYTHING and EVERYTHING is more or less domesticated through that presentation. But one must remember, that for example violence or sports are just tools of doing whatever, not holding any meaning or significance in and of themselves. This goes quite on another track from our actual topic, but I write it here now that it occurred to me, anyway: The fact that for example healthy habits and bodily fitness are now yoked to serve the demands of business, it doesn't mean those very same practices cannot be made to serve other ends. In the philosophical study of sports there is this concept of thematisizing the practice. So, while there are professional athletes and people who practice sports for other ends (such as relaxation from work) there is also the possibility of sports for sports' sake and sports as self expression/actualization.
Now, that you are wondering why I am going on and on about sports, I try to tie this up with Fight Club again...While Fight Club admittedly conforms largely to the forms mainstream entertainment, I think that this discussion has showed that the film contains in itself possibilities of interpretation, that raise it above the average Hollywood propaganda flics. When criticizing the films ideologically, one should always remember that viewers aren't necessarily completely passive and uniform bunch of people. The process of interpreting is an interesting and unpredictable one, as controversial movies such as Starship Troopers have shown. Thus it is more than possible, that seemingly conformist films or even superficially non-conformist but essentially conformist films can and will encourage critical thinking and even action. While cultural objects such as films constitute a considerable part of our perceived reality, they are essentially just tools, applicable and manipulable by our own choice. To some extent at least. It's best to try to avoid absolutist stances.
This was in no way intended as an attack to your or anyone else's righteous and effective criticism of Fight Club or any other movie. Just like in my last post I just feel that some themes need to be explicated to avoid too simplified dichotomies. And of course to clarify my thoughts to myself. I think with my fingers, see. Now I wonder does this have ANYTHING to do with Demian and Juspes original test? I hope someone finds a connection...Please, use your interpretative faculties.
I absolutely agree. Wait, uh, weren't we supposed to avoid absolutisms. Oh well...
The author is dead, long live (Barthes') writerly text and freedom of interpretation.
I'd love to watch Demian as a movie, but the book is so delicate that the film should try not to change it. I guess all the people that like the book would expect that the film reflects it the closiest as possible.
I love the book and I have a quite clear vision how it would look as a movie, but being a movie there would have to be some changes and interpretations done, otherwise it would not make any sense to turn it to a movie.
But it should definitely be done in the period that it describes, not try to update it as I here have examined the possibility or what it would lead to.. :)
Hey, just took a look at Demian, and thought of "Fight Club", googled it, and saw your development of the idea. Interesting.
Hi - I am certainly happy to discover this. great job!
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