Fight Club - Archetypes Stupid, Consciousness Evil
Thoughts On: Fight Club (1999)
A return to that thing we all know about but can't talk about... can't talk about.
Having found myself increasingly lost in very many respects of late, rewatching Fight Club was a somewhat uncanny experience. I did not experience the narrative and its symbolic-semantic structures shift or reveal themselves in a new light. Rather, the pneumantic strains of the narrative felt more personally relevant. Therefore, I cannot provide a particularly new articulation of the film's discourse on apathy, nihilism and the self. I can again present an outline of these thematic notes, but what I'd like to attempt today is to describe Fight Club's narrative structure as similar to a psychological and cosmological structure pertaining to an archetype-ego, unconscious-conscious dichotomy.
Fight Club is such a tremendous film precisely because it is a romance. It is a romance of a biting, self-reflexive and, for lack of a better word, teenage character, but, it is a romance nonetheless. Therefore, Fight Club presents a story about a man who is not just afraid to fall in love, but is afraid to experience a becoming of meaning via consciously traversing betwixt disparate ego planes. The Narrator is then a subject archetype trapped in a coming of age tale, one that challenges him to shed a symbolic virginity and manifest a hero of change from within. He enters the cinematic space about to destroy an anti-Christ and anti-hero of his unconsciousness' rendering. With the gun in his mouth, we (later) know that he learns that his journey, the meaning of this particular phase in his life, is encapsulated in a destruction of self (not of the world) and his union with an Other, a mirror, of feminine, Eros-tic character. Tyler is the part of himself he must destroy. He manifests as an anti-hero because the egoic reversal The Narrator assumes is so necessary is such a painful one. As he discovers in his innumerable help groups, he requires love to love, emotion to emote. Alas, he can only simulate this, thus stimulate his sense of life and being with a lie. Truth lies in a genuine relationship of earnest emotional and loving exchange. Marla is both that which makes The Narrator conscious of this and the opportunity to find fulfilment and to fulfil. Tyler emerges as an extension of The Narrator's yearning for simulation over experience. He simulates destruction, the destruction of his physical body, others, societal structures and manifests, not the destruction of that which is dead in his spirit and his world perception. These are all dramatisations of the struggle to traverse betwixt the ego planes, to shake ones depression, nihilism, apathy and become a minor hero of ones own writing by establishing a relationship with that which calls out the good in you and questions that which is not.
Much more could be said about Fight Club's thematic discourse, but I feel an adequate amount of discussion has been had. It is experiencing this breath of narrative and simultaneously reflecting upon those elements of dialogue and character that easily fall prey to derision - those aspects of narrative that one may understand as ideologically frank and teenage-esque - that I found myself somewhat embarrassed. How does one reconcile with the apparency that what they find meaning in is, under the eye of a critical mirror... stupid?
This is a question of rather piercing personal importance. I, like most I'm sure, struggle to act upon inspiration or to engage passion and drive for I am certain that what I wished I cared for so dearly is not worth much at all. There have been periods, interrupted now, in which I found myself blissfully dumb and naive, able, then, to engage passion without reserve or self-question. Consciousness invades, however, and the clichéd self-doubt manifests as a genuine wall, as paralysing as it is ominous. This wall is made of bricks of my own effort, laid by fruits of my own journey. Such, one may say, is life. Fight Club captures the essence of this manifest; the film is apathy, it frames social being on the one hand as repulsive and personal being on the other as embarrassment. It is The Narrator's consciousness that then does battle with his self, which is dramatised via archetypes.
Here is the key dichotomy of narrative that resonates outwardly in my opinion. Archetypes are manifests of the personal and the true; Marla and Tyler are embodiments of just this. One may point to Tyler as the Shadow, Marla as the Anima, but names are not particularly necessary - it is function that matters. As described, Tyler is The Narrator's Other side who primarily provides a simulation (partially an experience) of an alternative life of the monster within; Marla is The Narrator's supra-personal Other, a mirror that provides a tangible alternative life. Both confront apathy, both require destruction - Tyler more so of the world, Marla of the damaged self. This emphasis of the archetypes is somewhat fascinating, but it is not the point of note at present, rather, it is the intersection of the clichéd and teenagery elements of Fight Club's discourse and the apparent profundity provided by the archetypal underpinnings of the narrative.
The brooding, smart-ass, sometimes eye-roll-inducing components of Fight Club are often consequences of the bend in cinematic space that Tyler creates. Take, for instance, the many monologues, rants and asides he takes. As much as they formulate the style and feel of the film - are those elements which some may point to as entertaining - they are insipid. This is not due to bad writing, however. It is The Narrator (therefore Tyler) that is stupid. With earnesty--I believe--this is captured diegetically. One may also see weakness, in the writing of Marla's character. Indeed, she appears at passing moments to be a mere agent of sexual spectacle and crude humour. Is this bad or honest writing? My mind drifts to the egoic films of Woody Allen and Tarantino here. When is writing honest, and when is it terrible? This is a question I cannot answer at present, but may lay down some track with via Fight Club.
The honesty of Fight Club's narrative construction, its writing, is found in its ability to present the archetypes as stupid as they truly are. Revelations through a surface-reading of Jung may leave you to believe that the collective unconscious and the archetypes are mystical elements of cosmological profundity and unfathomable depth. In my view, the archetypes are and are not profound. Their profundity emerges from their simplicity, which, in a way, is to characterise them as... stupid. But the archetypes are only stupid because consciousness is evil.
To be inspired is to rather freely engage with the (and one's own) archetypes. Bad writing and its demonstration of archetype possession are evidence for this. Bad writing, of many things, consists of a writer's own egoic, self-satisfying projections: the anima/animus they wish they had (and doesn't exist) under their own finger tips; the hero they think they are and will be; the utopia they believe should be, etc. These projections illuminate not just the writer's fickle consciousness (a defining point of 'bad writing'), but their--often blundering, overconfident and semi-conscious--archetypal obsession. What makes this writing bad is the spectator's unforgiving consciousness. Consciousness does not have a good relationship with the depths of unconsciousness. This appears to be an unspoken axiom of many schools of psychoanalysis, and it is particularly relevant in the field of film (art) criticism. When bad writers reveal their transparent selves, the conscious spectator reacts with repulsion; their honesty is repugnant, their writing bad. This same energy is that which, it seems to me, fuels apathy and a feeling of meaningless existence: an embarrassed, repellence of evidence of the archetypal.
There is a strong link between our assertion that melodrama positions art as embarrassment and this concept of the archetypes as stupid, consciousness as evil. What is true is embarrassing, therefore, certain modes of art are embarrassing. The difference between embarrassing and bad art is difficult to distinguish. And all because the conscious spectator is filled with the potential to repel--that furthermore the artist's own consciousness is often highly dubious and questionable--and that, lastly, the archetypes are stupid. They exist as a naive substrate of existence, profoundly true, but far from glamorous. They sit in the cosmos, a projection of Tao, bared and naked, a body in a war without a shield, without armour, without any action of self-defence. They press through narratives so often in such a way. Laden in consciousness, the archetype often perseveres as stupid. But, its stupidity is what gives it motion; its softness to consciousness' hardness. And it is the softness of water that erodes the hardness of rock.
Greater articulation is hard to come by--I may have to try this again elsewhere. Alas, I will attempt to surmise by suggesting that Fight Club dramatises the cosmological attrition; the softness of the archetype, its existential bared nakedness, and its silent battle against the evil of consciousness. The development and refining of The Narrator's character presents the acceptance of one's own stupidity, narrativises the lashes of consciousness and the fatigability of the archetype manifest, illuminates the embarrassing courage of an earnest and productive relationship with those organs of the collective unconscious.
Previous post:
Camera Lucida - A Question Of Subjectivity
More from me:
amazon.com/author/danielslack
A return to that thing we all know about but can't talk about... can't talk about.
Having found myself increasingly lost in very many respects of late, rewatching Fight Club was a somewhat uncanny experience. I did not experience the narrative and its symbolic-semantic structures shift or reveal themselves in a new light. Rather, the pneumantic strains of the narrative felt more personally relevant. Therefore, I cannot provide a particularly new articulation of the film's discourse on apathy, nihilism and the self. I can again present an outline of these thematic notes, but what I'd like to attempt today is to describe Fight Club's narrative structure as similar to a psychological and cosmological structure pertaining to an archetype-ego, unconscious-conscious dichotomy.
Fight Club is such a tremendous film precisely because it is a romance. It is a romance of a biting, self-reflexive and, for lack of a better word, teenage character, but, it is a romance nonetheless. Therefore, Fight Club presents a story about a man who is not just afraid to fall in love, but is afraid to experience a becoming of meaning via consciously traversing betwixt disparate ego planes. The Narrator is then a subject archetype trapped in a coming of age tale, one that challenges him to shed a symbolic virginity and manifest a hero of change from within. He enters the cinematic space about to destroy an anti-Christ and anti-hero of his unconsciousness' rendering. With the gun in his mouth, we (later) know that he learns that his journey, the meaning of this particular phase in his life, is encapsulated in a destruction of self (not of the world) and his union with an Other, a mirror, of feminine, Eros-tic character. Tyler is the part of himself he must destroy. He manifests as an anti-hero because the egoic reversal The Narrator assumes is so necessary is such a painful one. As he discovers in his innumerable help groups, he requires love to love, emotion to emote. Alas, he can only simulate this, thus stimulate his sense of life and being with a lie. Truth lies in a genuine relationship of earnest emotional and loving exchange. Marla is both that which makes The Narrator conscious of this and the opportunity to find fulfilment and to fulfil. Tyler emerges as an extension of The Narrator's yearning for simulation over experience. He simulates destruction, the destruction of his physical body, others, societal structures and manifests, not the destruction of that which is dead in his spirit and his world perception. These are all dramatisations of the struggle to traverse betwixt the ego planes, to shake ones depression, nihilism, apathy and become a minor hero of ones own writing by establishing a relationship with that which calls out the good in you and questions that which is not.
Much more could be said about Fight Club's thematic discourse, but I feel an adequate amount of discussion has been had. It is experiencing this breath of narrative and simultaneously reflecting upon those elements of dialogue and character that easily fall prey to derision - those aspects of narrative that one may understand as ideologically frank and teenage-esque - that I found myself somewhat embarrassed. How does one reconcile with the apparency that what they find meaning in is, under the eye of a critical mirror... stupid?
This is a question of rather piercing personal importance. I, like most I'm sure, struggle to act upon inspiration or to engage passion and drive for I am certain that what I wished I cared for so dearly is not worth much at all. There have been periods, interrupted now, in which I found myself blissfully dumb and naive, able, then, to engage passion without reserve or self-question. Consciousness invades, however, and the clichéd self-doubt manifests as a genuine wall, as paralysing as it is ominous. This wall is made of bricks of my own effort, laid by fruits of my own journey. Such, one may say, is life. Fight Club captures the essence of this manifest; the film is apathy, it frames social being on the one hand as repulsive and personal being on the other as embarrassment. It is The Narrator's consciousness that then does battle with his self, which is dramatised via archetypes.
Here is the key dichotomy of narrative that resonates outwardly in my opinion. Archetypes are manifests of the personal and the true; Marla and Tyler are embodiments of just this. One may point to Tyler as the Shadow, Marla as the Anima, but names are not particularly necessary - it is function that matters. As described, Tyler is The Narrator's Other side who primarily provides a simulation (partially an experience) of an alternative life of the monster within; Marla is The Narrator's supra-personal Other, a mirror that provides a tangible alternative life. Both confront apathy, both require destruction - Tyler more so of the world, Marla of the damaged self. This emphasis of the archetypes is somewhat fascinating, but it is not the point of note at present, rather, it is the intersection of the clichéd and teenagery elements of Fight Club's discourse and the apparent profundity provided by the archetypal underpinnings of the narrative.
The brooding, smart-ass, sometimes eye-roll-inducing components of Fight Club are often consequences of the bend in cinematic space that Tyler creates. Take, for instance, the many monologues, rants and asides he takes. As much as they formulate the style and feel of the film - are those elements which some may point to as entertaining - they are insipid. This is not due to bad writing, however. It is The Narrator (therefore Tyler) that is stupid. With earnesty--I believe--this is captured diegetically. One may also see weakness, in the writing of Marla's character. Indeed, she appears at passing moments to be a mere agent of sexual spectacle and crude humour. Is this bad or honest writing? My mind drifts to the egoic films of Woody Allen and Tarantino here. When is writing honest, and when is it terrible? This is a question I cannot answer at present, but may lay down some track with via Fight Club.
The honesty of Fight Club's narrative construction, its writing, is found in its ability to present the archetypes as stupid as they truly are. Revelations through a surface-reading of Jung may leave you to believe that the collective unconscious and the archetypes are mystical elements of cosmological profundity and unfathomable depth. In my view, the archetypes are and are not profound. Their profundity emerges from their simplicity, which, in a way, is to characterise them as... stupid. But the archetypes are only stupid because consciousness is evil.
To be inspired is to rather freely engage with the (and one's own) archetypes. Bad writing and its demonstration of archetype possession are evidence for this. Bad writing, of many things, consists of a writer's own egoic, self-satisfying projections: the anima/animus they wish they had (and doesn't exist) under their own finger tips; the hero they think they are and will be; the utopia they believe should be, etc. These projections illuminate not just the writer's fickle consciousness (a defining point of 'bad writing'), but their--often blundering, overconfident and semi-conscious--archetypal obsession. What makes this writing bad is the spectator's unforgiving consciousness. Consciousness does not have a good relationship with the depths of unconsciousness. This appears to be an unspoken axiom of many schools of psychoanalysis, and it is particularly relevant in the field of film (art) criticism. When bad writers reveal their transparent selves, the conscious spectator reacts with repulsion; their honesty is repugnant, their writing bad. This same energy is that which, it seems to me, fuels apathy and a feeling of meaningless existence: an embarrassed, repellence of evidence of the archetypal.
There is a strong link between our assertion that melodrama positions art as embarrassment and this concept of the archetypes as stupid, consciousness as evil. What is true is embarrassing, therefore, certain modes of art are embarrassing. The difference between embarrassing and bad art is difficult to distinguish. And all because the conscious spectator is filled with the potential to repel--that furthermore the artist's own consciousness is often highly dubious and questionable--and that, lastly, the archetypes are stupid. They exist as a naive substrate of existence, profoundly true, but far from glamorous. They sit in the cosmos, a projection of Tao, bared and naked, a body in a war without a shield, without armour, without any action of self-defence. They press through narratives so often in such a way. Laden in consciousness, the archetype often perseveres as stupid. But, its stupidity is what gives it motion; its softness to consciousness' hardness. And it is the softness of water that erodes the hardness of rock.
Greater articulation is hard to come by--I may have to try this again elsewhere. Alas, I will attempt to surmise by suggesting that Fight Club dramatises the cosmological attrition; the softness of the archetype, its existential bared nakedness, and its silent battle against the evil of consciousness. The development and refining of The Narrator's character presents the acceptance of one's own stupidity, narrativises the lashes of consciousness and the fatigability of the archetype manifest, illuminates the embarrassing courage of an earnest and productive relationship with those organs of the collective unconscious.
Previous post:
Camera Lucida - A Question Of Subjectivity
More from me:
amazon.com/author/danielslack
