Movie 666

Hollywood movies are not subversive. That is the first rule of Fight Club.

Sometimes a Hollywood movie seems too good to be true. For instance, well into the film, the main characters of Fight Club have abandoned their jobs, rejected fancy clothes and other symbols of consumerism, urinated in the soup of the city’s fanciest restaurant, vandalized billboards, bombed corporate art, and destroyed direct subscriber satelites.

Oh yeah — just so there is not any confusion: The author of this article considers such actions (or at least the anti-consumerist impulse behind them) to be a good thing.

But if there is one convention Hollywood has mastered in 100 years of making the essentially same movie, its how to end a movie comfortably and in such a way that all plot lines are carfefully clamped, bullet holes cauterized, politics disowned, and the overall film left with no lasting consequence.

After treating the audience with anarchic sweets, Fight Club jerks its hand away to reveal its two heros one single, schizophrenic madman. The subversive undertones of the film are undermined as the madman turns himself into the police (now cooperating with the system he once yearned to dismantle), and even goes so far as to shoot himself in the head to stop his rampant alter ego.

The film’s ploy is not unlike the one that occurs at the conclusion of the classic Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Like Fight Club, Caligari undermines its own cultural critique by attributing its negative portrayal of culture to the twisted mind of a single, hallucinating madman.

Fortunately, sometimes one can extract something subversive from the scene-by-scene viewing of a Hollywood movie despite its lame ending — ideas on building an excrement catapult, for instance, or a demonstration of how to wreak havoc with an electromagnetic device at a Blockbuster Video store. Fight Club even goes so far as to offer a working recipe for nitroglycerine. Ultimately, this pechant for subverting through the process rather than the gestalt of of the film is both the danger and salvation of Hollywood cinema. It is also the second rule of Fight Club: Never respect the ending of a Hollywood movie, only the parts.

Related posts:

1. Focus on the Fight: Black Hawk Down
2. Burn After Reading Puts Unlikely Heroes in Spy Game
3. Doomsday Revisits Dystopia
4. Self Destruction and Self-Promotion: Corporate Branding in Recent Cinema
5. Special Delivery for Robinson Crusoe: Dreamworks Sells out Cinema with FedEx Corporate Love Song

Trackback Post