Fight Club, or the Cultural Contradictions of Late Capitalism

Most critical engagement with the film Fight Club tends to emphasize its rele-vance for the study of contemporary representations of gender and masculinity. These readings tend to primarily highlight the “reactionary ” aspects of the film, which are seen as response to structural sources of feminization experienced by men as they are embedded in the consumerist machine of the service-oriented economy. In this paper I argue that these takes on Fight Club, while enlightening and indeed capturing a key aspect, miss what I think is its most essential contri-bution: its attempt to craft a transcendental “counter-myth ” capable with deal-ing with the cultural and societal contradictions of post-industrial capitalism in the context of the transition to a service oriented economy. I draw on the work of Daniel Bell in order to offer a neo-Weberian reading of Fight Club which makes sense of various aspects of the film which are rendered meaningless by the gender-focused reading. I argue that Fight Club can be seen as an attempt to deal with the evacuation and exhaustion of the original form of value-rationality from the realm of production in service work — grounded in the older ethic of ascetic Protestantism — as well as the failure of ideological interpellation in the consumer society — grounded in a domesticated version of the experience-based counter-Bourgeious ethic associated with aesthetic modernism — to provide an adequate substitute for it. I conclude that Fight Club can therefore be inter-preted as an inchoate attempt to produce some version of a class consciousness and cognitive mapping in the late-capitalist situation. Introduction: The Mask