Anarchy in the D.C.

Anecdote: Taking a documentary film class in college, I once listened to a fellow student—the sort of kid who you have to describe by the size and location of his piercings and who takes deep interest in the politics of the local hardcore scene—describe his trip to D.C. to film an anarchist protest event.

“Shit was interminable. Everybody managed to meet up at the same place, somehow, but then they refused to make a plan, or agree on anything. Every time we’d get to a corner, there’d be a big debate about which way to go. Groups would split off. People would yell and bitch and try to convince everyone else. We ended up mostly walking around the back streets of D.C. looking for where we should be and fighting to keep the group together.”

This was from a sympathizer. I recall also that there was a lot of vulgarity and tangential anti-Bush grousing involved.*

Needless to say, this sort of anarchy isn’t about “personal responsibility” in any real sense. It’s a way of looking at the world that reduces everything to anti-authority attitudes: a sort of purist rebellion. It’s what the graphic novel character V would distinguish as post-authoritarian “chaos,” which, he explains, is often followed by an agreed-upon natural order, sans designated authority—a "true" state of anarchy.

Ross and Reihan, in their responses to my Fight Club post, throw out many, many excellent ideas—too many to really respond to—and Ross clarifies that when he was describing Fight Club as an “anarchist manifesto,” it wasn’t in the “shit was interminable” sense, but the V-graphic-novel sense. There’s a reasonable case to be made, I think, that the movie promotes that, at least implicitly. As he writes, “The only order it endorses comes from within,” and that’s certainly true. If one expands on that notion for a while, the result is certainly the internally-ordered state he talks about.

But I’m not so sure that’s really what the film is promoting. Seems to me that it’s agnostic on larger systems. It’s not saying that any of them (or their absence) are particularly terrible; it’s simply saying that we can’t rely on white collar jobs, support groups, television, image culture, shopping, or relationships with the opposite sex to provide meaning. At times in the movie, all of those things are variously blamed for Jack’s troubles. The movie isn’t suggesting we should do away with any of it; instead, it’s calling for people (especially young men) to avoid the victim culture that’s become so prevalent.

So, acknowledging that Ross didn’t fall into this trap (though by comparing it to what V could’ve been, he seemed to), I’ll just point out again that too many critics and viewers have embraced Fight Club as an anti-capitalist, pro-rebellion tract, with Tyler as the savior who shows Jack the way out and the final explosions symbols of victory. Roger Ebert, always influential but long since removed from being a trustworthy critic, called it “macho porn” and “cheerfully fascist.” Even the usually dead-on David Edelstein said that Tyler’s speechifying “seems meant to be intoning gospel.”

Despite some of the nervous critical reaction and total dismissal at awards and the like, I’m fully convinced that the next generation of film critics and academics will look back on Fight Club as one of the defining movies of the 90s and early 00s. It’s gaining in stature with the younger crowd, both those who’ve embraced it for its responsibility ethos and those who see it as a victory for rebellion, and at film fan sites like Chud and Ain’t It Cool, it’s one of the most oft-discussed movies. Writing in The New Republic last year, Robert Alter quoted Gershom Scholem as hailing Kafka’s work as canonical for its “endless interpretability.” In the last 15 years, I can think of no better film to meet that description than Fight Club.

*Kind of like The Wachowskis’ movie, actually.