Fight Club: A Crusade without The Cross
Why men need to bleed
The novel Fight Club (1996) raises important questions about emasculation that are even more pressing now than when it was published. This dialogue from the film — although not in the book — epitomises its core:
"If you could fight anyone," Tyler asks, "who would you fight?"
"I'd fight my boss.”
“Really?"
"Yeah. Who would you fight?”
"I'd fight my Dad.”
Released in 1999, the film diagnosed the sickness of a society weakened by absent fathers. In the novel, Tyler says his father started new families like ‘franchises’:
‘Me, I knew my dad for about six years, but I don’t remember anything. My dad, he starts a new family in a new town about every six years. This isn’t so much like a family as it’s like he sets up a franchise.’
This business image recalls Chesterton’s remark that ‘it cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism.’ Given the chance, Chesterton adds, Communism would have done, but really Capitalism has ‘broken up households and encouraged divorces’. It ‘has driven men from their homes to look for jobs. It ‘has forced them to live near their factories or their firms instead of near their families’. And it ‘has encouraged, for commercial reasons, a parade of publicity and garish novelty, which is in its nature the death of all that was called dignity and modesty by our mothers and fathers.’
This, I suggest, gives the most famous lines in both the novel and film their force:
‘Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. 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. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.’
What they’re so pissed off about is being ‘a generation of men raised by women’ because their fathers suffered the fate Chesterton outlined. Because they are neglected, emasculated sons, they crave masculinity: ‘I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.’
But although it raises the right questions, Fight Club gives the wrong answers. To combat the corrupting comforts of modern life that have left them soft and spiritually unfulfilled, the men crave a crusade. Without the Cross, however, it’s a counterfeit one.
To understand why, consider the connection between bloodshed and masculinity throughout history. In Manhood in the Making, an anthropological survey of patterns throughout human cultures, Professor David Gilmore observes that
‘Men nurture their societies by shedding their blood, their sweat, and their semen, by bringing home food for both child and mother, by producing children, and by dying if necessary in faraway places to provide a safe haven for their people.’
This is why the descent into hell is a motif in pagan literature and mythology: it is part of the initiation into suffering and death that all heroes — indeed, all men who wish to be truly men — must undergo. Beowulf, for example, thus travels deep into the cursed woods to defeat the monsters threatening civilisation and ultimately dies fighting a dragon. And Christ, who perfects masculinity, literally descends into hell to defeat Satan and death.
Since this emphasis on self-sacrifice is so central to masculinity, all the male rites of passage throughout the world test a boy’s ability to handle fear and pain. Only by doing so can they test courage. And without this test — without an opportunity to prove themselves— men feel incomplete. As the German soldier Ernst Jünger wrote in his memoir Storm of Steel, ‘there is nothing to set against self-sacrifice that is not pale, insipid, and miserable.’
Without a rite of passage, men will seek one somehow: they need to bleed. In Driven by Hope: Men and Meaning, the theologian James E. Dittie remarks that ‘man experiences life as given to him as incomplete’ and therefore feels the urge ‘to save life from its sorrow by summoning the transcendent.’ As men, he says, ‘we…are gripped with a passion to control because we are gripped with a passion to save.’
And death can be a way of touching the transcendent for men — perhaps, in fact, the only the way. William Broyles, a soldier in Vietman, wrote that ‘war was an initiation into the power of life and death. Women touch that power on the moment of birth; men at the edge of death.’ Men, Nietzsche said, are ‘the barren sex.’
Thus, after the car accident, the mechanic tells the narrator of Fight Club that ‘you had a near-life experience.’ And the narrator recalls Tyler’s advice about ‘running toward disaster’:
‘Tyler says I'm nowhere near hitting bottom, yet. And if I don't fall all the way, I can't be saved. Jesus did it with his crucifixion thing. I shouldn't just abandon money and property and knowledge. This isn't just a weekend retreat. I should run from self-improvement, and I should be running toward disaster. I can't play it safe anymore.’
The importance of the ‘crucifixion thing’ is that, as Tyler says, ‘only after disaster can we be resurrected’. But without Jesus the men are left with physical hardship as an idol. Hemingway, known for his masculine writing, captures this in a moment of dialogue in The Sun Also Rises:
“You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch."
"Yes."
"It's sort of what we have instead of God.”
Since Jesus is the ultimate example of ‘deciding not to be a bitch’ and men are ultimately made for Him, we thrill to even a deformation of his masculine message in the form of mere machismo: ‘Believe in me,’ says Tyler, ‘and you shall die, forever.’
This inversion of Jesus pervades his persona and explains its power:
Like Jesus, Tyler isn’t a slave to worldly possessions: ‘I'm breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions [...] because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit’.
Like Jesus, Tyler spreads his message, amassing followers and making apostles. When he walks into the Armory Bar, the ‘crowds part zipper style’ because 'to everybody there, I am Tyler Durden the Great and Powerful. God and father.’
Like Jesus, Tyler has a higher calling: ‘Getting fired [...] is the best thing that could happen to any of us. That way, we'd quit treading water and do something with our lives.’
Like Jesus, Tyler answers prayers: 'May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect. Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.’
His wounded hand is another echo of Jesus, and he gives these soft men raised by women the hardship they crave. Before they can join Fight Club, they must wait on his porch for three days while being insulted and told to leave:
‘This is how Buddhist temples have tested applicants going back for bah-zillion years, Tyler says. You tell the applicant to go away, and if his resolve is so strong that he waits at the entrance without food or shelter encouragement for three days, then and only then can he enter and begin training.’
Note the similarity to St. Benedict's Rule:
‘Do not grant newcomers to the monastic life an easy entry, but, as the Apostle says, Test the spirits to see if they are from God. Therefore, if someone comes and keeps knocking at the door, and if at the end of four or five days he has shown himself patient in bearing harsh treatment and difficulty of entry, and has persisted in his request, then he should be allowed to enter.’ (Chapter 58)
The difference, however, regards God. In Fight Club, He is rejected. It’s not that they have philosophical arguments against His existence. Instead, the problem is ‘your father was your model for God.’ And ‘if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God?’ As the mechanic says, ‘what you end up doing…is you spend your life searching for a father and God’ even if this means that you ‘burn the Louvre…and wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa. This way at least, God would know our names.’
This is Nietzsche’s death of God. Rather than relying on God, Fight Club rails against him as just another absent father. St Antony told the Devil in his desert fight club that, ‘with the Lord at my side to aid me, I shall yet see my enemies baffled’ (Psalm 117:7). In Fight Club, however, God ‘doesn’t like you,’ and the men seek to ruin their relationship to Him if only to find out He cares: ‘The farther you run, the more God wants you back.’
The ending of the novel captures how this culminates:
“I’ve met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, “Why?”
Why did I cause so much pain?
Didn’t I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness?
Can’t I see how we’re all manifestations of love?
I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong.
We are not special.
We are not crap or trash, either.
We just are.
We just are, and what happens just happens.
And God says, “No, that’s not right.”
Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can’t teach God anything.”
But their real problem isn’t that ‘you can’t teach God anything’. It’s being too proud to learn anything about how being ‘manifestations of love’ is compatible with the reality of suffering.
Indeed, on the deepest level, if the men ‘just are’ what Tyler calls ‘the same decaying organic matter as everything else,’ then their entire worldview is incoherent. Matter has no ‘spiritual war.’ It simply isn’t spiritual at all. And since it has no free will, there is no sense in blaming it. They’re claiming a spiritual crisis while undercutting the possibility of one.
For a correct understanding of the significance of suffering, we have to turn to the Bible. The model is Christ — the ‘man of sorrows and acquainted with grief’ (Isaiah 53:3). After Christ told Peter that He must suffer and die, ‘Peter took him and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you,”’ prompting Christ to rebuke him:
But He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men.” Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 16:22-25)
As a consequence of original and actual sin, suffering is inevitable. Because of this, we must have fortitude, and how Jesus faced the Crucifixion is the model.
Most importantly, as Aristotle said, the courageous person ‘faces the right things’: to be courageous means not only feeling fear and confidence rightly but choosing and acting rightly. For example, according to Aristotle, ‘The man who is by nature apt to fear everything, even the squeak of a mouse, is cowardly with a brutish cowardice’ (1149a7-8). Similarly, ‘he would be a sort of madman or insensible person if he feared nothing, neither earthquakes nor the waves’ (1115b26-27).
It is this insensate brutishness that characterises Fight Club. ‘Even death and dying,’ the narrator says, ‘rank right down there with plastic flowers on video as a non-event.’ Tyler’s wounded hand isn’t like Christ’s. It wasn’t achieved in the pursuit of a worthwhile goal. It’s not a mark of self-sacrifice. In Christianity, hardship is subordinated to spiritual purpose. As St. Paul wrote, ‘I do not run aimlessly. I do not fight as if I were shadowboxing. No, I drive my body and train it’ (1 Cor 9:26-27). But the problem with the violence of Fight Club is that, ultimately, it is aimless — a crusade without the Cross.
This makes an idol of suffering. Because their society has gone soft, the men crave hardship. As Nietzsche said, ‘There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that…[p]unishing somehow seems unfair to it’ (Beyond Good and Evil 201, Kaufmann translation). But since suffering is in fact good for us, the people against it are actually our enemies and would emasculate us further: ‘The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?’ (225)
As the narrator of Fight Club says,
‘It used to be enough that when I came home angry and knowing that my life wasn’t toeing my five-year plan, I could clean my condominium or detail my car. Someday I’d be dead without a scar and there would be a really nice condo and car….Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer. Maybe self-destruction is the answer.’
Thus, in The Will to Power, Nietzsche writes, ‘To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities’ (910, Kaufmann and Hollingdale translation). This is how Tyler treats his initiates. As Nietzsche put it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘if you have a suffering friend, be a resting place for his suffering, but a hard bed as it were, a field cot: thus you will profit him best.’
It’s said that heresy grows best in the shade of truth, and Nietzsche is correct that suffering is valuable. But without Christianity he cannot accommodate it properly: ‘we are losing the center of gravity by virtue of which we lived; we are lost for a while’ (The Will to Power, 30). This experience of being lost is the spiritual locus of Fight Club, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra powerfully captures it:
“Whither is God? … I will tell you. We have killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers… How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?… What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?” (The Gay Science, Kaufmann translation, p. 181)
The ritualised violence of Fight Club is one these ‘sacred games’ — a nihilistic search for negative transcendence by ‘the middle children of history,’ who lack a spiritual tradition because their ‘parents never said anything you'd want to embroider on a cushion.’
They have to ‘invent’ these ‘sacred games’ because, as Nietzsche says in Twilight of the Idols, ‘Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands’ (The Portable Nietzsche, pp. 515-16).
Fight Club is the story of these empty hands clenching into fists.
In the ‘system’ of Christianity, suffering has meaning, and man has a place and purpose as a potential husband and father within patriarchy. But without God, there can be no objective meaning, value or purpose. In Fight Club, ‘the gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says’ because the essence of manhood as the potential for fatherhood has been lost. When the connection between man and God the Father is severed (“Abba” means “dad” in Aramaic), so is the connection between manhood and fatherhood.
Nietzsche, too, had practically nothing to say about fatherhood or families. As Martha Nussbaum asked, ‘What are the higher men doing all the day long? The reader does not know and the author does not seem to care’ (‘Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche’s Stoicism,’ p.159). Nietzsche’s idea of the higher men is his attempt to combat what in Beyond Good and Evil he called ‘the over-all degeneration of men’ in the modern world. For the higher men, ‘man is something that must be overcome’.
Similarly, in Fight Club, ‘it’s Project Mayhem that’s going to save the world…Project Mayhem will break up civilisation so we can make something better out of the world.’ As Tyler says in a suitably Nietzschean hunter fantasy, ‘Imagine stalking elk through the deep canyon forests around Rockefeller Center.’ Richard Slotkin has argued that the hunter is an American archetype because he represents control over the wilderness — what Nietzsche called the will to power. He is the American equivalent of the European myth of the Faustian man.
Pursuing power, Tyler’s goal with Project Mayhem was ‘to teach each man in the project that he had the power to control history. We, each of us, can take control of the world.’ But man can’t do this if, as Tyler says, he’s merely ‘decaying organic matter’. That eliminates even the possibility of rationality. And so does Nietzsche’s idea that ‘there are no facts, only interpretations’ — his core doctrine, Perspectivism. It’s either a fact, meaning it’s not true there are no facts, or it’s just an interpretation, meaning it’s not a fact that there are no facts. It’s self-refuting.
But if there are no facts, according to Nietzsche, then not only truth but objective value disappears. By what objective standard is the ‘higher man’ truly higher? By what objective standard is the new world Project Mayhem wants to bring about better? Indeed, if your beliefs are simply due to evolutionary processes or the result of purely material processes, that gives you reason to doubt them: Tyler’s troops are just ‘space monkeys’. As Nietzsche himself admitted, ‘life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error’ (The Gay Science, 121). Nietzsche and Tyler both collapse into incoherence.
Yet both ultimately retain Christ as their intellectual centre of gravity, mimicking Him even as they mock Him. As Tyler tells the narrator, ‘the last thing we have to do is your martyrdom thing. Your big death thing.’ Similarly, Nietzsche’s last sentence in Ecce Homo, his last book, was ‘Dionysus vs. The Crucified.’
Dionysus is the symbol of unleashed desire — the lifting of all inhibitions. That is the essence of both Project Mayhem and Nietzsche’s Will to Power. But as Jung pointed out, the Dionysian impulse involves the ‘impassioned dissolution’ of the individual. Ultimately, Nietzsche’s vision and that of Fight Club glamorises suffering and seduces men into believing that, unlike St Anthony, they can endure and ennoble it without Christ’s help. Whereas God bore his people ‘on eagle’s wings’ and brought them safely out of Egypt (Exod. 19:4; Deut. 32:11), it’s significant that the narrator’s power animal in his cave vision is a penguin. Flightless, it can only slide as the narrator and Tyler let things slide.
What’s true in Tyler’s Nietzschean vision isn’t new: Christianity has always put suffering centre stage because ‘the life of man upon earth is a warfare’ (Job 7:1). ‘Humility,’ moreover, comes from the Latin humus, ‘earth’ — ashes to ashes, dust to dust: organic matter. And what’s new isn’t true: pride will be humbled ‘for gold and silver are tested in the fire, and acceptable men in the furnace of humiliation’ (Sirach 2:5).
As Hemingway said, ‘it is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.’ Especially the night of nihilism: for all his talk of strength, Nietzsche wrote towards the end of his life — just before his collapse into madness — that he couldn’t ‘bear the icy shivers of loneliest solitude. It compels me to speak as though I were Two’ — just like the Fight Club narrator and his Nietzschean alter-ego, Tyler.
Tremendous, Will. What I gather from this and from my own experience is that man suffers needlessly as a result of having nothing really to suffer for. However, on the flip side - when he has a cross to bear - there is a divinity in that suffering because it’s for a greater call and purpose. Much like Jesus. Too many people overlook this and end up in a free-fall of nihilism and meaningless existence.
Unrelated to this post but I would like to hear your thoughts on Fr. Ripperger.