Fight Club and Hegemony

When we discussed about the concept of hegemony in the lecture, I immediately thought of the movie "Fight Club" filmed by David Fincher. (BTW, for those who don't know, he also directed "The Social Network") In the movie, the narrator (Edward Norton) is an enthusiastic man who lives mundane life during the day and goes to the support group just for crying hard so that he can no longer suffer from insomnia during the night. This guy later meets Tyler (Brad Pitt), his alternate personality who has everything the narrator has longed for. Tyler intrigues and fascinates the narrator for many reasons, and one of these is that he is an activist dissatisfied with the society under hegemony where well-privileged groups exercise control over under-privileged people. He also pities those weaker groups who ultimately give their approval by taking unequal distribution of power for granted just like the narrator. In other words, Tyler feels pathetic that their naturalization eventually makes the dominant people maintain their power without forcing. Thus, he creates fight clube where oppressed males can express their aggressions towards whatever they feel dissatisfied with and it later evolves into a terrorist group that shows average people's strong resistance to the society. They weird thing I notice here is that as the movie heads towards the end, the fight club they are in has transformed into another hegemonic system where Tyler controls over the members as if he is the rulign power. At this point, I interpret this irony with Roland Barthes' idea that myth is part of the system of privileged. To elaborate, Tyler creates his hegemony by convincing members with the myth of destruction of the society that has oppressed them and by making it inarguable for them.

Anyways, here I only made a brief comment on just some elements of the movie that I think are related to the concept of hegemony we talked about in class. The movie in fact contains many cultural texts that I haven't written above such as capitalism, consumerism, gender issues etc. and definitely gives something to think about. I know it's a pretty famous movie but if you haven't seen it, it'd be nice to check it out during the break.