Fight Club: Raymond K. Hessel and a Main Point.

I hope this will be just a brief exposition of what I find to be the main good point of Fight Club, which can be a controversial film.

If you have seen the film, you know the plot trick, and if not, I'm going to try not to spoil it (although, if you have seen it, read my arm-spraining epilogue patting myself on the back at the end, which I don't go into here so as not to give spoilers).

What I am going to go into here is the theme, which is an examination of 20-something middle to upper-middle class, white, American males who have been so worn out and jaded by the pulp consumerism and trite art of the contemporary world that, in order to feel anything, they have to go to the brutality of physical fighting. To quote Tyler: "We're the middle children of history, man. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war; our great depression ... is our lives." As Jack says, in the end, nothing was solved in fights ... [my interpretation:] the point was to feel alive by feeling the pain and the brutality.

The only main thing for this post I want to examine (there is a whole ton of heavy content in this film, but I'm not looking to do a full exposition) is a foil that is used. If the main character tension is for the young, white, American male, then the foil will be at least not white and not American in origin ... although it will probably be young and male, since there must be some commonality for there to be a foil relation going on, and the demographic critique is of the whiteness and the American and the ennui in which it finds itself. That foils is Raymond K. Hessel, the Asian-American store clerk Tyler drags out into the alley behind the store and threatens to kill (although with an unloaded  gun) if he does not go back to veterinary school and try again.

There are two important lines, one scripted and one adlibbed. The scripted line is when Jack says "I feel sick" and Tyler replies "how do you think he feels" and then Jack says "what was the point of all that?" to which Tyler gives the key line: "Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day in Raymon K. Hessel's life. His breakfast will taste sweeter than any meal you or I have ever tasted." Because the non-white, not "American" in the same way as the white male has never entered that ennui, he has a capacity for experiencing that beauty in a way that the white male does not because he has been robbed of it by the ennui.

The ad lib line is "Run, Forest, Run!" when Tyler sends Raymond K. Hessel running off. Pitt and Norton, in the alongside commentary, cannot remember which of them came up with the idea to use that, but whichever it was, it is a good example of an actor really connecting with and sensing what is really going on in a scene. Gump's line in that movie is "I may not be a smart man, but I know what love is." Raymon K. Hessel doesn't have the "sophistication" that the white middle-to-upper-middle class American male has, and it is this very fact that saves him from the jadedness that would keep him from knowing love or how beautiful a meal can taste, which Jack and Tyler, at least according to the latter, can't. Hessel has been seriously handicapped by the system but at least he has not been robbed of that vitality, much as Dumbldore says at the beginning of Halfblood Prince that, while they mistreated Harry, the Dursleys at least did not subject him to the lack of real vitality to which they have subjected Dudley.

I don't think that the only thing that can provide anything for the white American male is the fighting, though, and the other and bigger thing ("fight club was in the basement, now that it's project mayhem, it's out of the basement") has to do with Raymond K. Hessel. We saw Tyler take Rayond's license. At a later point we see the bedroom door close with some 20 or so such licenses pinned to it, and we are too assume, I think, that these are others like Raymond K. Hessel whom Tyler is helping in the same way. I know many might argue against seeing him as really helping, but I think he sees it as helping and I am taking his point of view here as representative of the film's stage-affirmative stance and discussing what I think is the message of the film without yet going to a critique of the validity of that message (although I will say that I think that it definitely makes some valid points). Tyler sees himself helping the Raymond K. Hessels of the world (and I think the movie sees him as doing this, although the way that the film ends with what Jack must do does call into question Tyler's particular methods ... given that he himself must leave in order for Jack to progress).

A question is asked in one of the later scenes of the film: "Is Mr Durden building an army?" I think that what Tyler sees himself as doing is building rather a priesthood. I use this term in the loosest of senses because, for me particularly as Catholic, I think there is a sanctity that must be accorded even the concept of priesthood. But I think that I am doing so by clarifying my use as appealing to the most universal concept of priesthood as defined by service (and if there can be a conviction of any disrespect, it applies only to myself: the film never uses the term or images of it that I can remember). What Mr Durden is building is not so much an army as it is an organization in which his fellow ennui-ridden white 20s/30s American males can find some meaning by doing a service of helping the Raymond K. Hessel's of the world by giving them a needed little nudge (and some freedom from the American system of debt). Just as Tyler and Jack and their ilk have to go to the drastic form of fighting to feel anything, so they have to go to this drastic mode of "service" to find meaning in their existence.

There is obviously a lot that could be critiqued and argued in this regard, and I am not saying that this quality in the film thoroughly acquits it of gratuity or definitely establishes it as good. But I do think that it at least puts it at a higher level than simply a gratuitous display of violence over which testosterone-overloaded young males in America mindlessly drool. I do think it means that the film cannot simply be written off without some more involved argument being made.

Epilogue:

One of the moments I have always patted myself on the back for most as far as working with and recounting narratives, especially in being able to pick out and express the core narrative (and only the core) etc. When I lived in a group boarding situation in a house, there was a home theater in the basement. One day one of the other guys came up from watching a movie down there, and it was my friend Dom, with whom I became very good friends in that living situation and with whom I have kept in touch over the years and continued the same kind of discussion on literature and philosophy we used to have there. So, he came into the kitchen that afternoon and said "I can't believe you did that." And I asked "did what?" And he said "you've talked so much about so many points in Fight Club, and I hadn't seen it so I figured, what the heck, I already know the whole plot, might as well go ahead and watch the thing ... you gave me the whole stinking plot, in every detail, without giving me the change-over." I said "yep ... I'm good." It's the little victories that count lol.The funny thing is that I don't remember making a conscious effort to do so. ... funny old thing, the brain/mind.