First off, i havent read this in its entirety yet so don't bitch at me because it sucks or you disagree with it... i only skipped around it a little. It did seem good from what i did read. I also seemed like something i wanted to finish later so what better way than to share it with DSF so it'll be here for me to read when i have time?
--S666
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A Copy of a Copy of a Copy
The Matrix, American Beauty, and Fight Club as Retellings of Pink Floyd's The Wall
A Sneak Preview from You Do Not Talk About Fight Club: I Am Jack's Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection

1999 was the year that everything changed. It was the year the dot.com bubble burst, a year after the Internet became a mass medium, and the year Entertainment Weekly said all the rules of cinema were reinvented. It was a year of overmediation in one medium and reflection upon that very fact in another.

Entertainment Weekly was calling it the year that changed everything in reference to new special effects techniques in The Matrix and new narrative techniques in films like Being John Malkovich and Run Lola Run. But it was also, in retrospect, a year of incredible movie-making that included films like Fight Club, American Beauty, and Magnolia. I think that no small part of that cinematic greatness came from a merging of two forces that had been gathering steam for the previous century: 1) the increasing tendency of cinema, as both a medium and as a physical environment, to replace the cathedral in its place, purpose, and meaning in daily life, and 2) the increasing fear, loneliness, and alienation that Americans felt as a result of their increased wealth, technology, and supremacy in the post–Cold War order. I believe these two trends collided to create a cinema of profoundly honest spiritual yearning that was surprising, beautiful, and powerful. You could almost feel how powerfully embarrassing it was when, not two years later, the teen-angst satire Not Another Teen Movie created a Ricky Fitts (from American Beauty) parody character dubbed “The Beautiful Weirdo.” The parody character was necessary because Ricky Fitts had been a little too beautiful, a little too honest, and in retrospect many felt like it had to be gotten over quickly. An alternate reaction was the near-instant commodification of the spiritually-yearning movie formula, which produced such transcendent clunkers as J.Lo.’s Angel Eyes, among others.

But still a deeper trend ran through many of these films: instead of a generic spiritual search that the protagonists were put into, three films stood out as particularly revealing in their willingness to address the specific historical moment of our spiritual crisis as it intersected with the family, with mass media, and with gender roles. In order of their appearance, The Matrix, American Beauty, and Fight Club (released between April and October 1999) all dealt in some way with the following three themes: overmediation, fatherlessness, and homosexuality. These three movies both articulate these themes and present them as intricately but often subtextually interconnected. Ironically, these three films also have something profoundly familiar in them when compared to Roger Water’s 1979 classic, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, made into a film by Alan Parker in 1982. If cultural texts come and go like fashion, it was almost as if the three authors of the 1999 films produced their most creative work by unintentionally recreating their favorite movie from adolescence.

All three films, like The Wall, had phenomenal soundtracks. All three films, like The Wall, showed a man fighting a system against which he had no control but towards which he felt incredible rage and anger. And all three films, like The Wall, ultimately dealt with the fact that it was not Big Brother, but rather “big mother” who was watching you, and presented the world as a system in which the psycho-social and psycho-sexual consequences of fatherlessness are played out to the n<sup style="line-height: 100%;">th</sup> degree in the life of the male protagonist.

Each film has its own take on the subject, but in every instance the male protagonist has to fight physically against an overfeminized system as a key to achieving his identity. From a media effects point of view, these films are all not merely fictional manifestations of Neil Postman’s 1992 thesis in Technopoly—that culture had surrendered to technology—but to the idea that the feminine image had so replaced the masculine word that men were beginning to feel effeminate as a result. That the result was either homosexuality, rage, or a combination of the two in the lives of the authors or the protagonists, is telling. A culture-wide technological conditioning of homosexual inclinations, predicated on the absent father and the domineering mother in the form of mass media, may partially explain why Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club was so popular. From a marketing point of view, writing a gay novel for a straight audience is a sure way to lose 90 percent of the market, unless the market comes from a culture that has already been feminized. As Weezer sang, “Everyone’s a little bit gay,” and so the story strikes the audience as normal, or even documentary-like, in its presentation of gender and gender roles.


In Fight Club and The Matrix, the protagonist is a single, white, male, urban professional at or around age thirty. In American Beauty, the protagonist is a married father, aged forty-two, but he is also accompanied by a secondary lead male character in the form of Ricky Fitts, the teenage son of Marine Colonel Fitts, the new neighbors of Lester Burnham’s family in suburban New Jersey. So immediately, we are watching movies about Generation X, the post-boomer generation who were too young to serve in Vietnam, and whose lives were largely untouched by any horrors larger than media spectacles and tragedies from space shuttle disasters to the roughly-once-a-year horror of the nineties from Waco to Oklahoma City to TWA Flight 800 to the Unabomber to Columbine. Fight Club makes specific reference to this ongoing sense of malaise when comparing luck: Tyler Durden says to Jack after his apartment blows up, “It could be worse: you could have had your penis cut off and thrown out the window of a moving car.” This reference to Lorena Bobbit, and the emasculation of her husband John on the one-year anniversary of her abortion, makes it clear that the film is subtextually about the emotional and psychological emasculation at the hands of either a woman or a highly feminized system.

One of the teaser posters for Fight Club was simply a giant-text headline that says, “Wash your feminine side clean off.” This becomes the dominant background metaphor against which all three male characters in all three films struggle. In The Wall, as the film progresses, we see the link between the smothering mother of Pink, whose father died in the war, and the wall of social isolation and alienation built up brick by brick by endless consumer choices that serve as distractions from life’s more pressing realities. Interestingly, as the animated portions of the film take over, the Wall itself becomes symbolized by the mother, by feminine flowers that morph into ravenous female genitalia, and these are in turn analogized into the endless array of consumer products. The song “What Shall We Do Now?” accompanies this animated wall sequence with these words:

What shall we use to fill the empty spaces?
Where waves of hunger roar?
Shall we set out across the sea of faces
In search of more and more applause?
Shall we buy a new guitar?
Shall we drive a more powerful car?
Shall we work straight through the night?
Shall we get into fights?
Leave the lights on?
Drop bombs?
Do tours of the east?
Contract diseases?
Bury bones?
Break up homes?
Send flowers by phone?
Take to drink?
Go to shrinks?
Give up meat?
Rarely sleep?
Keep people as pets?
Train dogs?
Race rats?
Fill the attic with cash?
Bury treasure?
Store up leisure?
But never relax at all
With our backs to the wall.

In American Beauty, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) makes an explicit reference to Pink Floyd when visiting Ricky Fitts’s home. He speaks almost directly to the Pink Floyd imagery in the song above when he says to Carolyn, “This isn’t life, it’s just stuff!” in reference to their four thousand dollar sofa. And not coincidentally, the filmic image of human figures in front of walls is one of the recurring visual motifs each time a significant change happens in American Beauty. These are 1) Lester smoking pot against a white wall with Ricky outside at night, 2) the white plastic bag against the bricks of the red wall that is “the most beautiful thing” Ricky Fitts has ever filmed, and 3) Lester’s red blood against the white tiles of the kitchen wall after he has been murdered at the end of the movie. Thus, the wall in American Beauty implodes inward on the mind of Lester Burnham—whose sacrificial death atones for his own sins and the audience’s projected sins—releases the audience to see life as he sees it, with the inability to feel “anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.”


Lester Burnham, who is trapped in a loveless marriage to Carolyn, must struggle against his wife who keeps not only his “dick in a Mason jar,” but who also keeps everything in their life perfect, static, and spiritually dead. The screenwriter Alan Ball shows us this by associating Carolyn with the death of plants in the film, and by extension with her death-like effect on any element that is wild in nature. The film’s opening introduction to Carolyn’s character shows her snipping off a rose just below its stem with a fantastically glazed look in her eyes while her husband’s voiceover monotones, “See the way her gardening shears match her clogs: that’s no accident.” The rose, of course, is the American Beauty, a species grown to be visibly flawless and perfect, except that it tends to rot from underneath and within (and produces no smell, I’m told)—Ball’s restraint in not revealing this detail within the script itself makes it all the more delicious when we learn it later on, because it confirms all that his film has been saying—that a life led this way may as well be cultivating plastic flowers as anything real. Carolyn later discusses the root formation of a tree that the old neighbor has let grow into her yard, which is one reason she cut it down and why Lester secretly believes they moved out of the neighborhood. Finally, Carolyn is shown with a lesbian couple trying to sell the house when they complain that the backyard is not a tropical jungle, that it doesn’t have nearly the plant life they had been led to believe it had, and Carolyn weakly suggests, “I’ve got some Tiki torches in the back of the car . . .”

Under these conditions, the viewer is encouraged to be more sympathetic to Lester’s nonetheless pathetic condition in slavering over his daughter’s teenage girlfriend—Lester fantasizes about Angela as the sexual essence of a rose, who bathes in roses, and who kisses him so that afterwards, he pulls a rose petal out of his mouth. In the original script Lester does in fact have sex with Angela, but in the final version he only barely resists the temptation upon discovering that despite her horny cheerleader vulgarities, she is in fact a virgin.

Alan Ball, the screenwriter of American Beauty, so perfectly documents the dysfunction of middle class suburban perfectionism that one wonders if another, straight screenwriter could have had the aesthetic distance from which to perceive these hypocrisies. If it means anything that Alan Ball (American Beauty), Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club), and at least one of the Wachowski Brothers (The Matrix) are not completely heterosexual, then it may simply be confirmation of the truism that a cultural outsider is often the best one for analyzing the inside of a culture. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, we don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t a fish.

For Tyler Durden in Fight Club, the question is not one of an emasculating mother, but of an absent father. In the course of the film, before we discover that Jack and Tyler are the same character, the two of them discuss their respective fathers, who, in hindsight, are of course the same person:

Jack: I never really knew my father.
Tyler: Me neither.
Jack: My father divorced my mother when I was about six, moved to another town, married another woman, and started having kids with her.
Tyler: Fucker’s setting up franchises.

Later in the same conversation, Tyler says, “We’re a generation of men raised by women: I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.” The two men go on to form the fight club, which is essentially a form of primal scream therapy in which men vent their rage at the world (and their own failures) by physically pummeling each other. But throughout the film there is a phenomenal amount of homosexual subtext and inside jokes, from Tyler and Jack’s Ozzie-and-Harriet relationship to Jack’s dildo in his luggage to various clues that Marla Singer (and by extension, Jack’s heterosexuality), is also a figment of his imagination.

That Fight Club was originally a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, and that all of Palahniuk’s work deals with themes of homosexuality, are not surprising once you’ve read it, and especially not once Mr. Palahniuk himself came out publicly in 2003. But it is a complex and particularly honest portrayal, if Camille Paglia is correct in her assessment that a large part of explaining the rise in male homosexuality in the last three decades can be directly attributed to the divorce rate, and the subsequent rise in fatherlessness. But part and parcel of this feminization is the willingness to feed at the teat of consumer culture, and Tyler Durden soon evolves fight club into Project Mayhem, in which he takes on Adbusters-style culture jamming techniques as a means of social upheaval, rants and raves against consumerism and television, and ultimately attempts to blow up credit card buildings in order to restart the human race at the beginning by erasing the debt record and presumably making everyone truly equal again.


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