Fight Club (II)

I looked everywhichway for Koko's review of Fight Club but she must have gotten irate and ate it and so it is no longer with us. How does Slothy feel about it? Strange. Unsettled. Confused by its contradictions. But not necessarily in a bad way, though not in a good way either. This just might be the worst best film I've seen. It is a philosophical film––and no chump philosophy neither––filmed by what appears to be an adolescent teenager.

It has too many gimmicks and it needs none of them. It works best as a metaphor (one which is unnecessarily explained to us) but spends a lot of time playing with its literal embodiment. It preaches too often. It is structurally untidy. It's a beautiful mess and perhaps needs to be watched more like a poem than a narrative.

One example of its perplexity: Tyler Durden is not fully awake to life. Part of that reason is because there's too much inner-dialogue in his mind, a constant ramble that prevents him from being fully present in his life. He's drowning in his own advertisements. The solution is to selectively listen to his more bitchin' self. Why one mad-man voice is better than the others is never considered. We only learn that to finally truly liberate himself, he has to kill that voice too. He has to, in other words, become a more solid self, which sounds like exactly the problem he started with. And so the movie captures the aesthetics of Buddhist inquiry––gritty, raw, honest, uncompromising––but muddles the philosophies themselves e.g. judge yourself harshly so that your ego may become free from judgement. Say wha?! I dunno. This is truly an A/D+ if there ever was one.

And didn't realize this was by David Fincher. Hmmm. The immature work of a burgeoning mind not yet in possession of restraint and accuracy? Need to watch the commentary track and see what the man's got to say for hisself.

Koko: Look harder, Slothrop. Also, of all the possible texts on the all possible worlds in this (or any other) universe, none may be less relevant to Buddhism than Fight Club. Unless some minority sect in Bangladesh practices its compassion with dynamite and machetes. In which case, nevermind, and cool.

Slothrop: Allow humble, archive-retarded Slothy to disagree with you, gorilla. Compassion, as far as Buddhism is concerned, is a natural end-product and way of seeing after awakening from a self-centered, self-occupied, self-conflicted, metaphorical dream. One cannot be compassionate while fundamentally self-anything. Therefore Buddhism is as much about compassion as tennis is about holding big silver cups over your head in front of the queen while standing on fancy grass. It is more about the ways we trap ourselves into destructive patterns of thought, and ways by which we can remove ourselves from those patterns. Once removed, compassion first becomes a tool for further freedoms, and then finally an end-product and natural expression of all those freedoms. Which is exactly what Fight Club is about. You haven't become an American-Buddhist-sissy by tragic accident, have you Koko? You ain't been sniffing lotus flowers underneath waterfalls have you? Please, just stick to the lakes and rivers you're used to.

Koko: FUCK. I just spent the last half-hour smashing your claims and emasculating you, as a person, with my august, superior wit. But apparently you've bribed the Blog to block me from embarrassing you, because IE froze, evacuated the page, and then restored it with nothing remaining but a mental vestige of my art. The argument's essence was that you're fantastically wrong. I'll explain why tomorrow, while my Seles avatar shows you, by example, how to serve some Scandinavian upstart back to his fjords and Vitamin D deficiencies.

Slothrop: Karma can't be bribed, you ogre.