ABSTRACT
Fight Club (1999), David Fincher’s blockbuster, poses significant questions about ‘microfascism’: the heterogeneous, subterranean ‘other’ of political and social theory that, in spite of public denial, persists as sexism, racism, hooliganism, terrorism, fundamentalism and other ‘passionate attachments’. In the opening scene, we meet Jack, Fight Club’s protagonist, sitting in a chair with a gun in his mouth. He recalls the events that led him here, which are also the reason for the destruction of the skyscrapers he is watching through the windows. Jack’s flashbacks take us back over past months. He lives in an unnamed American city and has a well-paid job as a risk assessor in an insurance company, calculating the costs of recalling defective cars against the costs of losing cases in court. In an early scene, we watch him investigate a car filled with flesh of the victims burned into the seats. A central theme is hereby introduced: in capitalism everything is commodified, has a price, even human life. In this context we also get a taste of commodity fetishism; thus the camera shots panning Jack’s flat work in exactly the same way as browsing through an IKEA catalogue.
