ABSTRACT
When David Fincher’s fi lm adaptation of Fight Club was released, I was teaching freshman composition at the University of Delaware. The mythic urban setting of the fi lm’s apocalyptic fi nal scene was not lost on my students living in a bank-friendly state, who consumed and reacted to the fi lm with far more vigor than they did the similarly themed American Beauty. Students intuitively connected with the fi lm’s contemporary representation of existential despair, and its visceral and easily assimilated expression of the latent feelings of isolation and aloneness that lurked beneath the relatively placid boom times of 1990s America. Some even responded to its over-the-top violence by imitating it clumsily. However, despite the fact that Tyler Durden’s fate does not suggest a particularly reassuring, or sustainable antidote to the vacancy of modern consumer culture, they were less inclined to see the fi lm as a critique of late-Capitalism, rejecting Louis Althusser and Dick Hebdige’s claim that all late-Capitalist rebellion was performative, and was, by defi nition, part of the very hegemony that it sought to dismantle.
