I know what you are thinking. How can these two films even be put together? And if you only looked at marketing genres, you would be right. Years ago when 'Fight Club' came out, I was struck by the audacity of hoping to pull together people to a common radical cause. We just don't do that in a post-suburban, multi-corporatised, cross-collateralised, post-modernity. We don't invest in one another as people as soldiers do. Our individualism and freedoms lead us further and further into our own little lairs, seated in front of computers down-loading images and sounds o objects of desires - whether that is shopping catalogues or porn, that is your preference, but that is the world we have come to.'Fight Club' appeared like a rock smashing the glass, thrown by somebody inside the glass house, just to remind us how trapped we have become. The chorus line of critics lined up to say how bad the film was and the world went on regardless. At the time I was working with female producer who had heard from a friend it was awful.
"Your friend said it was 'awful'?" I asked
"Yeah. He said it was just terrible."
"'He'?"
"Yes."
It was one of those classic moments in a company when you just think "I'm working with an ideologue" - and you resent it.
"Let me guess, he's gay, right?"
"How did you know?" She said, wide-eyed.
I just shrugged.
Well I can imagine a certain type of gay-pride culture to resent a film that tears down a picture of masculinity built around beauty and desire. What I understand now is that the fraternity of men that is not built around those things, is potentially hostile to the gay-pride-parade crowd. And the film makes no apologies for its own hetero-prejudices. Or maybe it was the abject fear of "poofter-bashings".
One of my favorite anecdotes about 'Fight Club' is how Rupert Murdoch saw it and got incredibly incensed that one his own companies, Fox Searchlight, produced it. He got on the blower and yelled at them and admonished them never to make such a film again. The old media tycoon certainly understood exactly who the thrown rock was aimed at, and he did not like that at all.
Yet what are the young dogs of our society to do today? Take up Parkour and run amuck through parks and streets? There is no street fight, no festival of the fist; there is no revolution, there is no cause. If you read 'Stiffed' by Susan Faludi, you will realise that men have been trapped by the consumer culture as readily and as completely as women. The so-called Crisis of Masculinity' isn't some advertising copy to sell toothpaste. It's actually out there, and people ignore it at their own risk.
'Old School' appeared four years later, and the masculinity in this film is equally an un-reconstructed barbarian heterosexual one. Yet, being a like a comedy in the style of 'Porky's' of old, it slipped past the cultural censors who do want to stifle the return of the testosterone charged hetero male. Don't ask me why. I can't imagine what's wrong with boys growing up boys, but it's been unacceptable for quite some time. 'Old School' actually presents a vision of a fraternity that is almost autochthonous.Whereas in 'Fight Club', the fraternity is born out of Jack's Insane Mind, the fraternity that forms around Luke Wilson's 'Mitch' character gathers to recapture a moment in life. Fight Club is stoic, Mitch's fraternity is epicurean and pleasure-seeking. What is really interesting that both films go through some very similar scenes, when the protagonist tries to explain to the love interest that he is not the crazy person he seems to be, but is interrupted by a waiter who is already a member or wishes to pledge.
Even the initiation rites in both films echo each other, both involve pain; but in the instance of 'Old School', the basement fight is an old WWII vet jelly-wrestling some topless co-eds. Both films have scenes where the boss accidentally finds the protagonist abusing the company photocopier for the purposes of the fraternity, as well as strong, uncharacteristic rebukes of corporate bullies. Both films present a transformed man at the end, who is probably better off for having recaptured their masculinity. Yes, feminists would be disconcerted, but that is exactly the point. In the absence of fathers men must make themselves, not take mother's advice.
Both films reject a productive position in society. As such, they do not buy into consumerism, but instead, reject it unequivocally. Fight Club defines itself by what it is not - Brad Pitt intones over the megaphone that the space monkeys are not their cars, their house, their khakis; they are not a unique and beautiful snowflake. Mitch's fraternity pledges that it will do as little as possible to help the university and part of its plan is to have as little responsibility to society; to not do any charity work, to simply be a fraternity of fun activities, with minimal links to the university. It's not that they are anti-social people - the society of their respective fraternities are highly social, and they are fine in that context. It is that they band together to reject the norm as presented by marketing and advertising. What's amazing is that these two films dovetail as two ways of working through the problem: one goes through stoicism, the other, epicureanism.
I don't know if I would be the sort to join a American-style fraternity as such. Such opportunities did not present themselves to me on my campus days. It seems a little hokey for my tastes. However, what is increasingly obvious to me now is that if men do not find some kind of fraternity, whether it be official or unofficial, they simply won't be surviving the emotional mayhem that is post-industrial capitalist society. Perhaps building Fraternity together with Liberty and Equality as the French Revolution once advocated, is indeed the way to go.
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