“His name is Robert Paulsen”
[WARNING: SPOILERS.]
Watching Fight Club (1998, Brad Pitt, Edward Norton) with a friend the other night, I enjoyed myself by analyzing it with fresh eyes in light of a better grasp of postmodernism than I had the last time I’d seen it (at least a year ago).
In particular, the following. Insofar as Jack (Norton, the unnammed narrator) must imbue his world with meaning as the Everyman struggling to survive in light of a bleak and godless present, and insofar as Durden (Pitt) as the Nietszschean übermensch becomes a kind of antiheroic leader/god-figure among the men of “Project Mayhem,” the scene at Paper Street Soap Company immediately following Bob’s botched mission to “destroy a piece of corporate art and trash a franchise coffee bar” gives a biting critique of progressive theology—whether it “means” to or not.
When Angelface issues a stern edict to “bury him in the garden” in answer to a frantic cry that “we have to get rid of the evidence—we have to get rid of the body,” this god-figure expresses deep disgust and horror.
Jack: What are you talking about? This is not a f—king piece of evidence! This is a person! He’s a friend of mine and you’re not going to bury him in the f—king garden.
The objection comes from across the table on which sits this fresh corpse: “But sir, in Project Mayhem, we have no names.”
This dark figure rounds on him seriously, finger quivering indignantly, accusingly: “No, listen to me. This is a man and he has a name, and it’s Robert Paulson, ok? He is dead now, because of us, alright? You understand that?”
After a brief moment of silence, the dead man’s partner chimes in with quiet reverence: “I understand.” Turning didactically to his colleagues, as though having taken on a role of priest-mediator between this revelation so seemingly dripping for them all with gravitas, the scene recalls pagan sacrifice rituals on which scrolls of law would later be based. “In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name. His name is Robert Paulsen.”
The objector, now suddenly seeming as though recast as studious acolyte, quietly intones, “His name is Robert Paulsen.”
They all take up the cry for this the first true martyr of their gathering: “His name is Robert Paulsen. His name is Robert Paulsen….”
What do we see from this? A sardonic parody of the beginnings of tribal religion—and by extension, all religions, especially ones claiming progressive revelations (Christianity and Islam, e.g.). In the framework of postmodernism, Jack is only clinging to what he knows and is trying to make sense of the world around him; but as one of the founders of Project Mayhem, this everyman has taken on an incredible power for these men, his “followers,” who overinterpret simple statements and turn them into proverbs and parables.
This bleak picture of humanity seems characteristic of the late 1990s, now that we’re far enough from that decade to evaluate it at least a bit better in its historical context, with all its axioms, clichés, and presuppositions. In some sense, Fight Club is as clearly existential as No Exit or Edward Scissorhands, with an austerity of moral grounding that leaves man primal and with his own means of creating a meager truth for himself while he lives—and a bleak picture of the instinct to worship and sacredness that threatens to undermine this primal and paradoxically “higher” state of man.
4 Responses to ““His name is Robert Paulsen””
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Shandi Says:
May 2nd, 2007 at 16:34:35I enjoyed this analysis of a movie I have not seen, which is very different from the one given me by my brother, which in turn was the reason I haven’t seen it.
I think you make some very good points. Do you see a change in the intellectual climate now, perhaps due to 9/11? Or do you think that, as far as we are able to know, we are still in the midst of the same postmodern ethos you allude to?
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Michael Says:
June 28th, 2007 at 17:42:29I won’t lie to you, Shandi, it’s at times violent and vulgar, but even through the hip-hop MTV-style treatment of Palahniuk’s book, there is a rich palette of existential thought, of which I think the director was largely unconscious at the time.
It’s worth seeing because it’s still informative today, but I do think there’s a certain irony in Durden’s (Pitt’s) William Wallace-like call to arms to his fledgling underground boxing club: “We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.”
I think that’s truer in a sense than even Chuck P. knew. Let’s keep in mind this movie was produced in 1998. We had, for a fleeting moment three years later, a common foe and a unity of purpose. This attitude quickly faded back into precisely the selfish American consumerism that Pitt’s character Tyler Durden rails against: the “spiritual war” is the more important, the one between (if you like) advertising/marketing and the individual awareness of one’s true needs (i.e. for Tyler, fellowship, simplicity, anti-hierarchical interrelationships, &c.). Without that kind of standard, America and the West as a whole is always going to be more and more consumer-oriented, selfishly inclined, and lacking any unity or compassion for one’s fellow man.
That these points ride on the back of a movie about a neurotic Jack Everyman whose suffocation in a corporate bureaucracy takes an entertaining turn toward the markedly “uncivilized” makes it the more unexpected and delightful vessel for just such points.
As to your question, I think we are awash (as a culture, at least in America) in the postmodern just as much as we were in the 70s (Eraserhead ‘77), 80s (Blade Runner ‘82, Edward Scissorhands ‘90), and 90s, but it’s manifesting itself as differently now as it has in all three of those decades. It’s easy to point to Tim Burton or David Lynch films of the ’80s, for instance, and say, “Man, totally existential!” But it’s only because it was a stark and now-anachronistic representation of a philosophy that still lingers today.
The difference as I see it is a turn from
“It is highly plausible that Nietzsche was right and that God is dead, that Sartre was right and we are utterly alone in our inmost beings, and this is a terrifying and deeply sickening thought!”
–to a prouder, more irreverent atheism–
“the idea of God is an evolutionary appendage that no longer applies since we’re so advanced, once useful for survival of a newly-sentient race of animals; we are alone and we might as well get used to it”
–in the intellectual/academic crowd.
As we move closer to the arrogance of Rome, we repeat their mistakes, but now with a 1600-year post-Augustinian sophistication that has simply has a new terminology (hinging on the “emptiness” and “alone-ness” of our “inner selves”) to describe the progressively more self-centered, generally licentious condition of man.
(Admittedly I’ve had a great deal more fun thinking this through than such a hilariously black note seems to sound in my words above!)
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w00t Says:
August 15th, 2007 at 16:08:55What do I think? I thinkg AWESOME
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Casey Inman Says:
January 22nd, 2008 at 10:39:39When are we gonna hang out again dude? And why did you take my pictures off of the gallery?!
May 2nd, 2007 at 16:34:35
I enjoyed this analysis of a movie I have not seen, which is very different from the one given me by my brother, which in turn was the reason I haven’t seen it.
I think you make some very good points. Do you see a change in the intellectual climate now, perhaps due to 9/11? Or do you think that, as far as we are able to know, we are still in the midst of the same postmodern ethos you allude to?
June 28th, 2007 at 17:42:29
I won’t lie to you, Shandi, it’s at times violent and vulgar, but even through the hip-hop MTV-style treatment of Palahniuk’s book, there is a rich palette of existential thought, of which I think the director was largely unconscious at the time.
It’s worth seeing because it’s still informative today, but I do think there’s a certain irony in Durden’s (Pitt’s) William Wallace-like call to arms to his fledgling underground boxing club: “We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.”
I think that’s truer in a sense than even Chuck P. knew. Let’s keep in mind this movie was produced in 1998. We had, for a fleeting moment three years later, a common foe and a unity of purpose. This attitude quickly faded back into precisely the selfish American consumerism that Pitt’s character Tyler Durden rails against: the “spiritual war” is the more important, the one between (if you like) advertising/marketing and the individual awareness of one’s true needs (i.e. for Tyler, fellowship, simplicity, anti-hierarchical interrelationships, &c.). Without that kind of standard, America and the West as a whole is always going to be more and more consumer-oriented, selfishly inclined, and lacking any unity or compassion for one’s fellow man.
That these points ride on the back of a movie about a neurotic Jack Everyman whose suffocation in a corporate bureaucracy takes an entertaining turn toward the markedly “uncivilized” makes it the more unexpected and delightful vessel for just such points.
As to your question, I think we are awash (as a culture, at least in America) in the postmodern just as much as we were in the 70s (Eraserhead ‘77), 80s (Blade Runner ‘82, Edward Scissorhands ‘90), and 90s, but it’s manifesting itself as differently now as it has in all three of those decades. It’s easy to point to Tim Burton or David Lynch films of the ’80s, for instance, and say, “Man, totally existential!” But it’s only because it was a stark and now-anachronistic representation of a philosophy that still lingers today.
The difference as I see it is a turn from
“It is highly plausible that Nietzsche was right and that God is dead, that Sartre was right and we are utterly alone in our inmost beings, and this is a terrifying and deeply sickening thought!”
–to a prouder, more irreverent atheism–
“the idea of God is an evolutionary appendage that no longer applies since we’re so advanced, once useful for survival of a newly-sentient race of animals; we are alone and we might as well get used to it”
–in the intellectual/academic crowd.
As we move closer to the arrogance of Rome, we repeat their mistakes, but now with a 1600-year post-Augustinian sophistication that has simply has a new terminology (hinging on the “emptiness” and “alone-ness” of our “inner selves”) to describe the progressively more self-centered, generally licentious condition of man.
(Admittedly I’ve had a great deal more fun thinking this through than such a hilariously black note seems to sound in my words above!)
August 15th, 2007 at 16:08:55
What do I think? I thinkg AWESOME
January 22nd, 2008 at 10:39:39
When are we gonna hang out again dude? And why did you take my pictures off of the gallery?!