By LUCIANA MOLINA*

Foreword to the book by Joacy Ghizzi Neto

1.

1999. I wasn't yet a teenager when the film adaptation of Fight Club was released worldwide. In the following years, the film was consecrated and consolidated as a phenomenon cult. With that, a cascade effect: teenagers and young people began to list this film as one of their favorites.

The film, directed by David Fincher, stars Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and the ever-peculiar Helena Bonham Carter, Tim Burton's former muse. Bonham Carter is dressed in heavy makeup, black attire and a gothic air, in order to embody the solitary female presence in the role of Marla Singer.

It is easy to see how this film was able to engage with the general public and seduce them, becoming a mass phenomenon. If cinema, for Benjamin, is a kind of daydreaming, we can bet that many of the images that populate the collective unconscious at the turn of the 20th century to the 21st century are related to the Fight Club, with its anthological speeches, references and memes replicated en masse.

We are probably faced with a work of fiction that, to date, is one of the most exemplary cases of how fiction can contaminate reality and influence readers and viewers. In writing the afterword for the second edition of his novel, Chuck Palahniuk describes the replications of the Fight Club around the world, which, because they are so numerous, compete with the Werther Effect, the series of suicides that, according to tradition, would have taken over Europe under the influence of Goethe's book.

The impulse, if not thanatological, that is, guided by the death drive, is at the very least violent and destructive, and is expressed by the number of people willing to engage in fights and physical aggression on a regular basis.

We are talking about a work distributed from a system that embodies globalization in a different way from that outlined by Goethe with his concept of world literature. Fight Club It is yet another successful case of American production that, within the guidelines of the cultural industry, crosses the country's borders and dominates the world.

The film, based on Chuck Palahniuk's novel published three years earlier, seems to present content that was in full swing in the 1990s. Works such as Trainspotting (1996) American Beauty (1999) and American Psychopath (2000) also spoke to a public dissatisfied with the American way of life and the life promised by the American bourgeoisie. They began to flirt with another possibility of existence.

Part of its appeal comes precisely from the desire for another life beyond and beyond the insertion of consumer society. Even in a time of relative prosperity, such as the 1990s, capitalist society produced images and fantasies of escapism from its existential claustrophobia.

Our Economic-philosophical manuscripts, the young Marx shows that capital engenders the process by which the omnilateral human being is unilateralized by it. Thus, human potential becomes restricted to what is in accordance with capital. This supposed prosperity still significantly expropriates us, since we are inserted in reified models of education, work and leisure. Within this divided humanity, we do not know any real and effective prosperity.

In the early hours of November 9th to 10th, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. This event, by all indications, would mark the 1990s, and would be central to understanding the decline of Marxism, communism and the exultant trend towards neoliberalism. Fight Club and the other films from the 1990s mentioned should be read in light of the failure of real socialism and what the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized. The image of the fall meant, for many, the destruction of any alternative to capitalist society.

2.

Slavoj Žižek has an important understanding that is of great interest to aesthetic studies amalgamated with ideological issues. Although Hollywood productions have trafficked in ideology explicitly and implicitly since their emergence, there is something that should be observed with a closer look regarding ideological fluctuations within capitalist society over time.

In this scenario, we can ask ourselves in which directions the new narratives brought by the decade point. Thus, it is possible to observe more accurately what is at stake in the current situation. Fight Club.

The 1990s were the years that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, heralded prosperous periods for capitalism. So why, despite this, did these works appear, as symptoms of a pathos social still unsatisfied?

In 2021, I received an invitation to participate in Joacy Ghizzi Neto's doctoral thesis defense committee at UFPR. It was an unusual invitation, since I had never met him, but I received it with great interest, considering my own research. Thus, I had the opportunity to revisit my thoughts on this film, which marked not only my formation as a cinephile and art lover, but also an entire generation.

With this thesis, I found myself faced with interesting and extremely important hypotheses for thinking not only about Chuck Palahniuk's novel, but also about some of the impasses that left-wing critics must face. In addition, I better understood many of the reservations that I myself had about the work.

The conditions for defending the thesis were in themselves calamitous, as we were still going through the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic under the watchful eye of President Jair Bolsonaro. But, for that very reason, the debate concluded by the paper seemed extremely urgent, and even more worthy of attention.

Capitalism, due to its cyclical periods of crisis and prosperity, can sometimes disguise its precarious nature, especially for those who, in times of greater prosperity, manage to find themselves included in the chain of production and consumption. Despite this, the economic system has never been successful in eliminating the lumpenproletariat, poverty and hunger.

With the preface to the book Norm and transgression in the novel Fight Club, I embark on the hermeneutical endeavor of discussing the gains of Joacy Ghizzi Neto's work after the inauguration of a new Lula government in 2023. The various chronological moments intersect as I write. In this sense, I am not able to view the 8% unemployment rate announced by the new government with too much optimism.

We must also remember, with Fight Club and the thesis transformed into a book, that the capitalist system produces a reified humanity, in which many drown so that few can emerge.

It is absolutely essential that the debates led by Joacy Ghizzi Neto continue to take place, and that academia, and literary studies in particular, do not stifle research committed to criticizing capitalist hegemony. We know very well that, today, in Brazilian universities, there are not many spaces where we can observe these concerns.

Many of the studies that call themselves critical make commitments to short-term policies. Because of this, we can say without fear of being wrong that Joacy Ghizzi Neto's thesis stands out as a jewel shining almost alone in current national literary studies.

3.

Fight Club, and the analysis that Joacy Ghizzi Neto offers us touches on a central issue of recent years, which is how the betrayal of utopia has produced resentful masses. In his hypothesis of reading, the club, far from being a way out for the alienated work in capitalism, becomes its double.

I highlight the author's statement: “[…] In short, it is not a recovery to rear by the system of some emancipatory verve, since the success of the Paper Street Soap Company and the character's rise in class are already in the novel, as well as his conditions of existence and achievement were already duly codified in the imagination of the turn of the century and millennium. Fight Club It is in this sense a masterpiece of cutting-edge advertising, a radical encounter with the new configuration of capital at the turn of the millennium, and not its questioning (NETO, 2024, p. 159).

In the third chapter, which is especially thought-provoking, Joacy Ghizzi Neto shows the affinities between the representation of engagement in the work with the counterculture and a more playful and artistic way of managing work in current times.

The obsolescence of the counterculture outlined by Fight Club, both from an intradiegetic and extradiegetic point of view, points to appropriations of anti-establishment by capital, which, as a general direction, was already foreseen by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. The Frankfurtians' analysis indicated that the cultural industry is capable of appropriating almost anything, including artistic productions that counterpoint it.

More contemporarily, we can observe the theoretical developments of the phenomenon in Capitalist realism by Mark Fisher, a work that highlights the ways in which countercultural movements, such as grunge (represented by the iconic figure of Kurt Cobain), were appropriated by establishment.

This would not have happened only with Nirvana and cultural productions of the 1990s, but also with many other works of the following two decades. Just variations on the same theme. Wall-e, Breaking Bad., Succession: there are many examples of anti-establishment which ended up fostering the establishment. Fight Club seems to fit into this longer wave of anti-establishment which ends up falling into its exact opposite.

This explosion of ideological double-track narratives makes it clear that, as a common goal, we all still need to take stock of what art and literature are capable of expressing after the various counter-hegemonic movements that spanned the 20th century, such as the avant-garde, modernism, post-modernism and counterculture.

The romance Fight Club and its film adaptation still present many elements to be explored more carefully. Perhaps we are just beginning. The works, due to their eminently masculine character, need to be read in light of changes in gender identities. This dynamic of men who identify with Tyler Durden still needs to be better understood. To use an expression that is current today, but which was not used in the context of its most immediate reception, Fight Club It is also a novel about toxic masculinity.

4.

The appeal of the work, especially among male audiences, can be compared to what happens with Tropa de Elite, Taxi Driver and possibly some other Martin Scorsese films (almost all marked by a typically male subjectivity). The same appeal is found in other characters in culture pop, which, however crude and caricatured they may seem, still attract the identification of men, such as Captain Nascimento and Homer Simpson, whose catchphrases are repeated to exhaustion with apparent agreement from those who chant them.

The thanatological inclination of anti-menestablishment like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and, more recently, Javier Milei in Argentina, seem to have a lot to do with this valorization of figures who represent a traditional notion of masculinity. According to several surveys, it was also mainly men from the dispossessed social classes who voted heavily in favor of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro.

The resistance to assuming the crisis of masculinity as a potential for its reinvention seems to lead to identification with caricatures of the masculine represented by the cultural industry and from which Fight Club became one of the most forceful symbols.

As we move away from 20th century Modernity, it is possible to sketch out ideas to understand the times we are living through. In Marshall Berman's classic All that is solid melts into air, it is stated that Modernity is the first moment in which a historical era thinks about itself with more awareness.

But Modernity has already gone through several phases, and for this very reason it cannot stop thinking of itself as a historical-social transformation. In this way, one can understand the consummation of the work Fight Club as derived from an imaginative horizon that changes, becoming a concrete case of Capitalist realism pointed out by Mark Fisher, and which today attracts the attention of those committed to anti-capitalist criticism.

Neto presents a dense and full of discussion insights important information about contemporary life, its impasses and its fire escapes. Fight Club, and an efficient analysis of this work, touches us all. I also draw attention to the dialogues that the author makes with some of the most prominent contemporary theorists, such as Esposito, Safatle, Žižek, Blanchot, Badiou, among others, returning to burning questions of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Thus, with lucid arguments and a lively and attractive style, Joacy Ghizzi Neto leads us through issues such as the precariousness of work, expropriation and the ecological crisis in their new configurations at the turn of the millennium.

The critical and reflective developments of a tremendously popular novel and film have everything to find a warm reception. In the book written by Neto and which I had the privilege of rereading for the production of the foreword, the public can look at themselves and ask themselves what is in the novel and the film Fight Club that fascinates him so much and makes him feel attracted to them like bees to honey.

My bet is that Joacy Ghizzi Neto's work has everything to attract people interested in Fight Club, but also in contemporary art, literature and theory, as well as in the political situation and in what critical theory, in a broad sense, can still have to offer us.

I hope the reader will engage in the debates covered in the book. Here we talk and should talk about the Fight Club. With this project, we have a solid contribution to rethink the meanings of left-wing literary criticism.

*Luciana Molina She holds a PhD in Literary Theory and History from Unicamp. She is currently a lecturer for the Guimarães Rosa Reading Program, working at the Carolina University of Prague..

Reference

Joacy Ghizzi Neto. Norm and transgression in the novel Fight Club. São Paulo, Editora Dialética, 2024, 300 pages. [https://amzn.to/3HFE2B0]

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