The Ideologies of FIGHT CLUB and CITY OF GOD
20th centry fox/miramaxCinema can be used as a platform to express the multiplicity of problems people face in the world today. It can be a measure to express emotion, display art or discuss complex ideas. Despite this, film remains ‘an ideological product of the system’. As much as they seek to criticise the capitalist society in which we live, film remains a product of that very society. Nonetheless, both David Fincher’s Fight Club and Fernando Meirelles’ City of God use the cinematic platform to express their respective ideologies. Despite their differing backgrounds and commentaries, both adopt what Wollen calls ‘narrative intransivity’, with their films disrupting ‘the emotional spell of the narrative’, forcing the spectator to ‘reconcentrate and re-focus his attention’. This allows them to convey a variety of different socio-political messages to the viewer in one cohesive fictional, or pseudo-fictional, narrative. Despite this similarity, Fight Club opts for ‘emotional involvement with a character’, whereas City of God uses ‘multiple and divided characters’ to translate these messages, resulting in two different examples of ideological filmmaking.
The ideological basis upon which Fight Club is built largely concerns itself with a critique of consumerism, and a rejection of established social normality. This commentary is visible from the opening. Edward Norton’s Narrator claims “for six months, I couldn’t sleep”, repeated alongside visuals of Starbucks cups. This trance-like chanting, coupled with the mental deterioration of the insomnia he suffers, is reminiscent of society’s subjugation to a consumerist regime, as emphasised by these branded coffee cups. This ideology is bolstered by a subsequent scene where the Narrator finds himself surrounded by office drones drinking these aforementioned coffees, all dressed the same, with a bland colour pallet. This shows the extent of the consumerist regime, accusing it as a murderer of individuality. Cisney puts it best, claiming the Narrator ‘has no name, lives in a nameless city, and works for a nameless automobile manufacturer’. The ambiguity of our protagonist makes him a metaphor for the population as a whole, all assimilated under one consumerist regime, present in every aspect of day-to-day life. Despite the obvious visual impact of consumerism on the individual, Fincher suggests that it has infiltrated the fabric of human nature in a scene where our Narrator and Marla Singer argue over which support groups to attend, ‘the discovery of this emotional outlet soon turns, however, into another consumer addiction’. Through this emotion, the primary attribute of humanity that distinguishes us, is reduced to a commodity, as the consumerist regime commands we gain more and more of it. Fincher’s consumerist criticism, however, leads into another aspect of Fight Club that interrogates the flaws in society, that of toxic masculinity and its primitive roots. There is something cannibalistic about the now-iconic process of Tyler’s soap-making, taking waste from people bodies and using it to make ourselves better, or cleaner. Tyler ‘wants enforced simplicity, indeed primitivism’, and consuming human material for our own welfare has connotations of cannibalism, likely undertaken by the earliest members of the human race. Fincher claims that consumerism, a pillar of human progression and increased sophistication, simply masks the primitive side of humanity that remains.
Toxic masculinity is perhaps the most notorious ideology that Fight Club concerns itself with, some critics even claiming it enforces it, rather than challenges. Collado-Rodriguez claims this could arise as a side-effect to the prevalence of consumerism, ‘men trapped in a vicious enslaving cycle of production-consumption amid a collective imaginary that still expects them to behave as heroes’. Perhaps the primitive hunter-gatherer psyche that remains objects to what the Narrator calls “the IKEA nesting instinct”, gauging happiness in commodities. Toxic masculinity begins to rear its head upon the introduction of our only female character, Marla Singer, introduced as a corruptive force to the Narrator’s narcissistic lifestyle. This is likely due to the fact he cannot control her, ‘Marla does not “complete” him, nor he her . . . she is neither a prize nor a simple plot device’ . The presence of a complex female character is, initially, inherently wrong in the Narrator’s toxic masculine mindset. She is a woman independent of the existence of men, and viewed as destructive as a result.
This gives way to the introduction of Tyler Durden as the ultimate male fantasy of what a man should be. Whilst he exists within the Narrator’s mind, Fincher satirises this fantasy by making Durden fictional, emphasising the impossibility of his existence as someone who completely abandons society. ‘We can become self-aware and fight back against the forces that seek to subjugate us’. We can escape limits society sets, but only to an extent. The ideal man is limitless, with the boundaries of that limitlessness being extremism. Fincher comments that no matter how much we may want to escape society, these limits exist for a reason. The core of what Fincher explores in the realms of toxic masculinity comes in the shape of Brad Pitt himself. When Durden criticises male modelling on the subway, he is criticising himself, a chiselled, good-looking, famous, wealthy film star, embodying the very attributes his character rejects. Fincher says that whilst we like to think we reject these aforementioned social tentpoles such as consumerism and wealth, they are so ingrained in our lives that we subconsciously buy exactly what we’re selling. This is furthered in his sex scene with Marla. This scene is ultra-stylised with a focus on female nudity and orgasm, and thus the sexual prowess of the man. Condoms floating in the toilet represents how the ideal man views sex as disposable, and commitment as unnecessary. Tyler, the Narrator’s idealised version of himself, is a womanising, ultraviolent, anti-capitalist sociopath. Durden appears as the man we all want to be, until he doesn’t. Through the fictionalised Durden, Fincher exaggerates the inescapability of society, whether it be masculine, ‘the public sphere is phallically structured and coded’ , or feminine, ‘Fight Club reasserts a masculine identity threatened by the feminization of American culture’. Both the Narrator’s safe spaces, an Arctic cave, or Tyler’s house on Paper Street, are cut off from society. He is either trying to escape Cisney’s masculine society, ironic since that seems to be the very thing he stands for, or Clark’s feminine society, stunted by the fact that Marla, the woman he is infatuated with, is a prime example of an independent woman. Fincher exposes the futility of toxic masculinity by enforcing how those who embody it don’t know exactly what they’re fighting for.
Violence remains a critical constructive part of Fight Club, inferred to in the very title. The allure of violence or primal urges to its characters is an escape from real life. This is almost entirely the opposite in Meirelles’ City of God, in which the violence of everyday life is what the characters want to escape from. Middle-class frustration is replaced with lower-class repression, exaggerating the difference in ideological background between the two films and their filmmakers. The presence of violence is evident from the opening shot of City of God. The viewer is introduced to this world through violent imagery; the sharpening of knives, bloody carcasses littering the street. This is then enforced by the dominance of tyranny, as the first character we’re introduced to is the antagonistic Lil Zé at the height of his power. ‘The primary characteristic of this new kind of violence was that it became a means to reach socio-economic ascension, social recognition, and power’ , replacing the office-work-for-financial-gain of Fincher’s film with the fear-mongering-for-influence social gain of City of God. The fact we are first introduced to Lil Zé proves his power not only over the people that surround him, but over the camera itself. Violence in Meirelles’ film is the equivalent of consumerism in Fight Club, an integral part of life that proves inescapable to the characters caught within it. This is made especially clear with the rise of Lil Zé we see later in the film. ‘His ageing process and power are represented by a sequence of scenes portraying slaughters that he leads’, meaning that in a world dominated by violence and tyranny, as was explained in its opening minutes, the only viable path for the youth of the slums is one littered with violence. The story of the Tender Trio exemplifies the inevitability of violence, with any attempts to physically escape the slums resulting in death for the escapee, a physical manifestation of this imprisonment. Even the characters that the film obviously highlights as our protagonists are not exempt, with examples like Knockout Ned only becoming a hero through murder.
A secondary but equally integral ideology Meirelles includes in his film is that of class, and how it restricts those trapped in the City of God. This is manifested, once again, from the start, with the title card introducing protagonist Rocket imprisoning him. ‘As a result of his ability to take photographs – that is, produce images which are appetising to the middle-class press – Rocket escapes his roots in the City of God. Rocket is stuck in this society against his will, with the escape being to satisfy members of the middle-class who, through their ignorance, refuse to help otherwise. Rio de Janeiro is introduced as a picture-postcard city, with scenic shots of tranquil beaches, imitating the middle-class view, whilst the slums are almost entirely photographed with an uninteresting colour pallet. This visual distinction embodies the class divide at the heart of the film, ‘the lack of alternatives is represented by an almost total lack of reference to spaces outside the slums’.
Whilst several characters we follow in the film are undoubtedly antagonistic, Meirelles does not put this down to the individual, rather to a matter of class and the side-effects of this divide. During the motel robbery scene, middle-class victims are caught, almost comically, in the midst of sexual affairs with women unlikely to be their partners. This proves the distorted morality of people on both sides of this divide, commenting how the middle-class are better off because of the surroundings in which they were born, rather than on their actions. Meirelles uses the cinematic platform to stress the importance of breaking down this class divide in the final shot of the film, seeing the pre-pubescent Runts walking off into the distance, planning to start a gang of their own. This proves similar to the ending of Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario, in which, after the death of a cartel boss, gunshots are heard in the distance. Despite all the characters have been through, even the death of the main antagonist Lil Zé, the problems causing this violence are still there, and thus the cyclical process continues.
A final aspect to Meirelles film that proves important is interconnectivity. The narration between characters may simply be ‘a characteristic of modern Latin American cinema’ , but Meirelles puts particular effort into proving the cause-and-effect nature of this community, visible in the murder of Benny by Blackie after he took over their business much earlier in the film, ‘the past reconnects with the present, and their respective times become as one’. What this interconnectivity proves more important in doing, however, is connecting this fictional narrative to the real world. ‘The Loachian anthropological and social approach is central to City of God’s structure’. This objective is bolstered through the camerawork, which is done in a frenetic documentary style, and the commitment to realism and relevance with reality summarises Meirelles’ ideological goals with the film, a companion piece to the horrors that were really unfurling in the slums.
Fincher opts to critique how consumerism has become integral to everyday life in middle-class Western society, emphasising how this gives way to unearth primal masculine urges and ultimately, violence. Meirelles instead exposes how the interconnectivity of violence and class divide in South America damages the population as a whole. In their films, both filmmakers interrogate the issues they themselves face. As two examples of ideological filmmaking, they both reach effective conclusions, one criticising side-effects of developed Western society and modern living, the other attempting to expose to a wider audience the issues their country face. Either way, it is clear to see that cinema and dominant ideologies are inherently linked, and that each filmmaker brings their own subliminal perspectives and objectives to the construction of their respective films.
