This paper connects the reading biblical narrative about women with
the experience of viewing David Fincher's film Fight Club. To
do so first requires understanding Marla Singer, the primary female
character in Fight Club, as the linchpin in a Freudian psychodrama.
Using Freud as a guide allows for an exploration of what this film says
about the formation of male identity while also providing space for
reflection on how the production of maleness simultaneously generates
religious systems or religiously-oriented norms. Within this interpretive
framework, comparison of Marla's position and function to that of women
in biblical narrative and feminist reading of such reveals some striking
similarities.
[1] Feminist biblical critics typically see the bible as a predominantly
male-focused text. As J. Cheryl Exum states in the preface to her book
Fragmented Women: Feminist (Sub) versions of Biblical Narratives,
"in narratives of the Bible, women are usually minor characters
in the stories of men. The 'stories' of women...are parts of the more
cohesive stories of their fathers, husbands, and sons - fragments of
the 'larger story' that biblical scholarship has traditionally taken
as the story."[1]
While such a declaration might appear, at least initially, to indicate
that women lack significance in these texts, on many occasions the actions
of biblical women, or the actions taken against them, drive the plot
and propel the story.[2] Readers, trained over time to think of female
characters as little more than window dressing or mere functionaries
in the plotting of the male characters' stories, often fail to appreciate
the ways in which these women serve as the ground for definitions of
maleness as well as the locus for the generation of masculine culture.
[2] In David Fincher's 1999 film Fight Club, viewers frequently
understand the character of Marla Singer in a similar fashion.[3]
A short review of the film by Stanley Kauffmann illustrates the point
when he writes, "Helena Bonham Carter plays a druggie slut who winds
into the lives of both men, principally because the film needs a woman
and the two men need a chance to display their sexual prowess or lack
of it."[4] For this reviewer,
Marla exists primarily to serve the Hollywood movie formula by providing
the requisite love interest in an otherwise male film. He does not elaborate
on why the ability to act sexually with her stands out as a core issue
with these men or the connections the director draws between sexual
performance and authentic masculinity. The narrator and lead character
of the film, however, in his initial introductory voice-over about how
fight club and all that ensued from it came to be for him, its founder,
reports "and suddenly I realize that all of this - the gun, the bombs,
the revolution - has got something to do with a girl named Marla Singer."
Indeed, on close inspection of the film, Marla emerges as the focal
point in this male-dominated drama; although positioned on the periphery
of male power, possession of her body becomes the key to identity as
well as social, cultural and sexual power for the men.
[3] For readers unfamiliar with the basic plot of the film, Gary Crowdus
offers a quick synopsis in his Cineast review:
Narrated in a first-person, stream-of consciousness manner, Fight
Club chronicles the misadventures of a thirty-year-old corporate
nebbish (Edward Norton) - identified only as the narrator ...- whose
dehumanizing job...., combined with a self-confessed enslavement to
lifestyle consumerism, have fueled a six-month-long bout of insomnia
and a personal sense of despair so great that he secretly yearns for
a plane crash to end his meaningless existence. [This narrator] becomes
involved with a pair of eccentric social misfits - Marla Singer (Helena
Bonham Carter), with whom he shares an emotional addiction to attending
support groups for the terminally ill, and Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt),
a charismatic free spirit with whom [he] organizes a 'fight club'
in the basement of a local bar where they and other disaffected young
men find temporary physical and emotional release for their pent-up
frustrations. The unusual, three-way relationship that develops between
Marla, Tyler, and [the narrator] propels the latter on an increasingly
violent quest for personal redemption, which, in a bizarre plot twist
late in the film, confronts him with a startling self-discovery.[5]
First encounters with the narrator of the film introduce a man exhausted
by the perceived futility of his life and desperately seeking something
authentic, something that will offer him release. Emasculated by a job
where he has no power, a lifestyle that enslaves him to consumer impulse,
and with no close relationships to other human beings, he initially
finds some temporary solace in "Remaining Men Together," a support group
for men with testicular cancer, men who embody his emasculation in a
physically tangible way. The narrator explains near the outset of the
movie how being with the sick and dying, here and in a variety of other
support groups he attends, cures his inability to cope with this culture
and frees him. "Losing all hope is freedom," he says, because he can
now accept hopelessness as his reality and develop strategies for surviving
through the almost religious rituals of these groups. "Every evening
I died, and every evening I was born again - resurrected," he tells
the viewer. In describing his experience with Bob, a man who developed
breasts as the result of hormonal fluctuations, he intones, "Bob loved
me because he thought my testicles were removed, too. Being there, pressed
against his tits, ready to cry, this was my vacation." He then adds,
"And she ruined everything."
[4] The "she" here is Marla Singer and the narrator's respite
ends with her arrival on the scene. Marla's presence introduces the
complication of his inadequacy with women as well as embodies the problem
of what the film labels feminine culture. The narrator cannot possess
her because he lacks power as a fully developed man, a deficit the society
itself produced within him. Unable to process what she means to his
emotional stability, he simply resents and blames her. "This chick,
Marla Singer, did not have testicular cancer. She had no diseases at
all. . . . Marla - the big tourist. Her lie reflected my lie. Suddenly
I felt nothing. I couldn't cry. So, once again, I couldn't sleep." Film
critic Christopher Sharrett observes of the movie, "The anger directed
at the feminization of America is as explicit as its hysterical anti-consumer
preoccupation. The source of frustration is constantly located in the
female, whose presence, embodied in ...[Marla], looms over the film
like a death's head. She is either a prize to be possessed or an unhealthy
part of the male conscience that must be denied."[6]
Lacking the ability to express the anger he imagines toward her, she
brings to fruition a profound crisis in the narrator's psyche. Marla
provokes the emergence of Tyler Durden and initiates the narrator's
odyssey away from traditional support groups and toward the aggressively
male expressions of the fight club and Project Mayhem.
[5] When Tyler Durden bursts on to the scene, he engages the world
not only as a powerful alternative identity to the narrator, but also
as the herald of a counter-cultural movement. Good looking, charismatic,
sexy, and brimming with a philosophy of male anger and rage, Tyler embodies
all the qualities the protagonist perceives himself to lack. As Tyler
says to the narrator when discussing why and how he came into his world,
"You were looking for a way to change your life. You could not do this
on your own. All the ways you wish you could be - that's me. I look
like you want to look, I fuck like you want to fuck. I am smart, I'm
capable, and, most importantly, I'm free in all the ways that you are
not." Moreover, Tyler does something that the support groups could never
manage - he shows the narrator a lasting way outside of the feminized
consumer culture that enslaves and incapacitates him:
The catalyst for [the narrator], who [Tyler] nicknames 'Ikea Boy,'
to dump his cozily crisp Scandinavian modem digs for [Tyler's] rat-hole,
where even sheets on the bare stained mattresses would be too soft,
is an exchange the two men have when they meet on an airplane. [Tyler]
asks [the narrator] if he knows what a duvet is - he does - and poses
the philosophical inquiry, 'Why do guys like you and I know what a
duvet is? Is this essential to our survival in the hunter-gatherer
sense of the word?' And thus [the narrator's] horrifying textile awareness.....sends
him to the rest of the film which is all about bloody male bonding
and hitting and is more or less furniture free.[7]
Tyler is the freedom the narrator lost when Marla came along; he starts
a wild sexual relationship with her, he lives in a run-down house free
of any "feminine" consumer trappings, and he builds his community among
"real" men who fight bare-fisted and actively tear down a social system
that no longer works for them.
[6] Fincher withholds the true nature of the relationship between the
narrator and Tyler until near the conclusion of the movie. Alongside
the narrator, the viewers come to realize that the narrator is Tyler
Durden, or, rather, that the narrator creates Tyler, a fully formed,
breathing alternative self, nurtured in the deepest recesses of his
wounded psyche. To understand this trick of the mind and the nature
of this illusion, Sigmund Freud's three-fold division of the personality
into the id, ego, and the superego offers a convenient paradigm that
not only accounts for the narrator's psychic construction, but also
can explain how both men relate to Marla and the connection between
those relationships and the formation of culture.[8]
While a Freudian point of access to the movie can certainly be troubling
in its construction and necessarily limits other interpretive options,
it nonetheless generates an intriguing, if not unproblematic or exclusive,
reading.
[7] According to Freud, the biological drives that comprise the id,
the libido or sex drive and thanatos, the death instinct, always exist
within the personality and follow the 'pleasure principle,' the desire
to seek pleasure as the primary mission. A second part of the person,
the ego, "seeks to bring the influence of the external world to bear
upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavors to substitute the reality
principle for the pleasure principle which reigns unrestrictedly in
the id. ...The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense,
in contrast to the id, which comprises the passions."[9]
These oppositional forces operate in tandem, shape human development
from infancy, and must be understood in relationship to the Oedipal
Complex. As a male infant develops sexually, he experiences desire for
his mother, but fears his father's power, particularly the power to
castrate him. Consequently, he represses his desire for his mother due
to the father's prior claim, but in his willingness to submit to his
father's power, he ideally replaces his desire for his mother with "an
intensification of his identification with his father. ... (This) permits
the affectionate relation to the mother to be in a measure retained
(and) in this way the dissolution of the Oedipus complex would consolidate
the masculinity in a boy's character."[10] For normal individuals, their desires "are
repressed, made inaccessible to our thinking.....[and] (o)ur repressed
desires only appear to us disguised as dreams, symptoms, and other seemingly
incoherent, uncontrolled actions."[11]
When a person fails to successfully negotiate through these stages,
neuroses arise and express themselves in the world. The narrator in
Fight Club struggles with such neuroses as Tyler Durden breaks
loose from his inner turmoil as his id, the force of his basic desires,
and engages in uncontrolled passion with Marla (libido), the violent
interaction with the men in fight club, and the destruction of the culture
that strips men of their masculinity (thanatos). Running amuck in all
kinds of chaotic behaviors, he refuses the reality impressed upon him
in the ego, the narrator, because he rejects the standards the society
imposes upon him. Here, Freud proves helpful again in his explanation
of the third element of the personality - the superego.
[8] An internalized sense of what one should look like in the world
in opposition to how one actually appears through behavior, the superego
functions as an interface with the cultural norms of a society. Freud
holds that when the infant boy represses his oedipal desires, he does
so by borrowing strength from the father and creating a father within
himself. Then, "as a child grows up, the role of the father is carried
on by teachers and others in authority; their injunctions and prohibitions
remain powerful in the ego ideal and continue, in the form of conscience,
to exercise moral censorship."[12] Thus, for Freud, "in their very first years,
all human beings begin to discover that unless they can find a balance,
unless they can control their colliding desires, there can be neither
a family nor a society and hence no framework of security for the self.
Restraints must be placed on some of our urges, for without them we
cannot have a civilization, and without civilization we cannot survive."[13]
In other words, the external world's social order comes from incorporating
the power and authority of the father into one's own psyche and it consistently
receives reaffirmation from that society's institutionalized authorities.
[9] Fight Club indicates that the narrator's psychic development
went askew early, partly because he lacked the opportunity to successfully
negotiate these stages. In one conversation, Tyler asks him who he would
fight if he could choose anyone. He replies it would probably be his
boss, the only figure of authority who comes to mind as worthy of resistance
in his current life. Tyler immediately responds that he would choose
his dad. In the ensuing conversation, we discover the narrator's father
left the family when the narrator was six and then repeated the pattern
with subsequent families. Tyler then shares a story about his father
that the narrator affirms as his own. Pushed to go to college because
his father did not, Tyler calls him up at graduation and asks what to
do next. His father tells him to get a job. Another inquiry about the
next step receives a reply to get married. The narrator intercedes here
and in a startling moment of insight and clarity muses, "I can't get
married. I'm a 30-year-old boy." He knows, on some level, that his emotional
maturation is stunted, leaving him incapable of a stable, adult relationship.
[10] Significantly, the movie further posits that the narrator's life
tale does not stand isolated from that of other men. At the conclusion
of their talk about families, Tyler makes this story of absent fathers,
meaningless employment and lives, and the inability to maintain a mature
relationship, a paradigmatic male experience. He concludes the scene
by remarking, "we're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering
if another woman is really the answer we need." And herein rests the
problem for the film. The absence of his father meant the narrator's
development could not proceed normally. While Freud held that "in the
case of his (the father's) absence or failure to take up the symbolic
function, other authority figures - the teacher, headmaster, policeman,
or ultimately God - may take his place in instilling in the child the
sense of lawfulness and willing submission to social customs,"[14]
such a replacement never happens here. It cannot, because the whole
culture experiences this loss of fathers, and so alternative authorities,
specifically feminine or feminized ones, become dominant. In Freud,
mothers typically underscore the position of the father and impose his
will because of his presence in her life and in the household, thereby
creating a place for herself personally and in the larger cultural economy.
But as Tyler indicates, the entire system went wrong here as mothers
assumed the roles of fathers and created, in the vacuum of their absence,
a value system that prevents men, in this case all men within our culture,
from being able to form and to express authentic masculinity. Men therefore
rightly resist relationships with women because such relationships continue
the diminution of masculinity and erode the possibility of a society
reflecting "male" values.
[11] Religion was one of the authorities Freud saw as supporting the
ideals of the superego. In writing on Freud, Otto F. Kernberg observes:
Freud proposed that the superego reflects the internalization of
the external demands posed by culture, controlling by means of its
prohibitions the discontent or disadvantaged social classes, and providing
narcissistic and substitute gratifications through the positive influence
of ideals and artistic creativity. He proposed religious imagination
contributed to achieving the overall cultural objective of civilizing
interpersonal relations by reinforcing prohibitions against drive-derived
behavior and interpersonal aggression, while providing consolation
regarding the uncertainties of human destiny, and explaining the apparent
indifference of nature by humanizing it.[15]
Fincher uses Tyler Durden to question the values of the superego by
rejecting the culture that embraces consumerism and designer goods with
religious fervor because Tyler knows that absent fathers lie at the
root of this social order and thus it must be rejected. During a scene
where he marks the narrator's hand with a lye chemical burn, calling
it moment of premature enlightenment, he encourages the narrator to
abandon his societal moorings altogether with the following logic:
Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what
does that tell you about God? Listen to me! You have to consider the
possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all
probability, he hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen.....We
don't need him.....Fuck damnation, man. Fuck redemption. We are God's
unwanted children. So be it!
Tyler voices an idea of God, and thus a series of norms enforced by
that God, that reflect his story of abandonment by his father. The only
option for men seeking a true male culture comes in complete and total
resistance to all the standards reigning in their true selves, a resistance
marked by a skin-burning ritual, a resistance maintained by the regular
practice of brute force, a nihilistic resistance embraced even to the
point of death.
[12] Marla becomes the symbolic battleground in this struggle.
In his writing on 1970s and 1980s American film and masculinity, James
William Gibson observes, that "it is hardly surprising, then, that American
men - lacking confidence in the government and the economy, troubled
by the changing relations between the sexes, uncertain of their identity
or their future - begin to dream, to fantasize about the powers
and features of another kind of man who could retake and reorder the
world. And the hero of all these dreams was the paramilitary warrior."[16]
Fight Club represents a slightly altered, later extension of
the same themes as it describes men failing to fulfill their potential
and instead pursuing what advertising tells them they want and need
or what dreams the media instills in them about who they are. As Tyler
intones, "we are the middle children of history, man, no purpose or
place. We have no great war, no great depression. Our great war is a
spiritual war, our great depression is our lives." Re-imagining themselves
and their world provides the outlet of meaning they need, but instead
of paramilitary warriors, they become anarchist urban commandos. Gibson's
comments nonetheless remain helpful as he notes that, in this genre,
"all women are black-widow women. To be sure, there are several different
subspecies, but all are dangerous creatures, enemies of one kind or
another who are to be avoided, mastered, or killed."[17]
The narrator of Fight Club attempts all three approaches with
Marla.
[13] Once Tyler arrives on the scene, the narrator begins by avoiding
Marla. When he needs a place to stay, he calls her first, but hangs
up when she answers and seeks out Tyler instead. He ceases attending
the support groups where she dwells and sees her only once, in a brief
foray past his old haunts. When she reenters the narrator's life as
his lover, she is safely mastered in his bed even though he cannot yet
acknowledge his own sexual liaison with her, but rather can only feel
enraged as she invades his home with Tyler in the same way she did his
support groups. When the narrator begins to comprehend his own split
self, Marla faces a danger she does not see. She knows the narrator
as Tyler Durden and ultimately becomes the one who confirms his suspicion
that he and Tyler are one and the same. She also represents the narrator's
one chance to fully control Tyler by reintegrating him and so, in a
desperate attempt to secure his own survival, Tyler threatens to kill
her to maintain his own position.
[14] Fincher, however, places more emphasis on mastery as the
key to how the narrator ultimately relates to Marla; he cannot become
fully realized as a man until he can perform sexually. The film symbolizes
Tyler as a "nice big cock." When describing Tyler to the viewers, the
narrator shows how he works as a projectionist to change the reels of
the film and, in the course of that job, splices in single frames of
pornography (a male penis) that people see and process in some way,
but never with any certainty about what they experienced. Fincher does
the same thing with his audience, splicing in Tyler at key moments early
in the film to indicate the narrator's internal trauma before Tyler
enters fully into the world. The first shot comes as he describes insomnia,
the second as the doctor advises him to go to the testicular cancer
support group to see real pain, the third at the group when the leader
asks the men to all really open up, and the final when he watches Marla
walk away one evening. That cock, however, is useless to the narrator
as he cannot function as a man in his world and so Tyler expresses the
manhood too long denied by his host. As the repressed and raging libido,
as the embodiment of all the 'cock' signifies, Tyler can aggressively
use Marla for sexual release in romping, cathartic releases of all the
narrator's primal desires. The narrator, on the other hand, can only
listen, ignore, and grow more frustrated and angry.
[15] Her importance to his dilemma appears to the viewer initially
in one of his support group visualization exercises. Encouraged to enter
his "cave," or inner self and to find his "power animal," we first watch
the narrator imagining a remote arctic cave and a penguin, a rather
benign presence at best. Once he meets Marla, she recurs as the animal
in that space; she exists at the heart of his self-understanding and
represents what he must tap into in order to unleash his personal power.
Integrating what Marla symbolizes, possession of the mother and acceptance
of his role as a father, must occur for him to establish himself as
a man and must, necessarily, require taming and controlling Tyler even
as he learns to exist in the larger cultural frame he himself -- as
Tyler Durden -- is attempting to overthrow and redefine.
[16] Affirmation of her power position comes most clearly at the conclusion
of the movie. After the narrator discovers his connection to Tyler,
they lock into a final confrontation for control of his personality.
Standing in an abandoned office, they are poised to watch the collapse
of several buildings from explosive charges set by the members of Project
Mayhem as a strike against the financial system underwriting the consumer
culture they despise. The narrator sent Marla away for her own safety
earlier in the day, but here, the two men watch her arrive accompanied
by the troops of Project Mayhem on the street below them. To win, to
take over as the permanent force of this personality, Tyler needs to
destroy the one person and the one symbol that ultimately threatens
him - Marla. For the narrator, Marla enfleshes the only chance he possesses
of integrating his id, Tyler, and erecting a permanent, lasting identity.
If he can assume a fully masculine role with her, then he can satisfy
his basic drives and complete the development of self diverted in his
childhood.
[17] The narrator survives Tyler's onslaught by choosing Marla, protecting
her by physically enacting the repression he needs to complete. On that
final night, he takes the steps necessary for wholeness by shooting
himself in the head in order to kill Tyler. With part of his face blown
away and still reeling from the force of the bullet, he clears the room
of everyone except Marla and then takes her hand, as the world explodes
around them. The collapse of all of the faux-phalluses in a violent
orgasmic explosion, that is the loss of the buildings that evoke male
power but truly function financially to entrench feminized culture,
means the dissolution of that society and the making of a way for real
male power to emerge. Viewers catch the briefest flash of a penis, like
the earlier flashes of Tyler, as he now becomes what he actually is
- the sexual drive of the narrator now appropriately sublimated and
channeled. Susan Faludi writes, "when... [the narrator] sends the boys
away in the final scene, and throws his lot in with the defiant, if
deviant, woman he's been afraid to court, he seems poised to finally
begin life as an adult man. Director David Fincher called his film 'a
coming-of-age story about choosing a path to maturity.' For men facing
an increasingly hollow, consumerized world, that path lies not in conquering
women but in uniting with them against the hollowness."[18]
[18] Wanting to read the ending as positive for women, Faludi's reading,
like Fincher's, varies from a Freudian paradigm. While this avenue would
be interesting to explore as a reading, neither acknowledges how the
narrator uses Marla to establish his own identity, nor accounts for
her central position in his drama. Freud, on the other hand, argues
that when adult men enter into sexual relationships that "the lover
repeats the structure of his infantile narcissistic relations with the
mother, where he is affirmed as the object of her desire, the phallus
for her."[19] In other
words, this repetition of power relations does not affirm the woman,
but rather the man "displaces his infantile narcissism onto an extraneous
love object, and, by projecting her as an extension of himself, is able
to receive his narcissistic investment back." Sexual relationships thus
bring the man to full realization or actualization while doing nothing
for the woman other than positioning her properly in his life. The film
can be read as underscoring such a view given how the narrator uses
Marla for his own identity formation; viewers know only what he knows
of Marla and see her character only in relation to his unfolding drama.
Marla's history, Marla's struggles, Marla's identity, what drives Marla
never come to the forefront of the story and no detail of her existence
receives inclusion unless crucial to moving the viewer toward more clarified
visions of him.
[19] When understood within this interpretive framework, Marla can
be seen as functioning much like women in biblical narrative. While
finally not about her, she drives the story line and defines the relationships
between men. As Mieke Bal writes in her book Lethal Love,
It is my contention that, in spite of major differences in innumerable
readings of the Bible, there has been in Christian, Western culture
a continuous line toward what I refer to as 'the dominant reading':
a monolithically misogynist view of those biblical stories wherein
female characters play a role, and denial of the importance of women
in the Bible as a whole. Let me add right away that this does not
imply that all female characters are seen as negative, quite the contrary.
It does imply that any positive view of a female character has to
be reevaluated for its recuperation within male interests.[20]
In her work on characters such as Eve, Tamar, Delilah, and Ruth, Bal
moves within the overarching male stories to find the women characters
and to illustrate how they work within the constellations of male power.
Similarly, Bernard Brandon Scott evokes anthropology and speaks of women
in Mediterranean cultures as "embedded in a male, first in her father,
then in her husband, and finally in her son,"[21]
before concluding that "the bible, as a sacred text, has been important
in transmitting and enforcing the myth of female embeddedness in the
West."[22] In his chapter
on men and women, he connects this understanding of biblical story to
various women characters in Hollywood film. Acknowledging the disappearance
of women characters into the narrative and social worlds dominated by
men, whether in the biblical text or in film, cannot alone, however,
establish the connection between these two media proposed in this paper;
one brief biblical example will help to illustrate the point.
[20] In their review of Absalom's revolt against his father, King David,
Fewell and Gunn recount the march of the son into Jerusalem and the
counsel of Ahithophel in 2 Samuel 16:21 to "Go in to your father's concubines,
the ones he has left to look after the house; and all of Israel will
hear that you have made yourself onerous to your father, and the hands
of all who are with you will be strengthened." They conclude, "That
the son has entered his father's city is not enough; he must enter his
father's women. This is the act that will signal the ultimate dispossession
of the king his father. Thus politics are written on women's bodies
- not for the first time, nor the last - in this story of kingship and
nationhood."[23] The
creation of a nation through the agency of a king demanded order on
the social front and that order, much like the chaos that preceded it,[24]
found expression in women. Women represent the land - hearth and home
- and the control of women founds the stable culture within which male
power can be exercised. David, for example, seeks to consolidate his
power as the anointed of God, the king, the locus of patriarchal power,
through, in part, Michal, daughter of Saul. Their marriage, even if
vacated for a number of years, gives him a legitimate place in the house
of the first anointed king and a platform to initiate his claim on the
throne of Israel (2 Samuel 3:12-16). He deals with Saul's right hand
man, Abner, to achieve his goals after Abner proves his strength in
the house of Saul by taking Rizpah, Saul's concubine who bore him two
sons (2 Samuel 3:6-11). Similarly, David's inability to manage his household
and stem the behavior and ambitions of his own sons, also reveals itself
in the stories of women; the rape of his daughter and Absalom's sister
Tamar by David's eldest son Amnon initiates Absalom's efforts to become
the next king even as his father lives - an effort that culminates in
the taking of the concubines on the palace roof.
[21] As with Marla in the movie, none of these women, or the many others
in the kingship narrative, receive mention in an attempt to tell the
reader something about their lives, their stories, their realities.
Fewell and Gunn drive the point home when writing of Michal. "So Michal
disappears into the king's house, along with other women, wives, and
concubines, named and nameless. Did they live separately or in each
other's company, those many women?"[25]
The question poses an issue of no concern to the narrator for the narrative
impulse in this tale rests solely with the men competing for the power
to establish personal and national identity. In such a scheme, women
exist as plot devices, exemplars of power or its loss, or grounds for
symbolic struggle, and can only grasp subject status for the briefest
of moments before becoming subsumed in the men's world again.
[22] Esther Fuchs maintains that many of the problems with reading
women in biblical narrative come not from the text alone, but from the
readers. "The absence of a critical perspective in contemporary criticism
of the Bible delegitimizes a priori any attempt to question the Bible's
patriarchal ideology, which sanctions the dominance of men over women."[26]
While eviscerating contemporary literary criticism in particular, she
simultaneously promotes reading strategies sensitive to the ideological
agendas at play in biblical narrative. Alice Bach makes a similar point
when she advocates "shifting the gaze from the narrator's eye to the
reader's 'I' is especially important for feminist readers since the
elements of structural analysis applied to character often deflate female
biblical characters, who are not usually the focal point of narration."[27] Such a reading strategy does not, indeed it cannot, altogether
reorient the power structure of the stories themselves or locate the
female characters in positions of prominence. What Bach asks of critics
is to "endorse a strategy that allows the reader to step outside the
reader's appointed place in order to defy the fixed gaze of the male
narrator, [and] instead of believing the narrator, imagine him as a
combination of dual subjectivities, as a presenter of Israel's moral
and theological position, and as the one whose version of the stories
we are hearing."[28] That is, Bach implores readers to question
the narrator and whose interests the stories serve and why they unfold
as the narrator tells them, while imagining what other possible stories
could and do exist. By placing the focus on women, she invites the reader
to look past the surface-level of narration and the story line as presented
and to look toward all of the other possible stories arcing through
the fabric of the tale. In such a way, the ideological perspective of
the narrative voice becomes more apparent as ideology and the reader
can then see the deployment of the characters within that world view
and the limitations such a positioning places upon them.
[23] Reading Fight Club with Marla oriented as a Freudian centerpiece
to the plot does not make her a fuller or more realized character and
certainly does not redeem the movie for women. Nor would I call it an
inherently feminist reading of the film, given that it merely explicates
her place within a hermeneutical approach that has been the subject
of a well-deserved historical critique. Just as women in biblical narrative
move and breathe in a male-dominated world, and readers of that text
often accede to that power dynamic without questioning its values, so
do modern viewers of film frequently accept women as accessories to
male plots in our own contemporary narratives and fail to think about
why women function this way in our movies. But focusing on Marla does
open up inquiry into constructions of gender, and asks viewers to consider
why the societal and cultural norms represented feel appropriate and
natural. As Esther Fuchs says of biblical stories, "when all is said
and done, the biblical narrative justifies the domination of women and
children - by male heads of households, and male national and religious
leaders. The fictional world constructed along these androcentric perceptions
and patriarchal precepts has become a powerful discourse that continues
to shape our collective imagination and cultural scripts, our lives
and our histories."[29] By bringing those women who live on the margins, in the bible
and in contemporary film, to the centre, and by thinking about why those
margins and centres exist, the stories shift slightly. In that movement,
the possibility opens up that readers and viewers will begin to conceive
of gender differently and will demand new kinds of narrative for new
avenues of religious and cultural thinking and expression.
Notes:
[1] J. Cheryl Exum, Fragmented
Women: Feminist Sub (versions) of Biblical Narratives (Valley Forge,
PA: Trinity Press International, 1993), 9.
[2] Consider, for a few
examples, the woman's eating of the fruit in Genesis 3 as the initiation
into the larger biblical narrative, or Sarai's decision to present Hagar
to Abram in Genesis 16 as the provocation of a later family crisis.
Likewise, Dinah's setting out to visit the women of the land provokes
a crisis between her family and other peoples when she encounters Shechem,
much like Tamar's refusal to let Judah withhold her rights assures descendants
from his family in Genesis 38. Moses might never have made it without
the intervention of Hebrew midwives, his mother, his sister and the
Pharaoh's daughter, just as trouble between brothers in David's house
was touched off by Amnon's rape of Tamar.
[3]The idea of connecting
the representation of women in film to that of women in biblical narrative
originally came from comments my graduate school colleague and friend
Karla Bohmbach made about The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and
women in Judges. I acknowledge her insight as I pursue this topic.
[4] Stanley Kauffmann,
"Primal Stuff," New Republic 221:19 (1999): 64.
[5] Gary Crowdus, "Getting
Exercised over Fight Club," Cinesaste, 25:4 (2000): 46.
[6] Christopher Sharrett,
"Boys Night Out," USA Today Magazine 128: 2656 (2000): 63.
[7] Sarah Vowell, "The
Drapes of Wrath," Interiors 159:5 (2000): 84. The actual conversation
Vowell repeats in this quote takes place subsequent to the scene on
the plane. Its location is a bar.
[8] Reading the film
in Freudian terms came to my mind immediately after a first viewing.
Such a choice is not far-fetched, or particularly innovative, as illustrated
by voice-over commentary from actor Edward Norton (the Narrator) on
the DVD version of the film. He says of Tyler Durden, "He's basically
just an id - just charging forward - you know - he is all about the
purity of impulse and expression. . . . My character is all repressed
impulse and unstated things."
[9] The Freud Reader
(Peter Gay, ed.; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989), 635-36.
The sections quoted in this paper all come from Freud's work The
Ego and The Id (1923).
[10] Gay, Reader,
640.
[11] Sigmund Freud:
Conflict & Culture [http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/freud/freud02a.html.
This site is an on-line exhibit organized by the Library of Congress
in cooperation with the Sigmund Freud Museum (Vienna) and the Freud
Museum (London)].
[12] Gay, Reader, 643.
[13] Daniel L. Pals,
Seven Theories of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press,
1996), 64.
[14] Elizabeth Grosz,
Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990),
115.
[15] Otto F. Kernberg,
"Psychoanalytic Perspectives in Religious Experience," American Journal
of Psychotherapy 54:4 (2000): 452.
[16] James William
Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 11.
[17] Gibson, Warrior
Dreams, 52.
[18] Susan Faludi,
"21st Century Boys," Village Voice 44:41(10/19/99),
44.
[19] Grosz, Lacan,
127.
[20] Mieke Bal, Lethal
Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987), 2.
[21] Bernard Brandon
Scott, Hollywood Dreams & Biblical Stories (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1994),
220.
[22] Scott, Hollywood
Dreams, 254
[23] Danna Nolan Fewell
and David M. Gunn, Gender, Power, & Promise: The Subject of the
Bible's First Story (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993), 141.
[24] Judges 19-21 is
a key example of the turmoil of the tribal arrangement and a story about
what precipitates efforts towards a kingship. The dismemberment of the
Levite's concubine tangibly illustrates the lack of unity and the failure
to achieve any overarching social structure.
[25] Fewell and Gunn,
Gender, 155.
[26] Esther Fuchs,
Sexual Politics in the Biblical Narrative: Reading the Hebrew Bible
as a Woman (Sheffield; Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 36.
[27] Alice Bach, Women,
Seduction, and Betrayal in Biblical Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 16.
[28] Bach, Women,
15.
[29] Fuchs, 32.
