The Nightmare of Consumer Culture: Fight Club and The Adjuster

Fight Club (1999) directed by David Fincher, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk
The Adjuster (1991), written & directed by Atom Egoyan
Simulacra and Simulation (1995), by Jean Baudrillard

Here, I would like to interpret Fight Club and The Adjuster against each other and in relation to Baudrillard’s The Precession of the Simulacra. In essence, both these films are a critique of what is taken to be a false reality—a mode of life which has seeped out of the awake and into the dream world. These films critique “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” (Baudrillard 1994:1) It is therefore fitting that The Adjuster begins as Noah startles awake and Hera is still asleep, taken by nightmares. In this same eerie spirit, our narrator in Fight Club, Jack, has insomnia. He therefore is “never really awake and never really asleep.” And he describes life as “a copy of a copy.” Although we might expect films intending to prove a social falsehood to focus on dream and fantasy, it is quite the opposite. These films de-center the material world and expose the consecrated fantasy that sustains our consumer culture.

They succeed masterfully in exposing the materialistic obsession as a lie, as the real nightmare. In this sense, they are about exposing a social fiction as embodied in stuff. But although the films share this broad trajectory, they have significant differences. Most importantly, Fight Club refuses to relinquish the hope that a true world might still be uncovered by ripping down the false adornments of our culture and by blowing up the headquarters of creditors. The Adjuster, on the other hand, truly delivers history beyond the real and into the realm of nightmares—a realm where the real is nothing but a taunt and a haunting memory. Here “there is no longer a God to recognize his own, no longer a Last Judgment to separate the false from the true, the real from its artificial resurrection, as everything is already dead and resurrected in advance.” (Baudrillard 1994:6) The Adjuster ends in this hopeless tone.

Fire burns through both Fight Club and The Adjuster. The homes of the adjuster’s clients are torn out of a quotidian order through physical reduction. They are reduced to dust and ashes and expose the ease with which the lofty abstraction of the home can be rendered noxious fumes. Similarly, Jack comes home from a business trip. He steps out of his cab, and looks up into that concrete “filing cabinet for widows and young professionals.” The floor to ceiling windows of his apartment have blown out, revealing blackened husks. His scattered and fried little shits are an embarrassment to him, “a household full of condiments and no food.” This lack of food is emblematic in that the material comes to signify not substance but absence of substantive meaning. For both these films whirl around an absence—the flamed destruction of material property that reveals there was no property. Jack later tells Tyler “I was close to being complete,” as he mourns the loss of DKNY shoes and A/X ties.

“It started as a little spark,” one of his clients tells Noah. Her gaze is like transfixed; frozen in the imagining of the eye before the storm, a tiny eye, “so small,” but pregnant with a firey demolition of the woman’s house and life. The adjuster is startled for a moment, coming to understand that this devastated woman had been already devastated before the flames came to wreak her inner anguish onto the props of her life. But his surprise is half-faked, for the woman’s flirting with destruction makes too much sense to him. “Something had to change,” she says. And he understands. He knows the swirl of life, that unceasing premonition that the home has walked out the door of the house, that all is but simulacrum. Noah must counsel these people who have seen the cracks of the simulacrum in the evaporation of their life in the burning of the material props in which it was grounded. He is therefore a fundamentally conservative character—an agent of the establishment.

Tyler Durden rescues Jack from his vertigo of interpretation. He serves as Jack’s adjuster with a slight difference—he blew up Jack’s apartment to begin with. Whereas Noah works for the property structure, and therefore acts as the prophet of a restored materiality, Tyler does not take the shipwrecked under the wing of capital. Tyler is in this sense an anti-adjuster. Instead of promoting Jack’s material clinging, he advises that he “let the chips fall where they may.” Tyler first blows up the coin, and then he seizes the lust for the coin—the need for perfect teeth, fashionable clothes, an eternal home improvement and re-improvement—and he exposes the lie by revealing the immaterial nature to a love of the material. It’s not about the great pile of stuff, it never was. This is Tyler’s revelation.

But rather than withhold his wisdom, Tyler and Jack embark on a project of religious conversion. They deny a world in which “people no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotheraphy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging.” (Baudrillard 1994:13) Their revolution is a new orientation to materiality: an orientation whose pulse is set by the hard smacks of fists on angular cheekbones; whose new face is measured not in skincare creams but inaudible rips and bruises of the skin; whose constant bodily wounding purges the soul of its artificial lust for stuff. In fighting, a new orientation and technique of the body is fashioned. This technique becomes the reason for cutting one’s hair short and trimming one’s fingernails. But it also allows the participant to feel a smack of reality, and thus to re-inject some vigor and even meaning in a life that had seemed to be horribly mediated and far removed.

This critique does not stop there. Having seized upon and eroded the material obsession in the individual, it seeks to enact such transformation across the entire society. Underground fights turn to Project Mayhem. They turn to organized chaos and troops of space-monkeys prowl the cities of the country blowing stuff up and pranking Tyler’s sneering critique onto the self-satisfied face of yuppie culture. They expose the simulation of daily life. This is best demonstrated by Jack’s masterful performance of the debased employee roughed up by his boss. But the culmination of this instinct is the end scene, as the phallic skyscrapers, headquarters of the creditors of consumer culture, are shaken by explosions and topple to the ground. Here Fight Club asserts a genuine reality which it claims we should prefer. And it does so in simulation, in film.

Whereas Fight Club explodes Jack’s relinquishing of the material through social mobilization, The Adjuster does just the opposite. Noah works to contain the interpretative vertigo opened by the fire. He stuffs them in a motel where he makes the rounds—visiting and attending to their existential angst. He provides for them a human consolation, a warm hand to re-induct them into the cold embrace of the filing cabinet. Noah’s clients are so moved by his unwavering attention to their angst, that they even kiss his hand lovingly, as if he were a saint or prophet. The kissing of the hand also features in Fight Club. Tyler licks his lips and plants a big wet one on the hands of his inductees, just before pouring lye on their moistened flesh. This is Fight Club’s new baptism. Jack and the space monkeys’ willingness to undergo the intense pain of the chemical burn materially scars their commitment to “hitting bottom”—losing everything to be able to do anything. Noah, on the other hand, saves his clients from touching this bottom, and even resorts to sex so as to take their minds off the emptiness of their loss. In this way, he preserves their investment in consumer culture.

At first glance, Noah himself embodies a model of social perfection. He has a family and owns a spacious house in suburbia. But Noah’s life too is set disturbingly close to the abyss. His house is built on what looks to be the frontier of civilization, its last bastion a huge billboard at the edge of an unfinished construction project. Noah flings arrows at the simulated family’s frozen smile from his window while his wife moves restlessly in her sleep. When he asks about her nightmares she changes subject. Their angst is implosive, clinging onto the fleetingness of meaning by burying it deep within. Jack and Tyler also live in the middle of nowhere, in a real “shithole.” In this rotting house Jack learns to be without any of the “versatile solutions to modern living” around which he had ordered his life. In Tyler’s words, “the things you own, end up owning you.” So what appears to be Noah’s accidental teetering at the edge of a material order, is a self-consciously search for material denial on the part of Jack and Tyler. They destroy the materialistic fluff around them, and then cultivate a practice of ensuring the reality of their physique by smacking it against each other.

The Adjuster’s ending, through the intervention of Bubba and his twisted troop, fits in the film as the shared nightmare between Noah and Hera. She is a censor, and her work, like Noah’s, brings her to the boundary between permitted discourse and the pornographic groaning and wheezing of the abyss. In renting out their already marginal home, Hera and Noah allow it to be seized onto by a perverse nightmarish agency of wealth, whose desire is to bring their twisted games into their walls, and to simulate the content of Hera’s disturbing videos. Bubba is able to seize the house through his superior standing in material culture, through his wealth. And so it is the system itself that exposes its ghastly contradiction—the complete lack of purpose to this material hand-over. It exposes that the material is merely a setting for perverse games that are an end in themselves. Not only that, the separation between setting and content erodes. So the house becomes both setting and pornographic content, as much as the porno becomes the setting of the house and its content.

Bubba knows this, the horrible realization bursts into flame just after Noah bursts into his own house, finding it drenched in gasoline. Bubba finally takes off his mask and looks Noah in the eye, describing the scene as that in which the “person in the film decides that he’s going to stop playing house,” and thus exposing the terrible spectral quality to their reality. He then poses the film’s final question, “are you in or are you out.” Noah stumbles out of the door as Bubba strikes the match. And so even the priest of material culture, this adjuster, falls victim to the nihilistic maw, that horrible collapse of opposite poles into one another. As he cries watching the flames, he imagines himself arriving at the scene, comforting his family not as a father but as an adjuster. Here the alienation between agent of the materialistic order and person is complete. The reality of the film and its nightmare merge into one another until we cannot tell them apart.

We might understand the house to be representative of Noah’s ark—the cradle of our current and much deluded civilization. Perhaps this is Egoyan’s way of letting us know that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. And that it’s time to stumble out the door before the whole thing burns down. This is also Fight Club’s prescription, to burn it down. Yet as Noah watches his home burn, the happening of the moment merges into his own worst nightmare. It becomes less clear that we can ever crawl away from the ghastly pornography that rented its way in through the back. Now those horrible sounds echo through plastic walls just as much as our plastic walls shine in the grisly film. Fight Club is an easier simulacrum to watch and dream in.