Hot & Sweet
I was watching Fight Club the other day because Katie said she had never properly sat through the whole movie, and it is a movie that really must be sat through several times. I was excited to watch it with her, as I suspected that she would enjoy the extra level of commentary and analysis that I can bring to the film, thanks to a period in my early twenties when I watched Fight Club about three hundred times. This period was bookended on the one end by my first darling internet startup going the way of the Dodo, and on the other by the entering into a hilariously disastrous sitcom-pilot-inspiring marriage of international inconvenience.
Amongst other experiments in Tyler Durden-inspired self destruction I conducted upon myself in those day1, the one I struggled with the most - primarily because this one thing did not consist of consuming some sort of inebriate and/or not bathing - was learning to punch myself in the face. It is really, really hard to punch yourself in the face. I honestly couldn’t tell you if it was the weird angle, or some psychological aversion to inflicting pain on yourself, or maybe I just throw a limp punch.
But eventually you learn.
Like Tyler says, it’s not till you’ve lost everything that your free to do anything.
One of my favorite scenes in the movie is when Ed Norton is walking through his apartment which, as he voices over, becomes a living catalog. “Like so many others,” he says, “I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct. If I saw something clever, like a little coffee table in the shape of a Yin Yang, I had to have it.”
Fight Club really resonated with me back then. I was pissed, and sad, and hurt. I felt powerless. I felt like a failure. I felt like everything was a waste and that nothing had any meaning. Fight Club made me want to get rid of every stick of furniture in my cozy little house and DO that ANYTHING I would be free to do.
Even if that anything is marry my IM buddy from New Zealand. Even if I didn’t actually get rid of anything. The idea was valid.
He says, “I’d flip through catalogs and wonder, what kind of dining set defines me as an individual?”
Ed Norton walks into his kitchen and opens up his fridge. He’s on the phone, ordering hand towels or a bed skirt or a clever rubberized trivet out of a catalog. The light blinks on in the fridge, and he looks around in disgust when he realizes there’s nothing to eat.
David Fincher is a really detail oriented director. He brings an insane level of attention to every aspect of his movies. I know this from watching many a DVD commentary track. So I know that, when the camera pans past Ed Norton’s face to the door of the fridge, I know that someone, maybe even David Fincher himself, put a lot of thought into the kind of things that a worthless self-loathing chicken shit yuppie would have in his fridge. Things that show how much he values his own ability to choose and buy premium products that don’t mean a thing. Things that show how the meaningless and empty nature of his life.
“How embarrassing,” he says. “A houseful of condiments, and no food.”
I haven’t watched Fight Club at this point for maybe 2 or 3 years. I used to fall asleep to this movie every night, like a lullaby telling me to burn everything down and plant wheat. Now, Ed Norton’s fridge makes me thirsty.
I get up off the couch and walk into the kitchen, past the little coffee table in the shape of a tree we just bought online. I open the fridge to grab something to drink.
What I’m always asking myself these days is, how far away did the water in this bottle come from? Colorado? France? Fiji? Fucking Fiji, seriously? Do you know how far Fiji is from San Francisco?
5500 miles.
And as that thought crosses my mind, my head in the fridge with the miniature compact fluorescent swirl all a’glow, thinking I am so punk rock, I am so Fight Club, look at me and my progressive attitude towards bottled water, look at me acting globally by purchasing locally, look at me, look at me, that’s when I look over at the door of my fridge and see that I’ve got the same bottle of gourmet, hand-prepared in Medocino since 1977, Kosher, not a significant source of trans fat bottle of mustard, glowing all fresh and new and unopened all these six weeks since I brought it home from the too expensive grocery store I love so much about my neighborhood with a price tag on it for $6.99.
Nice try, Dodo.
1 This may actually be an inclusive bookend kind of thing, meaning that the startup and the marriage were actually part of my experiments in self-destruction. This feels uncomfortably like perspective.
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