Primitive Mythology and Fight Club

(From an old post on the Media Underground forum — which you can no longer read as all the old posts have been deleted)

I’m part way through reading the second chapter of Primitive Mythology, The Imprints of Experience. And I came across a passage that immediately put me in mind of the discussion we were having not so long ago about the merits of Rita Su’s essay Empowerment of Masochism; a piece of writing in which Su tried to argue for the emancipatory power of masochism and self harm, referencing the film Fight Club many times in her argument — indeed I believe the essay came from a Palahnuik fan site. The passage of PM in question is part of a section in which Campbell attempts to show how the imprints left behind on an individual’s psyche by the traumatic experience of being born, an experience which induces what Campbell calls “a brief seizure of terror”, are referenced in rituals and mythologies whose purpose is to guide individuals through a process of difficult transformation — for example the rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. To quote Campbell (pp 65-66):

The fear of the dark, which is so strong in children, has been said to be a function of their fear of returning to the womb: the fear that the recently achieved daylight consciousness and not yet secure individuality should be reabsorbed. In archaic art, the labyrinth — home of the child consuming Minotaur — was represented in the figure of a spiral. The spiral also appears spontaneously and certain stages of meditation as well as to people going to sleep under ether. It is a prominent device, furthermore, at the silent entrances and within the dark passages of the ancient Irish kingly burial mound of New Grange. These facts suggest that a constellation of images denoting the plunge and dissolution of consciousness in the darkness of nonbeing must have been employed intentionally, from an early date, to represent the analogy of threshold rites to the mystery of the entry of the child into the womb for birth. And this suggestion is reinforced by the further fact that the Paleolithic caves of southern France and northern Spain, which are now dated by most authorities circa 30000-10000 BC, were certainly sanctuaries not only of hunting magic but also of the male puberty rites. A terrific sense of claustrophobia, and simultaneously of release from every context of the world above, assails the mind impounded in those more than absolutely dark abysses, where darkness no longer is an absence of light but an experienced force. And when a light is flashed to reveal the beautifully painted bulls and mammoths, flocks of reindeer, trotting ponies, woolly rhinos, and dancing shamans of those caves, the images smite the mind as indelible imprints. It is obvious that the idea of death and rebirth, rebirth through ritual and with a fresh organisation of profoundly impressed sign stimuli, is an extremely ancient one in the history of culture, and that everything was done, even in the period of the Paleolithic caves, to inspire in the youngsters being symbolically killed a reactivation of their childhood fear of the dark. The psychological value of such a “shock treatment” for the shattering of a no longer wanted personality structure appears to have been methodically utilised in a time-tested pedagogical crisis of brainwashing and simultaneous reconditioning of the IRMs, for the conversion of babes into men, dependable hunters, and courageous defenders of the tribe.

First of all note the interesting point that in order for the reconditioning to take place from a state that is no longer desirable to one that is now being sought, it is necessary that a corresponding appropriately traumatic event occur whose role it is to give such a shock to the system that it becomes susceptible to new imprinting. That’s been observed in many instances of brainwashing, and cult indoctrination, but we’ll leave that discussion for another time if anyone’s interested. The more important thing here is Campbell’s suggestion that, historically, the passage from boyhood to manhood has been precipitated by rites, really ordeals, that involve the introduction of a measure of trauma and distress, the result of these ordeals being, to use Campbell’s terminology, the reorganisation of “profoundly impressed” sign stimuli. It might even be that such a dramatic and upsetting rite of initiation is necessary in order to slough off the old skin as it were, to reconfigure childhood habits and conditioning in order to receive new imprints. Then it occurred to me: isn’t this what Fight Club is all about?

In the film the character Tyler Durden argues precisely that men have been failed by a society that has striven to immunise them from all trauma and pain, physical and otherwise, and that has therefore kept them stuck at a dependent adolescent stage of psychological growth. Instead of encouraging men to face up to hardship and pain they are taught to value their emotional growth, and this overriding emphasis ultimately has a feminising influence on the male population, even further alienating them from their essential “maleness”. Maybe the so-called masochism in Fight Club is not really masochism at all but comes from an intuitive grasp of the type of cathartic and traumatic event that is necessary in order to trigger the passage into full manhood, to re condition and prepare the male psyche to face the world as “dependable [hunter] and [courageous defender] of the tribe”, rather than as a preening, vain, stunted semi adolescent, suffering from the kind of neurosis that Campbell, when criticising Freudian psychoanalysis incidentally, describes as follows (p 64):

‘The problem of the neurotic is precisely that instead of accomplishing the passage of the difficult threshold of puberty, dying as infant to be reborn as child, he has remained with a significant fraction of his personality structure fixed in the condition of dependency.’

It is precisely this condition of dependency that the protagonists of Fight Club find most demeaning; a condition of dependency that is sustained by a society that promotes lifestyles driven by insatiable appetites for consumerist indulgence and the stoking of material wants and desires.

To flesh out the bones of this comparison a little bit more, don’t the fighters in Fight Club meet in a dank and badly lit basement somewhere, therefore in their surroundings replicating the dark claustrophobic subterranean conditions of the threshold rites mentioned in passage quoted above? Remember that these conditions were themselves a means of harnessing the primordial power of those first imprints left by the trauma of being born – although Campbell also claims that the birth process also gives rise to a concomitant terror of being taken back into the womb (though couldn’t that easily be confused with the fear of dying), so the fighters could be seen as trying to prove themselves worthy of escaping the womb (of adolescence). And of course this dark basement is the male-only venue for a process of re-imprinting that is achieved through the unrestrained and uninhibited act of men fighting each other foregoing all rules and decorum. This act of combat becomes when performed in the sight of male peers a rather belated rite of transformation from boy into man, the fulfilment of a deep-seated desire for individuation and self-affirmation as men. What fuzz said earlier was exactly right in that these are “boys trying to be men and fighting a teenage fight”, but the point I think the book and the movie trying to make is that these boys have never had the opportunity to undergo an appropriate threshold ritual in order to prove themselves as men, and that within the film and the book this act of emancipatory self-mythologising is a way of redressing the balance, the bias of what some sociologists call Matrist society.

But then, maybe, we don’t really need those qualities that made for “dependable hunters and courageous defenders of the tribe” in the past any more. Maybe there is no longer any requirement for those kinds of roles in society, roles that entail a ready willingness to use aggression and physical power to defend family and property. This willingness if widespread would be incredibly problematic for the kind of society we live in nowadays where we entrust our safety and defence to the state; it would definitely have a destabilising effect on the authority of the state to impose law and order on its citizens. What’s more in a society where men and women are both seen as equal citizens with equal rights and opportunities, any kind of process that encourages men to exult in their strength and sheer physical power, would again run contrary to the grain.

It reminds me of all those cowboy films, you know when we see the last defenders of the dying traditions of the old frontiersmen the “dependable hunters and courageous defenders of the tribe”, with their own personal codes of morality and justice, unable or unwilling to fully comprehend what the slow but sure encroachment of civilisation really means for their way of life. It’s most beautifully illustrated in the last scene of The Searchers, when John Wayne is framed in the doorway, left waiting outside as the rest of the characters make their way inside the house, and it seems as if he has outlived his usefulness and relevance in a society where it’s no longer every man for himself, but the faceless machinery of society against the transgressor of society’s laws. In a way then maybe Fight Club is the modern-day corollary of the old-time Western, a revival the urge to live without the constraints of civilization. Though of course the cowboy motif is very much back in play with modern-day John Wayne Dubya in charge of the universe currently piling up bodies in the wild Mideast, and more happily the subversive Brokeback Mountain a film which thanks to its success proved once and for all that cowboys probably weren’t averse to man on man action.

Anyway to return to the subject at hand, if you feel that rituals are important because they address some basic inner need, or because they help us to come to terms with the momentous changes that we go through throughout the various stages of our lives then you have to accept that my argument has some plausibility, even if you feel that the so-called crisis of masculinity is a myth (and not a good kind of myth) used to justify the clawing back of some of the gains made by the gender equality movement of the Sixties.