Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club

Film Theory in Practice

by Anna Kornbluh

Anna Kornbluh provides an overview of Marxist approaches to film, with particular attention to three central concepts in Marxist theory in general that have special bearing on film: “the mode of production,” “ideology,” and “mediation.” In explaining how these concepts operate and how they have been used and misused in film studies, the volume employs a case study to exemplify the practice of Marxist film theory.

Fight Club is an exceptionally useful text with which to explore these three concepts because it so vividly and pedagogically engages with economic relations, ideological distortion, and opportunities for transformation. At the same time, it is a very typical film in terms of the conditions of its production, its marketing, and its popularity. Adapted from a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, the film is a contemporary classic that has lent itself to significant re-interpretation with every shift in the political economic landscape since its debut.

Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club models a detailed cinematic interpretation that students can practice with other films, and furnishes a set of ideas about cinema and society that can be carried into other kinds of study, giving students tools for analyzing culture broadly defined.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Theory

200 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 2, 2019

About the author

Anna Kornbluh is Associate Professor of English at UIC. She is the author of Realizing Capital, and the manuscript, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space. Articles on Marxist aesthetics have appeared in Mediations, Novel, the LARB, Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives, Lacan & Contemporary Cinema, and the Bloomsbury Companion to Marx.

Reviews

[Colin Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Far too often, critical theorists feel compelled to justify the critical frameworks they use to analyze cultural products such as novels and films. The implication of these calls to justify one's approach is straightforward. Either those leveling these questions think the critical approach in question is illegitimate (this often happens with psychoanalysis), or they think the application of said critical approach is asynchronous (what could Marx or Marxism have to say about The Canterbury Tales, for example?). Anna Kornbluh addresses these questions head-on in her book about Marxism and Fight Club by writing, "While Marxism is just one kind of film theory, one thesis of this book is that the basic tenets of Marxism should be foundational for all kinds of film theory" (6-7). This is a bold, totalizing assertion, but Kornbluh nuances it in the sentence that follows: "The theory of cinema, since its earliest incarnations, has been concerned with questions at the center of Marxist theory: What do human beings create when they work? Why do human beings create art in addition to working? What is the form of a work of art? How is a work of art produced? How is it consumed? In what ways is it ideological? In what ways is it autonomous? What are the industrial, technological, political, and economic conditions from which the work emerges?" (7). Not only does this elongated explanation do the work of justifying the application of Marxism to a film like Fight Club, but it also mirrors many of the technical and thematic preoccupations of the film itself. In this respect, Fight Club is unmistakably Marxist, but I suspect Kornbluh would argue that all films, to some degree or another, are too.

Kornbluh divides Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club into two section. Section one introduces and unpacks Marxist film theory, and section two applies Marxist film theory to Fight Club. Section one is worth reading and reading several times. Kornbluh demystifies the complicated terrain that is Marxism by providing useful and succinct definitions of key phrases and concepts. She emphasizes the concept "mediation" quite often and defines it as the "bidirectional capacity of ideas, representations, and forms" (57). Kornbluh takes this definition a step further by suggesting, "we can understand 'mediation' as the work of forms" (57). Mediation cuts, connects, represents, and forms a variety of things. Mediation makes visible the connections between context, time, ideology, modes of production, behavior, form, and so on. However, as Kornbluh emphasizes, mediation is the dialectic process at work because while it "enables us to think of how films," for example, "act upon the world ambivalently," mediation also has the effect of "making things apparent but also obscuring them" (64). This suggests that the dialectical process is humbling. It acknowledges, to some degree, how fixed and situated it is. However, this is not to suggest that a dialectical approach is nothing more than an acknowledgment of one's fixed or situated status. A non-reductive dialectic sees and balances the fixed with the transcendent. As Kornbluh suggests, "dialectics balance the part and the whole, the particular and the total" (100).

There are several other key moments and thought-provoking insights in section one, but what impresses me the most is the sheer density of this section. While there are countless introductions to Marxism, I suspect few are as concise and readable as Kornbluh's.

Section two, Kornbluh's analysis of the film, is fresh and interesting. For example, her analysis of the IKEA sequence focuses less on the gratuitous commodification of the scene and far more on how the sequence "uses form to call our attention to gaps between the commodity and the labor that produces it" (152). Another fresh observation Kornbluh offers focuses on the end of the film and its "refusal of closure" (170). "For Marx," Kornbluh suggests, "one benefit of the materialist approach to history as contingent rather than inevitable was a corollary approach to the present as in process rather than as fixed. Fight Club punctuates this ongoingness of the present by juxtaposing a radical social event...with the more intimate and banal events of psychic reintegration and romantic connection. Contradictions remain in motion. At psychic, interpersonal, and political levels, new sets of relations unfurl toward the future" (171).

Suffice it to say, Anna Kornbluh's book is both an intelligent piece of critical theory and an original contribution to film scholarship. I see myself returning to section one in particular many times in the future.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clear, accessible, compelling. If I had the chance to teach MA-level courses, I'd snap this up immediately for one.