At the end of the Coen brothers film Barton Fink, the eponymous writer finds himself face to face with shotgun-toting Madman Mundt. Until then Barton has only known Madman Mundt as Charlie Meadows, a working stiff in the next hotel room about whom he knows nothing but presumes to be the personification of the "common man" he celebrates in his plays. "Why me, Charlie, why me?" asks Barton, fearing for his life as the hotel blazes and the Madman prepares to kill some more. Charlie tells him why: "Because you DON'T LISTEN!"
This failure to listen has become a preoccupation in several recent American films whose protagonists become violent in order to define and perhaps even to redeem themselves. In an affectless society in which next almost everybody is alienated from everybody else, violence may seem to be the only way of connecting. In American Psycho the yuppie Wall Street dealer Patrick Bateman leaves a long confession to a series of murders on his lawyer's answering machine, but his lawyer regards it as a joke. He tells people to their faces that he would like to kill them and eat their remains, but no one hears.
In Fight Club, too, the Narrator inhabits a world in which "nobody cares if you live or die, and the feeling is fucking mutual". He attends cancer support groups in order to get someone to listen to him, in order to experience the human warmth denied to him in the rest of his life. In the book, he explains this fascination with such encounters (with dubious syntax): "This is why I loved support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention." True, the Narrator isn't dying like many of the other men who attend the support groups, but to be a faker in such circumstances is as authentic as he can manage. Until, that is, he gets into fighting.
The spark for Chuck Palahniuk's novel, Fight Club, came when the author got beaten up on holiday. "The other people who were camping near us wanted to drink and party all night long, and I tried to get them to shut up one night, and they literally beat the crap out of me. I went back to work just so bashed, and horrible looking. People didn't ask me what had happened. I think they were afraid of the answer. I realised that if you looked bad enough, people would not want to know what you did in your spare time. They don't want to know the bad things about you. And the key was to look so bad that no one would ever, ever ask. And that was the idea behind Fight Club."
Inspired by the camping trip, Palahniuk got into more fights. "I discovered that I'd never been in fights, and went, wow, that was sort of fun. That was a great release, and yeah, it hurts a little bit, but I lived through it. And it made me really curious about what I was capable of. And after that, if the opportunity arose, I didn't hesitate to get in a fight. So through the writing of the book, there was a period where I was in fights pretty regularly. My friends never wanted to go out with me, because I was always looking."
Pleasant, soft-spoken and surprisingly unthreatening (at least during our phone conversation), Palahniuk tells me that what he found most striking was that whenever he returned to work cut and bruised no one would want to hear what he had really got up to at the weekend: "They want you to say, 'No, I didn't do anything special.' And then they'll tell you about their weekend."
There's more to Palanhiuk's taut, hilarious, anti-consumerist, nihilistic novel than transformative fisticuffs, of course, but the notion that you might learn something useful from recognising that society trundles along through denying the ugly, destructive, even healthily self-destructive parts of ourselves, is Fight Club's chief idea. It's why the novel's anarchic anti-hero, Tyler Durden, sets up a string of clandestine fight clubs where men can escape the alienation of their day jobs and the sterile acquisitiveness of their apartments, and connect through physical contact. In Palahniuk's literary world, black eyes and fat lips are signs of spiritual health on the part of otherwise alienated white collar young men. "There's a redeeming value to taking a punch under controlled circumstances," says Palanhiuk.
Fight Club is in many respects the 90s reply to American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis's satire on youthful white collar greed and banality in Wall Street in the 80s. Like American Psycho's narrator Patrick Bateman, Fight Club's Narrator is devoid of identity; Palahniuk doesn't even bother to give him a name. Like Bateman, his identity, such as it is, is composed mostly from the things he owns. The Narrator admits at one point, "I'd collected shelves full of different mustard, some stone-ground, some English pub style. There were 14 different flavors of fat-free salad dressing, and seven kinds of capers." Nobody needs seven kinds of capers and, when they realise they don't, everything has to change.
The best thing that happens to the Narrator is when his apartment is blown up into the night sky. Perhaps the Narrator did it himself, to escape a life in which he didn't so much own things as was owned by them. Or perhaps Durden did it. Durden is the flip side to the Narrator, an anarchic unconscious come to life, someone whose passionate impulses are not sublimated into acquiring dishwasher-safe crockery, and whose natural mode of speech is trenchant, tendentious and not a little bit preachy.
"You are not your job," he tells the Narrator in a salutary speech. "You are not the money in your bank account. You are not the car you drive. You are not how much money is in your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis." You can imagine how this sort of stuff plays to alienated twentysomething desk clerks from Sacramento to Southend - or indeed anybody existentially dissatisfied with their lot.
Hence the mantra that the Narrator recites to himself on the way to spiritual redemption: "Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me from clever art. May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect."
Throughout the novel, men regularly get hospitalised after fights, clam chowders are defiled by urinating waiters in posh restaurants, men wound each other to focus on the spiritual aspect of pain, apartments are destroyed, BMWs ruined with baseball bats, and by the end a coast-to-coast secret society called Project Mayhem established by Durden seems poised to blow up corporate USA and dance in its ashes. And all this, Palahniuk encourages us to believe, is a good thing. Durden, who takes over the life of the Narrator in what one critic called a "jihad against the American way", tells his charge: "Self improvement is masturbation. Self destruction is the answer."
In Fight Club, the destruction has a nihilistic force. "Without a period of ruin and collapse, we can't have anything better," Palahniuk tells me. He has read his Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus and it shows in his nihilistic insistence on destroying lifestyles that serve nobody well, and recognising the importance of mortality.
Palahniuk also found that Susan Faludi's book about the crisis of the modern male, Stiffed, struck a chord. But what is the modern male? In David Fincher's virtuosic, exciting film adaptation of Fight Club, Tyler Durden and the Narrator find themselves looking at a poster for Calvin Klein underwear - a pair of designer pants topped by an extraordinary sculpted washboard stomach and pumped pecs. "Is that what a man looks like?" asks Pitt rhetorically, sarcastically of this icon of self-improvement. Of course it isn't, we are meant to think: real men don't get so ludicrously buffed.
True, there is something unconvincing about this scene in the film, mainly because Durden is played by Brad Pitt whose pristinely buffed upper body is as much part of the problem as the solution - it is as commodified as capers, though more sexy. Ever since his character in Thelma and Louise seduced Geena Davis by allowing her to strum his washboard stomach, Brad Pitt, with his perfect body, has been something women want and men want to be like.
But Palahniuk's point remains: to neurotically perfect one's body is to submit to the same kind of tyranny that leads the Narrator to collect mustards. It is a point that Pitt, ironically, recognises: "I find this truly insidiously damaging, this focus on exterior beauty, things, clothes, cars." No wonder the book has proved so appealing to men of a certain age. At times it seems to be exclusively about men whose fathers were absent during their childhoods. Durden, when contemplating a lover moving into his house, rejects the idea: "We are a generation of men raised by women," he says. "I'm beginning to wonder if another woman is what we really need."
What's more, the men of the Narrator's generation are not able to define themselves in relation to male sacrifice or great challenges as their ancestors were. "Our generation has had no Great Depression, no Great War," says Durden. "Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives." At points like this, the novel suggests that all-male clubs are the only way men can re-establish their male potency.
Edward Norton, who plays the Narrator in the film with aplomb, found the novel struck a chord: "This was the first thing I read that said: 'This expresses the depth of the paralysis and the numbness and the despair that I feel in a lot of people I know.' " "But Fight Club isn't just for men, says Palahniuk. "I find a lot of women getting in touch with me to ask where they can find fight clubs. The truth is I don't know."
Palahniuk, 32, is surprised at Fight Club's critical and commercial success. "I can't believe the response to the book. I never expected the book to be published. I had been rejected so many times because my work was seen as too dark and depressing, that when I sent off Fight Club, I thought it was just a fuck off to New York publishing. It was my last gesture."
A journalism graduate from the University of Oregon, Palahniuk couldn't get a job in newspapers and instead became a diesel mechanic in Portland, where he still lives. "It was dark, and frustrated, and sort of subversive, with lots of stunts because we were so frustrated with our jobs and our lives." Like Palahniuk's fights, some of these stunts have found their way into his books. The urinating waiters were his friends. He and some friends would tour show homes and steal prescription drugs they found in the medicine cabinets. This found its way into his latest novel.
Since the success of Fight Club, Palahniuk has published two other novels. Survivor comes from the same dark corner of his mind as its predecessor: it transcribes the voice on a 747's recovered black box recorder. The voice belongs to a former cult member, Tender Branson, who has hijacked the airliner at 39,000 feet. The passengers have been forced to deplane, and the pilot has been invited to jump out with a parachute, leaving the plane on autopilot and Branson to record his memoir about life as a drone in a fundamentalist community and, later, a media messiah, before the plane crashes into the Australian outback. A satire both on cults and media manipulation, it is being adapted for the screen.
His latest book, Invisible Monsters, yet to be published in Britain, is about a model who becomes disfigured when her jaw gets blown off. "She's so used to being the centre of attention because of how she looks, and then becomes culturally invisible, no one will even acknowledge she's in the room, because she looks so hideous. It's about the process of discovering that she has so much more power being invisible than she did as a beautiful person." That interest in the redeeming force of self-destruction again.
These two novels, he claimed on the internet recently, "make Fight Club look like Little Women. My agent says offended folks will be standing in line to take my head off with a gun. I'm pretty much OK with that." At least such a reaction would show that people are finally listening to Chuck Palahniuk.