Hey Wisecrack, Michael again.
If you’ve ever been inside a college dorm, you’ve likely seen a lot of Fight Club posters
displayed over janky twin beds.
If you, like me, tend to overthink everything, you might ask: What does this declaration
of love for the 1999 classic mean for this hypothetical freshman?
Maybe it’s just a token of recognition that David Fincher knows how to make a damn good
movie, or that Brad Pitt is crazy good looking.
Maybe it indicates solidarity with frustrated men who feel disenfranchised and desire to
reassert their masculinity?
Or maybe it’s the exact opposite- a reminder that such forms of masculinity can be horrifying?
Or maybe it’s that consumerism is bad?
Until you ask said poster-owner, they remain Schroedinger’s Fan.
You never really know until you investigate further.
And it’s not just Fight Club, plenty of works of art elicit radically different, and
often mutually exclusive interpretations.
1984, Starship Troopers, American Psycho, and even the Bible have been interpreted in
a variety of ways.
Sometimes it seems like the interpreters must have read dramatically different works.
What's going on here?
How can the same text have so many, often contradictory, messages?
Is there one true reading?
Or, conversely, if every interpretation is valid, does that make the text meaningless
- where everything could be made to mean literally anything?
If not, how do we distinguish between the good readings and the bad?
Let's find out in the Wisecrack Edition on Interpretations and spoilers ahead for Fight
Club
and uhhh... the Bible.
First, what
do we mean when we say 'reading'?
When you 'read' a text you're not just looking at the plot, but also the subtext and themes.
For example, Jaws' plot is about a seaside town rocked by shark attacks.
But the subtext could be about the dark side of small-town America, the eternal fight between
man and nature, or if you’re Fidel Castro, it’s about capitalist exploitation.
Because a subtext isn't explicit it can be open to interpretation and thus spawn hundreds
of video essays.
Thanks subtext.
Take Fight Club, which has been written about and interpreted to death.
If you don't know, it’s the story of a repressed man who starts a revolution after turning
a basement into a sparring room with his imaginary friend.
In the movie, Tyler Durden, the charismatic driving force behind the titular fight club,
turns his decrepit house in to a boot camp for homegrown terrorists.
“You are not special.
You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.”
His actions wouldn’t be out of place in a reeducation camp.
He strips a group of men of their individuality so that they will do what their self appointed
dictator tells them to do.
But earlier in the film Durden points out that modern society does the same thing - asking
us to craft identities around consumer products and the jobs we need to afford them.
“You are not your job, you are not how much money you have in the bank, you’re not the
car you drive, you’re not the contents of your wallet, you are not your fucking khakis”.
Which brings us back to the poster problem.
Does it worship Durden as a subversive hero who emancipates men from an oppressive society?
Or does it warn us of how supposed liberation might oppress us even more?
As you can see, a text’s meaning can vary depending on who’s watching - to the point
of contradiction.
But is that a bad thing?
Art is subjective, after all.
And the real-world the impact from differing interpretations can, well, change history.
Perhaps no text has been reinterpreted more than the Bible.
And we’re not going to touch the conflicting interpretations of the various sects of the
major religions that use the old or new testaments.
We’re not saying anyone is wrong.
Well, except one guy.
Let me introduce you to Joel Osteen, an American pastor and televangelist worth an estimated
50 million dollars.
Joel preaches the 'Prosperity Gospel', a collection of ideas that join Christian faith with financial
success.
Essentially- ‘money is good, because God said so’.
Osteen uses quotes from the Bible like Hebrews 10:35 which says:
as proof that God wants you to make bank.
Conveniently, this means that his $10.5 million dollar mansion in Texas is God’s will.
While it’s clearly all about the Benjamins for Osteen and his megachurch, his interpretation
of the bible has its fair share of critics.
Particularly from... well, uhh Jesus.
Remember the Cleansing of
the Temple?
Now call me a literalist here but there doesn’t seem to be much wiggle room there.
So if the same text can mean two contradictory things does that simply mean that anything
can mean whatever you want it to mean?
The author of Fight Club himself, Chuck Palahniuk, perhaps thinks so.
In an interview about his new book “Adjustment Day”, he said
something he seems to relish.
What all this speaks to is a question of literary theory.
Differing schools of thought have proposed various ways of approaching a text:
to name a few.
But today we’re going to focus a particular mode of thought:
Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols.
In the modern sense, the term was coined by philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce.
By signs we don't just mean that this means STOP.
Rather, semiotics is the study of the process that goes into knowing what someone is referring
to when they communicate something through language.
A linguist named Ferdinand de Saussure gave this process his own spin, and broke it down
into two things: the signifier and signified.
The signifier is the symbol, usually a word or phrase, that points to the thing that is
signified.
So the letters d-o-g arranged thus are signifiers for that group of perfect four-legged fluffers,
or the phrase “Save Martha” is a signifier for very bad writing.
Or something about rescuing Superman’s Mom.
As the last example illustrates, meaning can get real complicated real quick.
For Saussure, the relationship between signifiers and their meaning is the product of not just
some capital R reality, but a whole system of other signifiers.
In a simple case, the word or signifier “dog” has a meaning but that meaning is more than
just dog-ness, it also means “not cats” - who also have four-legs and can be fluffy.
We can understand more about what a dog is like by understanding this juxtaposition to
something like a cat.
Cats meow, dogs bark - and so on.
In this way, the Signifiers and Signified only attain their meaning in relation to other
Signifiers.
So when I make a joke about
“Save Martha,”
that phrase and its meaning would be informed by other signifiers, like “The DCEU,”
“Superman’s relationship to his mother,” and “bad writing.”
If it sounds complicated, that’s kind of the point, because so is language.
Philosopher Jacques Derrida was inspired by Saussure, but had some problems with his work,
because in Saussure’s model, in spite of the complicated way meaning was constructed,
it was still conveyed pretty seamlessly.
I write dog, you say the word dog in your head and conjure an image.
Part of the trouble is that signifiers can often mean different things to different people.
Like if I say “Woody”, you might think of the character in Toy Story, or the guy
who made Annie Hall, or Clive Owen's acting style.
The word signifies a lot of different things and my intent could get lost, but if I say
“Jared’s Dog, Woody” more of you might know what I'm talking about.
You still might not know what he looks like though.
Your idea of a “dog” could be a pug, a German Shepherd or a Chihuahua but if I say
“Jared’s Maltese Poodle mix, Woody” you're gonna have a much better, but maybe
imperfect idea of how much of a baller he is.
This tenuous relationship between what is said and what it's referring to, without getting
lost ad infinitum in modifiers and clarifications, is where the gap for interpretation opens
up and where we get these totally different understandings of the same text.
And here’s where we return to “can anything mean anything?”
According to Derrida, no.
Despite the need for interpretation in what we say and what is understood, that does not
dissolve any kind of meaning into a choose-your-own adventure.
Derrida was more like Pierce.
Pierce was a pragmatist.
Unlike other philosophers, who sought absolute and eternal capital T Truth, pragmatists thought
of the search for truth as a kind of iterative- fix it as you go process.
The same could be said for meaning, and Derrida embraced this unending process.
Therefore meaning isn’t given, but always requires careful interpretation and attention
to the things that surround a particular sign in order to make it meaningful.
So instead of absolving us of the responsibility to look at the context of signs when creating
their meaning, the malleability of language should make us MORE responsible.
So when I say “Woody”, by now most of you should know I'm talking about Jared’s
dog.
I just mentioned him and Jared talks about him a lot of our videos so, I don't need to
explain who or what he is because there isn't really much room for interpretation.
This context creates a kind of 'ecosystem of ideas' so that all the interrelated signifiers
and what they signify add up to this handsome pup.
This map for understanding is like a geographical map in that even though it changes incrementally
over time and there might be zoning disputes, you will still need one to get to the right
destination.
Like an actual map, it is still a representation of other things - you know, mountains, rivers,
etc.
As a result, we should pay attention to both what is included and excluded from it - like
how Google Maps refuses to list discrete locations that are good for public urination.
So let's go back to Fight Club and look at the 'road map' for interpreting what that
text, and that poster on the wall, might mean.
What goes on this map?
Well obviously, there’s the characters and their ideologies - primarily the narrator
and Tyler Durden.
Also, the actual things that happen in the plot.
The narrator likes his nice life with nice things and Tyler Durden doesn’t, noting
that
“the things you own end up owning you.”
Then there’s the story structure - Like many antagonists, Durden’s role is to put
forth radical ideas that disrupt the protagonist’s way of thinking.
This creates a central conflict that the protagonist has to reconcile by finding a happy medium
between the villain’s philosophy and the status quo.
So in this case, we could say that Tyler Durden’s critique of our consumer society is either
true or mostly true
“Why do guys like you and I... is it essential to our survival, in the hunter gatherer sense
of the word, no.
What are we then?
I don’t know, uh, consumers?”
but his solutions go to far.
Case in point: Durden complains that men are emasculated in society
“we’re a generation of men raised by women, I’m wondering if another woman is really
the answer we need.”
then literally threatens to emasculate them.
Seems like a problem.
“You are going to publicly state that there is no underground … ,or these guys are gonna
take your balls.”
Over at the edges of the map might be the book, which the movie can deliberately diverge
from, but can still add additional context.
In the last chapter, the narrator takes Durden’s “snowflake” comment and rejects both the
status quo and Durden’s dehumanization of his followers, saying that:
Another point on this map might be what Chuck Palahniuk has actually said about it.
In one interview Palahniuk claims the term snowflake came from Fight Club and that there’s
a new Victorian sense of offense in the world.
In a later interview, he back-tracked and said “snowflake” never had anything to
do with fragility or sensitivity.
He also claims the book has a lot to do with his own rejection of the self-importance that
was drilled into him by teachers.
Maybe more central on this map, if we’re talking about the film, is the filmmaker himself
- David Fincher.
He said:
And you, like a good Duridian, might ask what we’ve left out of this map that might also
help us interpret the film and/or book.
Looking at the map thus far, we can admire Pitt’s performance, or the character’s
writing, and he may even have some astute points on sociology, but in the context of
the movie, or in relation to the signs and signifiers around Durden, he’s definitely
not a role model.
And of course, we can update this map, and hone this map.
But there’s not many versions of this map that shout “Go be like Tyler Durden.”
Now let’s turn to our buddy Joel and the Good Book.
Like we said earlier, the 'Cleansing of the Temple' has become a pretty well known lesson
from the Bible that explicitly states using a church or temple to extract personal wealth,
ain't cool with J-dawg or God.
While Osteen might argue otherwise, the fact that he and his fellow Prosperity Pastors
have reinterpreted the Bible to mean the exact opposite shows a lack of semiotic responsibility
on their part.
They know about the parable in the Temple and, you would think, about that time Jesus
said:
but they either choose to ignore it or change what it signifies.
Whatever their justification for reinterpreting the text, they - metaphorically speaking - made
the word “dog” mean “cat” and you can see why that's a bad thing.
If we look at George Orwell's endlessly reinterpreted text 1984, it has been referenced by everyone
wanting to make any point about powerful actors.
Of course, leveraging the themes of 1984 to argue about some new context is fine and well.
But it’s often times leveraged in ways that seem flat out wrong or besides the point to
Orwell’s original message:
“Firmament: Vaulted Dome of the Earth, George Orwell, 1984, must read.”
It’s sadly become a phrase that just signifies a big, bad thing that is allegedly trying
to control you.
In psychology, there’s this idea called “concept creep,” which talks about how
definitions of abuse or bullying have been stretched to accommodate things that they
were not originally intended for.
Others have used it to describe how other general terms will slowly stretch their original
meaning - which is how we’re using it.
Now, words often naturally change in the scope of their meaning over time, like how decimate
went from just meaning “to kill every tenth man,” to just “destroying a bunch of stuff.”
But when you’re trying to use the original meaning of a thing, concept creep gets tricky.
Like what if I really did want to specifically describe killing every 10th person?
Now you’re just going to think I meant “a bunch of people” and my intended meaning
is lost.
In the case of 1984 the result is that a book often voted one of the greatest of all time,
has been divorced from what it was originally meant to signify, and now means a lot less
than it should, despite its dire warnings of mass surveillance, the collapse of public
and private identity, historical revisionism and propaganda.
What a text means, whether it's 1984, Fight Club or the Bible, is not set in stone and
can be read in a lot of different ways.
But that's what makes it so important for us to be responsible readers.
Saying 'anything can mean whatever you want it to' has dangerous results, as anyone who
has driven past a 'road closed' sign will tell you.
If we recklessly manipulate cultural objects like books and films to suit our narratives
we undermine their value.
Every text exists in relation to many other ideas and semiotics is a way that we can decode
meaning by looking at the kind of creative ecosystem a text inhabits.
Because of that, the emphasis shouldn't only be on the authors of the work to deliver a
text's meaning, but on US as responsible readers and viewers to understand the relationship
between the signifier we are presented with and what that signifies.
Which is why there will only ever be one Woody.
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And as always, thanks for watching guys, peace.