Hendrix 1

Mark Hendrix
Professor McFarland
ENGL 3000-01

28November 2012

“You’re a faker!”: The Artificial Marla Singer in David Fincher’s Fight Club

Power is a palpable force. According to social theorist Michel Foucault, power is a “mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those, which may arise in the present or the future” (qtd. in Rozmarnin 2). David G. Winter identifies power as “the control, by one person … of the behavior and conditions of life of another” (384).

In Fight Club, director David Fincher uses the character of Marla Singer to bend, reverse, and ultimately destroy social expectations and conventions regarding power. Exposing the problematic nature of socially-constructed gender identity by highlighting purchased or otherwise artificial representations of phallocentric power, Fincher first explores Marla’s binary oppositions to accepted gender norms, then reverses them. The conflicting nature of Marla’s contrasting schizoid and maternally empathetic behavior provides an insight into what is either imitation or truly genuine about her power. While critics acknowledge Marla’s presence in Fight Club and her effects on the Narrator, they ignore an important semiotic implication: the artificial nature of her acquired power symbols indicate that she, like Tyler Durden, is not a flesh-and-blood, living human being, but is rather a symbolic fusion of media-driven acquiesences and rejections of visions of power.

Marla Singer is not real.Fight Club is undoubtedly presented as a work of fiction; in turn, Marla’s character is ultimately a fictional construction—a representative symbol designed by Fincher to specifically remind the viewer that they are, in fact, watching a film.Just like Tyler’s mid-film provocative broken-fourth-wall rant informing viewers that they are “not [their] fucking khakis” literally breaks down, dizzyingly showing the film negatives’ sprocket holes, Marla serves to continually defy convention as a complex personified amalgamation of the Narrator’s inherent expectations of both stereotypical feminized behavior and a simultaneous rejection of those behaviors and expectations. Marla’s unpredictable eccentricities provide insight into the Narrator’s own misconceptions and assumptions of the categorically “correct” gender roles inferred fromimplied societal observations as well as the actions of his absent father and inadequate mother.

However, the simple fact that Fight Club is indeed a work of fiction does not inherently prove or disprove Marla’s real or imaginary existence in the world of the film; the Narrator is also part of this world, yet he is indisputably established as real, if only through the gravity of his anonymity.The Narrator’s namelessnessestablishes a decentralizeduniversal connection to the unspoken thoughts, ambitions, hopes, and fears of every viewer, juxtaposed in stark comparison to objectifiable detailedpeculiarities localized to a specific character as admirable personality traits (as seen in Tyler Durden). Despite the unreliable and untrustworthy context of his storytelling, the Narrator must be real for the story to matter—otherwise the film is simply an elaborate setup for a surprise twist ending. Because itcreates substance within the very real universal connection to each viewer’s aspirations and anxieties, the Narrator is real, and the story does matter.Dino Felluga identifies this notion of acknowledging the Real, defined as “the materiality of our existence” as one of three key elements of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s structure of the psyche (“Modules on Lacan”). The Narrator is the tangible foundation, a platform to structure the psychical symbolism of both Marla and Tyler’s representation of the Imaginary and Symbolic orders.

Proof for Marla Singer’s imaginary existence is found throughout the story: he refers to Marla specifically as a self-induced irritation when he calls her “the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you could stop tonguing it… but you can’t.” Marla’s drug overdose and resultant suicide would lead directly to this form of “healing” for the Narrator and freedom from the problems she creates, yet he actually impedes the process already in motion from completing itself successfully: while he does seem uncaring and uninterested when Marla calls, he notably leaves the telephone receiver off the hook. The Narrator is later astonished to learn that due to this action, Tyler ultimately aids in saving Marla’s life: “How could Tyler, of all people, think it was a bad thing that Marla Singer was about to die?” Until this point, Tyler has psychopathically eschewed nearly all of humanity for a perceived listless indifference and has championed the ensuing destruction of a society obssessed with consumption, yet he ironically makes a determined intervention for a complete stranger who has overdosed on (or literally over-consumed) an anti-anxiety mind-numbing tranquilizer. Although this would progress the decline of the flawed society Tyler rejects, he directly prevents Marla’s death. The more direct point of Fincher’s diversionary subplot, then, is that the Narrator’s alter-egos purposefully reinforce, support and thrive on each other. Thus, the Narrator does not merely apathetically view thisillusory relationship, but through his “accidental” actions, he actually nurtures it.

The sexual relationship of Marla Singer and Tyler Durden then appears complicated—the surface level provides a revisionist viewpoint by the end of the film placing the Narrator in the role of Tyler, which gives a vastly different context to the short, awkward, terse exchanges between the Narrator and Marla after instances of sexual contact. However, if Marla and Tyler do not exist, what does their intercourse represent? The Narrator constructs both of the alter-egos, the “yin and yang”of the male and female, to try to find himself through self-improvement, first through a neutered, feminine commercialism, then through a masculine obsession with violence, an attempt that triumphantly fails. If the Narrator is Tyler and Marla, the sexual contact is then reduced simply to masturbation. Tyler imparts this knowledge directly: “Self-improvement is masturbation. Self-destruction is the answer.” Hauntingly foreshadowed near the beginning of the film, the message is explicitly delineated by the charred and smoking yin-yang Swedish table lying broken and unsupported after being blown out of the Narrator’s apartment.

Of course, the most compelling piece of evidence for the questionability of Marla’s existence comes directly from her name. The letters in “Marla Singer” can arguably be rearranged into an imperfect anagram: “Alarm Rings.” This alarm motifis recognizable in the Narrator’s introduction to Tyler Durden. Their first exchange occursimmediately after a vivid dream involving a violent mid-air commercial airline collision: the Narrator wakes to the chime of the “Fasten Seat Belt” sign being turned off, and Tyler’s subsequent cool, indifferent sarcasmin their discourse points out the campiness of the Narrator’s clever “single-serving friend” analogy.As the Narrator literally wakes from a dream, he metaphorically wakes from a static, uninteresting life at the introduction of Tyler. Additionally, as a method of drawing attention to the fallacy of the Narrator’s incorrect assumptions, Marla’s name as an“alarm” connotation is a clue to the truth behind her personality; she is not only a foil, an anti-hero of the anti-hero Tyler Durden, but her dominance and power is a contrived representation of both societal expectations involving women and the opposites of those expectations.

What is clear about Marla, then, is that she is a symbol for the Narrator’s misconceptions about identity and gender roles. The Narrator presumably arrives at these misconceptions as a result of either a flaw in his biological personality traits assigned by his parents or the environment in which he was raised, including any influence by media and society. However, whether Marla’s character is a product of genetically programmed misogyny or ignorance is inconsequential: her skewed behavior normalizing over time stems from an evidently incorrect assessment attempting to right itself through continual revision exhibited out of context for the viewer.

An insight into the formation of the Narrator’s incorrect assumptions occurs during a conversational swap of prospective fantasy opponents. Tyler confesses that he would like to fight his father. The Narrator agrees, explaining that his father left when he was six to start “franchises” of families in various cities, a detail which reemerges as the Narrator later discovers that Fight Clubs have similarly been set up as franchises in various cities. In his essay Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant explains that the past inhibits free will; that is, Kant explains that in order to make a choice in the present, a decision must inherently be made based on determining factors distributed from the past: “… if we could exhaustively investigate all the appearances of men’s wills, there would not be a single human action which we could not predict with certainty and regonise as proceeding necessarily from its antecedent conditions” (Kant 474).Therefore, power and control are merely illusion and inextricably linked to the past. For the Narrator, the past refers to both what appears to be a biological tendency to “franchise” inherited from his father and the lack of paternal influence in his childhood.

However, in her book The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Judith Rich Harris argues that parental involvement has less effect than peer interaction(Harrisxv). While peer interaction could conceivably involve information obtained through media or roles modeled by surrounding society, such as co-workers or family members, the version most obviously seen in Fight Club is the Club itself. Clearly evident in the rapid period between the formation of Fight Club and the violent separation of the personalities of the Narrator from Tyler Durden, juxtaposed against all time spent becoming a “thirty year old boy,” the intrasocial interactions within the fellowship purportedly have the transformative powers of changing a participant from a “wad of cookie dough” into being “carved out of wood.”

Marla too has a role in this peer interaction: her presence challenges the Narrator, ultimately forcing him out of his comfortable lie and into a harsh reality. Upon their first confrontation, the Narrator clearly (and correctly) points out Marla’s true character: “you’re a faker!”First in her metaphorical penetration of into the Narrator’s various support groups, even extending into the Narrator’s safe, yonic “cave” during guided meditation, Marla literally replaces (and thus equates to) the Narrator’s power animal. The invasion and replacement of the power animal destabilizes the Narrator’s sense of control by forcing his ensuing actions to be merely reactionary and defensive. She eventually forces the Narrator to be submissive, if by nothing else through compromise in sharing the support groups that he originally occupied.

The power and control exhibited by Marla Singer is artificial: her material power symbols are always purchased. In nearly every scene, Marla is shown with a cigarette, usually tilted up, a clear representation of an erect phallic symbol. She therefore projects a specifically masculine power, but it is not real; it is literally a constructed commodity that can be bought and sold.Along those same lines, Marla purchases the power to satisfy her own sexual urges through her acquistion of a sex toy she ironically comments on as “not a threat” to Tyler.

Excavating Marla’s unraveling as a dominant, gender-bending masculinized force comes about not through her material power objects, but through her reactions to the Narrator’s actions towards her. Marla suddenly embodies the standard damsel in distress, albeit outside the normal conversational expectations, when she anxiously expresses her fear that she may have breast cancer: “My tit’s going to rot off.” The Narrator begrudgingly agrees to give her an exam, but his subsequent rejections and verbally-abusive tendencies toward her, even going as far as explaining that he “feels nothing” display a type of Marla previously unseen: one with feelings, capable of being hurt. Notably, this interaction takes place in front of a cracked mirror, a striking image reflective of thebroken nature of the two personas.

This is not the only mirror imagery that occurs in the film, however. At the end of the film, Marla arrives dressed in a near mirror-image of the Narrator’s own clothing. This“mirror” of Marla as a reflection of the Narrator serves several purposes. First, it represents what Lacan calls the “mirror stage” of development, in which an individual views itself as an externally viewable object (78). The individual first views this “fragmented body” as a rival, creating an “aggressive tension,” then later learns to identify with it (78). Lacan explains this directly influences the Imaginary Order, a psychosexual stage in which the sense of lack portrayed within the disconnected, disjointed abstraction of the mirror stage is “filled in” by a fantasy image of oneself. The Narrator’s clear dissatisfaction and boredom with his insomniatic, carbon copy life has created a sense of disgust, and he views himself as the “fragmented body.” Marla and Tyler emerge as a twisted parental archetype, creating a complicated aggressive tension, both sexually and in terms of power and control. The sexual conflict with Marla alludes to both a Freudian Oedipal complexas well as clear castration anxiety through her phallic imagery, while the homoerotic undertones of Tyler’s aggression are additionally destabilizing.

From an alternative perspective, Foucault posits the mirror of Marla as a “placeless place,” what he defines as a heterotopia, indicating the duality of the real and unreal. Foucault explains: “I see myself there where I am not… the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction of the position that I occupy” (“Of Other Spaces” 24). The Narrator’s mirror is Marla, a clear counteraction of both the positions that he and Tyler occupy: she represents chaos in a system of order and obedience that Tyler demands while she also exerts power and confidence that the Narrator lacks. A reflected mirror image, seen in the breast exam scene between the Narrator and Marla, or the imaginary “space” of a phone call, such as Marla’s attempted suicide call, are heterotopias: things which exist but are simultaneously intangible. Clearly these heterotopias have effect, but only due to the notions expressed in Kant’s free will principle—the past governs the opportunity to make decisions. In the Narrator’s case, the past dictates his perception of Marla and the distinct foundation of control given to her. This distribution of power holds another meaning: the Narrator has the ability to distribute power, confidence, control and ambivalence in a male/female relationship, indicating that his pervading reasoning ascribes to a male-dominant view, further defusing and stripping the power of Marla by simply identifying himself (or maleness) as the source.

Fincher reinforces the concept of the heterotopia with his soundtrack pairing as the Narrator and Marla walk away: the Pixies’ droning “Where Is My Mind?” whines as the skyscrapers implode. The title hearkens not only to the initial action-packed neuralfear center camera sweep featured at the beginning of the film, but through a Foucaultist lens, it raises a literal question in which the songwriter seeks to locate the “spaceless space” of the heterotopia of thought.

Although Marla Singer is not a tangible being, she clearly represents a multitude of complexity related to ideas of power, control, fantasy and what Lacan and Foucault identify as reality within the perception of oneself. Fincher artfully uses the concept of what Marla represents (a misconception of misogyny, ignorance and fear driven by a whirlwind of external influences) like a polarized magnetic force, pushing and pulling the Narrator toward and away from a contextualized image of himself and the world surrounding him, ultimately leading to a perspective exclusive to the omniscience of those viewing the film. However, the Narrator gives a clue that he may have identified Marla’s lack of existence in a moment taking place at the beginning of the film, but chronologically connected to the conclusion when he states that “all of this … is really about Marla Singer.” Regardless of her inexistence, one thing is clear about Marla Singer: the messages connected to her are very real.

Works Cited

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Critical Theory.Purdue U, 31 January 2011. Web. 28 November 2012.

Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. Perf. Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham Carter. 20th

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Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Trans. Jay Miskowiec.Diacritics, 16.1 (1986): 22-27.

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Harris, Judith Rich. The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. New

York: The Free Press, 1998. Print.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965. Print.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Print.
Rozmarin, Miri “Power, Freedom, and Individuality: Foucault and Sexual Difference.” Human

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Winter, David G. “Power, Sex, and Violence: A Psychological Reconstruction of the 20th

Century and an Intellectual Agenda for Political Psychology.” Political Psychology, 21.2

(2000): 383-404. Print.