The giant international furnishings chain IKEA is responsible for many consumer-based phenomena, among them our docile acceptance of cheap, hinged desk lamps that droop like spent lilies. But I hadn't realized that overexposure to IKEA results in limp penises, too, until I saw Fight Club.
David Fincher's dumb and brutal shock show of a movie floats the winky, idiotic premise that a modern-day onslaught of girly pop-cultural destinations (including but not limited to IKEA, support groups, and the whole Starbucks-Gap-khakis brand-name axis) has resulted in a generation of spongy young men unable to express themselves as fully erect males. And that the swiftest remedy for the malaise lies in freely and mutually beating the crap out of each other — bleeding, oozing, cracking, and groaning until pulped bodies crumple to the floor in a poetically lit heap.
Had I but world enough and time, I could construct a unified theory linking this grossly simplistic notion to other recent entertainments depicting late-century American emasculation, from American Beauty and Dilbert to Susan Faludi's new all-guy tome Stiffed. But Fincher's contribution to the hubbub commands attention all its own, not least because the director's twitchily art-directed obsession with filth, degradation, and sadism, previously on display in Seven and The Game, puts his work on a path more extreme and disturbing than any theory of male disenfranchisement dreamed up by Faludi or the writers of The Drew Carey Show.
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