According to Sturken and Cartwright, a distancing irony is used to “ask viewers to notice the structure of the show in order to distance them from the surface pleasures of the text…” and helps “viewers be engaged at a critically conscious level.” Quoting can be a reference to something, in manner, mode, or style, and in postmodern examples, irony is usually used to reflect on different aspects of contemporary culture.
David Fincher’s Fight Club (as well as the original novel by Chuck Palahniuk) integrates many postmodern ironies into its narrative structure. Overall, the film displays a flattening of affect: using hyper violence, media, and drug use to depict an emotionless, detached, and unauthentic life of the main character, while commenting on society as a whole.
The unstable narrator immediately makes the audience suspend their belief in the alternate reality and aware of their own existence. The story is framed by entering the ending first and tracing back from the beginning. Everything that the main character is thinking, he is directing towards you, in your seat in your world.
The plot turns the “truth” in many human events that we see as normal on their heads, which is a component of postmodern work. This includes the notions of empowerment and masculinity, the redundancies of a desk job, hurting the ones you love, consumerism, and even the illusion of safety on airplanes. The narrator is a character that is struggling with his identity and one aspect of this is tied to the consumerism of the culture he inhabits. When looking through an Ikea catalogue he asks the viewer: “What kind of dining set defines me as a person?” He is placing what is on the surface as the “truth,” which is another point of postmodernism.
He attends an “AA” style meeting in the beginning of the film called “Remaining Men Together.” This scene draws on the stereotypical support group setting, and is ironic in itself due to our societies beliefs on how to “be a man.” Then as he sits at his numbingly painful desk job, like millions of Americans do each day, he states “everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.” This disassociation from reality and popular thinking is a technique to distance the character from society, and make the audience think critically about their own reality. This is coupled with a fourth wall break, where his sidekick (ahem) goes from questioning him to speaking to the audience directly. He calls out the “truth” that society feeds us, and how we as individuals proliferate all of our own made up problems.
By the end of the film, the narrator’s own sense of self-awareness is what brings the narrative full circle. Although we want nothing more than to escape from our perceived “truth,” ironically we are just trapping ourselves in our own irrational desires.