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Joey Chestnut won the thing, but part of me wants to call him Robert Paulson.  Takeru Kobayashi may prompt comparisons to many people, but I might be the first to think of George Romero.

July 4th for most people means fireworks and cookouts.  There's usually a fair bit of drinking tied in as well, though for me it's usually a good occasion to recover from the hangover brought on by birthday drinking the day before.  And tied in with all of the expected Independence Day traditions, for better or for worse, is the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Competition on Coney Island.  I'd been marginally aware of the contest until ESPN began broadcasting it, providing yet another reason for me to be thankful I don't watch TV.

It was while I was driving home from a friend's house the morning of the 4th that I heard about the results of this year's contest on the radio.  Joey Chestnut became the first American to win the title in eight years.  I pause to mention what the newscast mentioned next only to advise readers to exercise discretion before reading further.  For it was at this point that I learned that at the end of the contest, Kobayashi, the six-time defending champion entering the competition, suffered what in the world of competitive eating is referred to as a "reversal".  Yes, that means what you think it means.

The juxtaposition of doggie bags and airsickness bags gives me nightmares.

So what do vomit and being able to eat 5.5 hot dogs per minute over a 12 minute span have to do with Fight Club?  The answer is obvious to those who've seen the film.  For David Fincher's movie adapting the Chuck Palahniuk novel skewers one of the most prominent aspects of the late 20th century's zeitgeist: the culture of consumption.

Ed Norton plays a non-descript, nameless shlub working for a major auto manufacturer.  An insomniac who sleepwalks through life in more than just the literal sense, Norton's character finds the routine he's become accustomed to torn asunder by the random meeting of two people. 

The first is Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), a strung out, self-destructive woman who shares Norton's penchant for support groups of all stripes.  Norton's character is torn by two competing interests: a fear that Marla may expose his standing as a fraud in the various groups he attends; and a desire for her physically.

Those interests are further complicated by the second stranger Norton meets.  Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) makes and sells designer soaps.  He also lives the ultimate stripped down life in an abandoned and condemned house on the outskirts of town.  When Tyler comes to Norton's aid after an explosion destroys all of Norton's possessions, he asks only one simple favor in return:

"I want you to hit me as hard as you can."

From the scuffle that bubbles out of that first punch, Tyler and Norton bring forth a new kind of support group for them and others like them.  Men who have become disaffected with their place in the world and the things life brought them.  Through the one-on-one brawling that they experience in Fight Club, these men find themselves stripped down to their basest natures and then reconstructing who they are and who they perceive themselves to be.  As Tyler escalates the scope and ambition of Fight Club, Norton finds himself swept up in something more than he could have imagined and questioning whether what the escalation can bring him is what he really wants.

The deeper themes and actions making the film sound like a heavy-handed drama, but the reality couldn't be further from the truth.  Fight Club ranks in my top three black comedies in film history.  Fincher balances the action in Jim Uhls' screenplay nicely between absurd farce and deviously raunchy humor.  The absurdity takes the form in an underappreciated performance from Meat Loaf as the aforementioned Robert Paulson, a member of one of the support groups Norton trolls whom Norton rediscovers later in Fight Club.  The cruder aspects flow from inspired turns from Carter and Pitt, who are as good as I've ever seen them.  That their characters have a perverse chemistry in most all their shared screen time only serves to elevate all the action that surrounds them.

And yet despite the humor that pervades the film, the deeper message, the anger at the perversion of what was the American Dream that infused Palahniuk's novel comes through loud and clear in the serious moments that offset the comedy.  Early in the film when Norton laments some of the material possessions he's lost in the explosion, Durden points out "The things you own end up owning you."  Later, at the point when Fight Club is about to evolve into something more significant, Durden surveys his charges and finds their positions sorely lacking:

"Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

In the end, Tyler may be the only one who recognizes society's drive towards consumption feeds a race not to the top, but to the bottom as people find themselves overburdened with debt and obligations tied into trying to acquire all the things society tells them they need.  Tyler ultimately wants Norton and everyone else to bottom out completely because it may be the only way to start over fresh.  And Tyler has a plan for the way to hasten that reset for society.  Norton has to figure out if he wants to participate in the plan to thwart the consumption culture or impede it.  The conclusion leads Norton to revelations about himself that exceed his wildest imagination.

With the novel Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk gave voice to the anger and frustrations of Generation Y.  Horror movies, in contrast to both the book and the film, have frequently highlighted some of society's greatest fears.  The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers personified the anxieties of the Cold War and Red Scare.  The giant monster movies of the 50s and 60s highlighted concerns about the threat of atomic/nuclear weapons and energy.

There was a blog that I occasionally read that posited that this was why zombie movies came back in such a big way in this first decade of the 21st century.  Undead hordes mindless consuming all that stood in their way was metaphoric for contemporary fears about our consumption of the planet's natural resources.  The idea that as a people we're zombiewalking through our everyday lives was lampooned nicely in the opening title sequence to Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead.

Well before then, George Romero touched on some of those same fears in a different fashion, but during a time not unlike today when people found themselves coping with the reality of limited resources through high gas prices.  And in a similar fashion to Fight Club, 1979's Dawn of the Dead takes a long look at our fascination with consumer culture, even while poking fun at it in absurd fashion.

Opening in the aftermath of Romero's Night of the Living Dead, the zombie plague is slowly overtaking the entire country.  Francine (Gaylen Ross) and Peter (Ken Foree) work for a city television station that is struggling mightily to keep the public aware of their options in the mounting zombie threat.  Like the society around it, the stations command structure is crumbling horribly. 

As the pilot for the station's traffic copter, Peter knows he has a way out.  He convinces Francine to leave with him in the hopes of finding some isolated piece of wilderness the zombies haven't found.  In taking their leave they meet up with Peter's friend Roger (Scott H. Reiniger), a SWAT officer who has given up trying to fight the onslaught.  Stephen (David Emge) is another SWAT member that Roger has invited along on their escape attempt.  The foursome fly some distance before they set down at a building where they think they can hold out for some time, recoup, and plan their next move.

And this is how one of mankind's last stands against the undead should take place at a shopping mall.

The film was given an X rating by the MPAA when it was first made, which seems positively ludicrous by today's standards for gore and violence.  The cartoonish splatters of fake blood look more like ruptures of hobby paint tubes on the shelf at Michael's than undead ichor.  The film was ultimately released unrated, with theaters showing a disclaimer prior to screenings warning that "there was no explicit sex in the film, the movie was of such a violent nature that no one under 17 would be admitted."  The finished product plays almost like a farce at times with the cheesy effects.

But underlying the unintentional humor was the social commentary about what ultimately drives us as human beings.  When the foursome land on the mall and look down in the parking lot, they see waves of the undead shambling towards the building, clawing at the doors to be admitted.

Francine Parker: What are they doing? Why do they come here?

Stephen: Some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.

Still later there's another exchange:

Francine Parker: They're still here.

Stephen: They're after us. They know we're still in here.

Peter: They're after the place. They don't know why, they just remember. Remember that they want to be in here.

It ceases to even be about the people, but more about what the building represents in what remains of the zombies decayed minds.  Once the crew has managed to isolate and eliminate the zombies that remain inside the mall, the four survivors indulge their every whim within the abandoned stores, taking advantage of everything they couldn't afford before.  Yet having it all with no other humans to share it with proves to be every bit as empty and unfulfilling as one would imagine it to be.

Surprisingly, there's more of a misogynist angle within Dawn than there is in Fight Club.  When it's learned that Francine is a few months pregnant with Stephen's child, the men add protector to their assumed titles of hunter/gatherers without considering any of Francine's needs or interests until she forces her viewpoints into the discussion.  Whatever may be said of Marla Singer in Fight Club, she has her own say in things from the beginning.  Her character may not be redeeming, but at least she still has self-determination.  It makes Roger Ebert's assessment of Fight Club as being nothing more than "macho gay porn" even more ridiculous for the lack of depth in its analysis.

This isn't to say that either of these films will appeal to everyone.  I've had very heated arguments about the nature and message of Fight Club with very close friends who I have the utmost respect for.  And the violence of the fights when they occur is intense, brutal, and ugly.  Dawn of the Dead's gore and blood may be cartoonish, but it is still gore and blood.  Combined with the violence against and by both man and zombie, it will be enough to turn some people off without discussion of any of the subtext in either film.

In the end, both films wrap up on a similar idea: whether one has all the luxuries of life they can find or has hit absolute bottom with nothing to show for it, the only way to define one's life and truly live is to make the choice to assume control of yourself and do what you know needs to be done.  Neither film has a "conclusive" ending, but I find that to be one of the things that makes both films worth recommending by themselves.  Movies that leave the ending open to interpretation and discussion make for the best group viewings in my opinion, because you can learn as much from the arguments afterwards about what each film really means as you can from the films themselves.

What Dawn of the Dead has shown me in the aftermath of this past July 4th is that I find a zombie munching on "human entrails" in a film far more palatable than watching Kobayshi attempt to hold in the vomit and failing miserably, with the bile spraying forth from around his hands and fingers.  Lord knows what the zombie is eating is probably considerably less processed and may actually be healthier.

And what Fight Club showed me after seeing Joey Chestnut raise his arms in victory is just how far our society has slipped in terms of finding events and accomplishments to celebrate.  That someone can successfully gorge himself without spewing and be called by an announcer (I hope to God with tongue planted firmly in cheek) "one of America's greatest sporting heroes" makes me wonder what happened to our answer to the greatest generation.  His name is Joey Chestnut, but in my head I look at him and find myself rechristening him in repeating a mantra from Fight Club that feels all too appropriate once you know the context:

His name is Robert Paulson.

His name is Robert Paulson.

His name is Robert Paulson.

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