In Fight Club (Fincher, 1999), the unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) is shaken up from his upper-middle class life of white-bread malaise by an anarchistic, charismatic figure named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), with whom he starts a series of unlicensed boxing clubs. These clubs are meant to shake up the meaningless, droll lives of disenfranchised men who do not get the chance to be masculine anymore. Fight Club addresses issues of masculinity and consumerism, while determining whether or not the kind of extreme philosophy Durden espouses is the right answer. This is all done in a wonderfully stylistic way, with slick, music-video editing, washed-out cinematography and harsh industrial score by the Dust Brothers, leading to a clean, sanitized world with a seed underbelly underneath – much like Norton’s character and his relationship with Tyler Durden.
“We’re a generation of men raised by women,” says Durden in one scene with Norton’s character, as they compare the uselessness and absence of their fathers. The narrator (who refers to himself as Jack in some self-aware callback narration) responds with his realization that he is “a thirty-year-old boy.” The characters of Fight Club are always desperately searching for answers, stumbling nihilistically through a harsh, dank city that offers them none. The early argument for the film, as espoused by Tyler’s pedantic but fascinating monologues, is that popular culture and the demasculinization of men has led to a softening of the male culture. Men are no longer encouraged to get in fights, and they are seduced by what Jack calls “the IKEA nesting instinct.” Rampant consumerism and malaise has replaced these male ideals of aggression, courage and confidence, turning men into boys and making them purchase material goods in order to define themselves as people.
In the beginning of the film, Jack is one of these people, someone who stumbles through life, constantly downtrodden and incapable of making drastic, spontaneous changes. He has no girlfriend, he cannot sleep, he is constantly walked on by his boss and coworkers – there is nothing to make him believe he is a man. Jack attempts to compensate for this unhappiness and lack of masculinity by being “clever” and coming up with a cynical, wryly detached way of looking at the world. It is his defense mechanism for not being able to stand up for himself in the traditional, masculine way (fighting one’s opponent). Tyler wakes him up from this by sarcastically asking him, “How’s that working out for youbeing clever?” He says this with a knowing grin, understanding (more than Jack can know) just how hollow his cleverness is. He is using humor to deflect his own self-hatred, which comes from not being a man.
In order to deal with this insomnia and depression, he begins to shadow support groups, pretending to have these diseases in order to have sympathy and experience real pain. Jack’s search for feeling, even negative feeling, persists throughout the film – this is merely one avenue he uses. The metaphor for finding his masculinity is taken even further during his most frequent and meaningful support group: men with testicular cancer. There, he befriends Bob (Meat Loaf), a former boxer whose testicles were removed, and the estrogen led to his “bitch tits,” making him even more a visual representation of emasculation. “We’re still men,” weeps Bob in his high-pitched voice. Jack can only flatly, insincerely respond, “Yes, we’re men. Men is what we are.” Even in these sincere moments, Jack does not believe what he is saying.
Oddly enough, one of his first steps to real freedom in the film is when Bob encourages Jack to finally cry. Once he does, he feels free, and his insomnia is cured. In this scene, it is evident that Jack has not completely feminized himself; however, he has turned his aggression inward to himself, instead of outward, like traditional men would in a fight. Society tells us boys do not cry, and as such Jack has repressed that desire to express his nihilistic loneliness; he cannot fight or cry at the start of the film (Bird, 2011). As the film progresses, he learns he must reconcile these masculine and feminine attributes in order to complete himself as a person. To this end, the film explores what it is like to have a ‘dark side’, a part of ourselves that wishes to live out these destructive and rebellious impulses in ourselves – Tyler is Jack’s id, the unhindered part of himself that wants to exorcise all the emasculating frustrations he has as a lame, postmodern man. The editing gives us glimpses of this in the beginning, with Tyler showing up subliminally in the corner of the frame in several points before our first meeting with him – showing the audience that Tyler is bubbling under the surface, waiting to come out.
Jack is awakened to a newfound sense of manly confidence when his new friend Tyler, who is so charismatic Jack feels obligated to impress, urges him to punch Tyler in the face. At first, he is resistant, everything that popular culture and his mother taught him telling him that fighting is wrong. However, Tyler feels as though fighting is the shock to the system that Jack needs; it is a quintessential part of being a traditional man, and he “doesn’t want to die without any scars.” Afterwards, instead of hating the pain and injuries as society tells him he should, Jack feels alive, invigorated – he has something to do now. They continue to fight, drawing in more men until it becomes an entire underground subculture.
Over the course of the film, it is revealed that Tyler is, in fact, a divergent personality created by Jack in order to shake himself out of his ennui. Deep inside, Jack knew that there needed to be change – as Tyler says, “you could not do this on your own.”As a result, Jack invented an ideal to follow; “I look like you wanna look, fuck like you wanna fuck, but most important of allI am free in all the ways that you are not.” Baker describes this as “a heroic individual that overcomes obstacles and achieves success through determination, self-reliance, and hard work. He controls his own destiny by succeeding in free and fair competition offered as representative of an American society that promises to reward to the most deserving individuals” (p. 177).
Tyler’s careless swagger and confidence in every action represents the ideal man for Jack; someone he wants to be , but he is constrained by modern society’s expectations of man – to be a docile, subservient, golf watching IKEA-buying consumer slave. Jack needed a model to follow, and when none existed for him, he created Tyler. Tyler’s complete disregard for normal, polite society (squatting in a rundown flooding house, taking restaurant jobs only to defile the food) is an attractive bit of contrarianism that the rule-bound, repressed Jack finds enticing. Through this fantasy life of Tyler’s, Jack has an outlet for this male aggression that is pent up from decades of Oprah and self-help books. Of course, this same ideal is turned on its head when it goes too far – Fight Club is eventually turned into a terrorist organization that seeks to blow up the headquarters of credit card companies and perform consumerist vandalism all throughout the city. This leads to the death of Bob, which is the event that shakes Jack out of his stupor, and makes him understand that Project Mayhem needs to stop. However, the mindless man machine that Tyler created continues without him, unabated, leaving Jack to confront Tyler himself. At the same time, the mood of the picture changes once this occurs – Jack, realizing the endgame of the fascistic terrorist group he has inadvertently helped create, desires to stop it, the film turning into a thriller where the protagonist must fight to undo what he himself has created.
Even Jack’s one female relationship in the film is hindered by his inability to feel like a man. His first meeting with Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), who also starts to crash these support groups, leaves him impotent in a sense, as he can no longer cry and feel free, a somewhat clear analogue to performance anxiety. He begins to have feelings for her, but he cannot express them in either a masculine (sexual) or feminine (romantic) way – this is typical of the romantic distance that can be placed on women by men in film (Risman, 2011). Once Tyler comes into his life, he starts having sex with Marla as Tyler, while the real Jack is in another room, jealous and impotent once more. Tyler does not care for Marla in an emotional sense, as he is willing to sacrifice her for the good of his overall plan for Fight Club, but Jack must use his ability to express feeling for Marla to save her. Jack finally admits his feelings for her, and manages to defeat Tyler by finally letting go, shooting himself in the head. While he lives, Tyler dies, and he and Marla hold hands as the world crashes down around them (Tyler’s terrorist plan having succeeded).
In conclusion, Fight Club is about the search for manhood in an increasingly disconnected, sanitized consumer society. Jack desperately tries to navigate a world in which his basest instincts (to fight and fuck) are denounced as savage and oppressive. Jack’s generation has been encouraged to be increasingly sensitive and in touch with their feminine side, and yet still is not allowed to cry. Through the creation of Tyler Durden and the implicit expression that fighting is what makes you a man, Jack begins to rediscover his manhood, reign it in from the unchecked hostility Tyler presents. In so doing, he finds a happy medium where he is secure in himself, willing to stand up for what he believes in, and express romantic and sexual interest alike to a woman. The slick tracking shots, sickeningly dark and green-tinged cinematography, and the frenetic editing showcase an unhinged man living in an increasingly sick world he does not know how to effectively change.
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