Fight Club as Feminist Cinema
Suggestions of homoeroticism begin to pop up all over the movie. Jack refers to his relationship with Tyler as "Ozzie and Harriet." Before Tyler burns Jack with lye, he slowly kisses his hand. Tyler's very occupation is suggestively feminine: he makes and sells extremely expensive soap. After almost every fight scene in the movie, the two shirtless fighters hug and clasp their sweaty and beaten bodies together. In this way, even hand-to-hand fighting, arguably the most basically masculine action possible, becomes homoerotic. When Tyler pays too much attention to another character, "Angel" (played by Jared Leto), Jack gets extremely jealous and beats Angel to a hideously deformed pulp, explaining, "I felt like destroying something beautiful." This is the only time the word beautiful occurs in the movie in reference to anything, and it refers to a man. Gender confusion continues to abound in the form of Bob (played by Meat Loaf), a former body builder who developed testicular cancer after years of steroid use, and now has "bitch tits," because his body "upped the estrogen." Bob is in this manner the very embodiment of the castration complex, right out in the open for the viewer to see.
In these ways, Fincher takes Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and creates his vision of the book Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk step-by-step using Mulvey's ideas and themes to create a feminist work in an almost entirely male-dominated plot.
Read more on this perspective here.
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