FM4 - Single Film Critical Study: Fight Club

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Edited extracts:

Fight Club is also about masculinity among a specific class of American men: the burgeoning gray-collar workers. There was a time when blue-collar workers could invest in a kind of honor and mythology of hard physical work, but "the world has changed" and now former steelworkers are parking cars, waiting tables, and watching security monitors. They have not even the solace of big muscles and the solidarity of unions from which to construct their identities and with which to salve their bruised egos. And as a character says in the film, they lack a great cause, like a war or depression, in which to test themselves.

Tyler Durden turns out to be a fragment of Jack's personality, but this is merely a device to have this mysterious and powerful character (and manifestation of wish fulfillment) appear in Jack's life. (An analysis of Tyler Durden's name reveals that in antiquated English, "Tyler" means gatekeeper or house builder. "Durden" has the word root dour meaning hard (as in "durable"). His initials, T.D., invoke Todd or death in German or perhaps D.T. (delirium tremens), since Tyler is a hallucination of Jack, the waking person.

Fight Club is really about what it is to be a man who serves others (as women have traditionally) and how such men construct identity and meaning in their lives. That women now can take most of the jobs that men can is certainly a background fact, but the film explores other issues or sources of masculinity. The first of three pivotal scenes in this film is a moment of intimacy between Jack and Tyler when they confide that their fathers are distant and disengaged.

Tyler says in his heart-to-heart with Jack: "We are a generation of men raised by women. Do you really think that women are the answer?" At the prospect of marriage, in hypothetical response to Tyler's questions of "what next?" Jack says, "How can I get married? I'm a 30-year-old boy." Not until Tyler becomes a threat to Marla, who has been Tyler's lover, does Jack take steps to protect her. In the final moment of the film, he can acknowledge that he has been part of this relationship (which he believed only to be between Tyler and Marla) and can be tender to her. By way of explanation, he says, "You met me at a very strange time in my life."

There are nagging fears of castration and mutilation that pervade the film. The first support meeting that Jack attends is a testicular cancer group where the members have had their testicles removed and commiserate, saying, "We're still men." One of the survivors of testicular cancer, Bob (Meatloaf), has grown huge breasts because of subsequent hormone imbalances, but there is no sense of his being effeminate. His breasts are almost incidental and (consistent with the rest of the film's dismissal of women) referred to as "bitch tits." After the Tyler personality blows up Jack's condo, he tells him that it could be worse: He could have had a woman cut off his penis as he slept and thrown out the window of a moving car. Castration is also a threat used against adversaries at other points of the film. Jack embraces and reintegrates Tyler in the final scene of the film when he shoots himself in the face, "killing" Tyler.

The other two pivotal scenes, with regard to exploring masculinity, are occasions when Tyler speaks to the members of fight club, saying, "We've all been raised to believe that we'll be millionaires and movie idols. But we won't!" This ties into the American dream and the mythology that anyone can become rich or become president. Part of the way that the working poor are lulled into cooperating and staying in the service of richer classes is by this unspoken promise that if they work hard they will ascend to higher security and status.
(c) 2000-2004 by Adrienne Redd.