Fight Club: Masculinity
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A Copy, of a Copy, of a Copy? Exploring Masculinity Under Transformation in Fight Club: Simon Lindgren, Umea University, Sweden
Extract:
The story of Fight Club obviously has something to do with masculinity, male ideals, power or the lack thereof. And this is indeed something that many scholarly readings of the film have noted. Much like the raging disempowered husband and father running amok in Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993), similar to the character Lester Burnham in Sam Mendes’ American Beauty (1999), and in analogy with the exercises of genital exhibition, self-torture and disgust within the Jackass genre of reality television (Lindgren & Lelievre, 2010), Fight Club’s ‘Jack’ seems to express a form of male obsessive compulsiveness. This is a condition described by Anthony Giddens (1992) as a consequence of men suffering a loss of sexual control in late modern societies. Many readings of Fight Club have, consequently, emphasized that it should read as an expression of a threatened traditional form of masculinity desperately trying to regain its control by resorting to extreme violence. But, in fact, just as many have seen it as a crticism or subversion of stereotypical masculinity.
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