The title Fight Club has been reused by other media since the film's release; newspapers identify incidents of bare-knuckle boxing among working professionals as "fight clubs", and TV shows like Jurassic Fight Club adopt the title.[1]
Fight Club is a popular film among young men, and in college, it is common for students to deconstruct the film. While some academics have studied the film's depictions of gender, masculinity, and sexuality, others have dismissed the film as not worthwhile for analysis. Andrew Slade writes, "Fight Club is a generational conflict that is reproduced in much of its academic reception as a conflict between competing notions of masculinity."[2]
The film attracts "alienated young men" because Project Mayhem's actions are like pranks of adolescent rebellion but on a Hollywood scale. The pranks "function as wish fulfillments". Slade writes, "The film champions a nostalgia for clear forms and models of masculinity that would supply the men of the film with clear routes through which to channel their energies."[3]
The unnamed narrator is alienated from his father, and in the course of the film, he becomes a father figure by creating a community through Project Mayhem and assumes the role of "the ubiquitous, authoritative patriarch".[2] The narrator's father had told him to go to college, to get a job, and to get married. The narrator perceives the advice as "castrating and feminizing" despite the father's "patriarchal and heterosexist form of masculinity". At the end of the film, the narrator is partnered with Marla Singer while the song "Where Is My Mind?" by the Pixies is played to establish "the tropological force of the heterosexual love story as liberating", validating the father's advice.[4]
The image of the penis is prevalent in the film as representative of authentic masculinity.[4] While the penis itself is rarely displayed, it has "second order representations" such as pornographic frames, dildos, and Tyler's gun. Tyler Durden holds the narrator at gunpoint and keeps the gun barrel in the narrator's mouth; Tyler is portrayed as "hyper-masculinized" while the narrator "is figured as feminine".[5] When the ending scene shows a spliced frame of a penis, it is one belonging to "a disassembled body". Slade writes,『The film performs a violent reduction on the concept of masculinity as lived out by real persons—what matters the most is the cock.』The film says that modern men base their masculinity on their possessions and that real masculinity escapes these "conventions and trappings" and possess a kind of freedom.[6]
The fight clubs put the male body on display as a way of showing that women's castration of men is incomplete.[7]
The film suggests that lack of a strong father leads a man to have gay desire, and Tyler Durden's rhetoric is "a defensive measure against gay desire" by finding the right father or becoming a father figure oneself.[4]
The narrator becomes jealous when Marla Singer is present in his and Tyler's lives. He is close to Tyler and becomes jealous of "any other object that competes with him".[8] When Tyler and Marla are "sport fucking", the narrator passes by their door and Tyler opens it and asks the narrator, "What do you want?" The narrator wants to replace Marla and "be sport fucked by Tyler Durden". Since the gay desire is a hallucination and the narrator unites with Marla in a heterosexual coupling in the film's resolution, the desire is impossible. Slade writes, "Without Marla to screen straight desire and to supplement the film's queer love, Fight Club reveals the truth of homosocial panic and desire."[9]
The narrator is also jealous toward a blonde man who receives attention from Tyler Durden. At fight club, the narrator beats up the blonde man. In the film, gay men are "objects to be destroyed"; a man is a heterosexual, and the pommeling is a rejection of gay desire.[9]
In the film's DVD commentary, actor Edward Norton, screenwriter Jim Uhls, and author Chuck Palahniuk discount the interpretations of homoeroticism. "Young, straight, male" college students also discount the interpretation as not belonging with the film's notion of masculinity, though the film's structure has "discernibly" gay desire. For example, the narrator and Tyler confess to each other that they do not need another woman.[7]
"Fight Club has a recursive structure."[4]
Despite the film appearing to have a new message,『it follows a conservative, even cliché tropological structure』in bringing the narrator and Marla Singer together, him overcoming his revolutionary ideals and her overcoming her alienation. The film attempts to mask these conventions from the audience. Slade writes, "This is how Marla can become, at the end, both the object of Tyler's 'sport fucking' and the object invested with the tenderness of the caress."[8]
The film is also "an hallucination from beginning to end"; the narrator has a dissociative identity disorder that causes him to hallucinate Tyler Durden.[8] When at the film's end the narrator realizes that Tyler is a hallucination, he finds stability reinforced by the conventions of the heterosexual coupling with Marla and "the destruction of the skyline" as a way to start over from the previous world.[10]
George L. Henderson observes about the film, "One prominent reading is that Fight Club is an anti-capitalist, antisocial screed; a rejection of capitalist values, of commodity-centered living, and of bourgeois materialism tout court." Fight Club is a rare Hollywood film that attacks capitalism directly; They Live (1988) is another such rarity. Henderson disagrees with the reading and says that the narrator and Tyler Durden's conversation about being complete and incomplete is the work of capitalism.[11] Trash is a key element in the film that is tied to use value and exchange valueinMarxian economics. With this element, the film is not a revolution against capitalism but instead a revolution of capitalism.[12]
The narrator possess material things as part of his class aspiration; he focuses on having possessions "from his own standpoint within capitalism". At the film's onset, the narrator is becoming saturated with possessions, and his "droll" voiceover of the contents of his condo suggests that "the specificities of use value have reached their limit".[13] When the narrator moves to live with Tyler in the dilapidated house, his capitalist perspective still lingers as he becomes interested in the previous tenant's possessions. Like he read the IKEA catalog in his condo's bathroom, he now reads old magazines left behind. He was bored with his own possessions and finds new pleasure in exploring others'.[14]
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (saved){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (saved){{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help) (saved){{cite news}}: CS1 maint: date format (link) (saved){{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help) (saved){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (access in October 2009){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (A listing of the top two hundred and one films as chosen by the reader's of Empire magazine. With comments by actors and filmmakers.){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (To celebrate its 200th issue Empire select their favourite songs from film soundtracks covering the period of its 200 issues.){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (Results of an online debate to decide which decade is the best for films. Includes a timeline of events from the 90's and a range of subjects from technology, award winners and top ten films.){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (Drawing on previous contributions, examines the meaning of the concept of unreliable narration in films as diverse as Fritz Lang's YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE, BARRY LYNDON, The CASTLE, and FIGHT CLUB){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (DVD review and analysis of FIGHT CLUB.){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (Traces Guy Debord's interaction with cinema, looking briefly at FIGHT CLUB.){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (A consideration of narrative ambiguity in three popular Hollywood films: The USUAL SUSPECTS, The SIXTH SENSE and FIGHT CLUB.){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (Brief reviews of the editor's choice of films of 2000.){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (A note of the release in the UK on video of FIGHT CLUB.){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (Additional filmographic information on The FIGHT CLUB: certificate 18, length 138 minutes 56 seconds.){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (On the use of effects to visualise the narrator's view of the world in FIGHT CLUB.){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link){{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: date and year (link) (Interview with David Fincher who talks about the making of FIGHT CLUB.){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (Soundtrack review for FIGHT CLUB.){{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) (On French broadcaster cancelling a planned screening of SE7EN after controversy over David Fincher's latest film FIGHT CLUB.){{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) (On the marketing campaign in Spain for FIGHT CLUB.){{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) (On FIGHT CLUB being the second major US studio title to require cuts to qualify for an 18 certificate.){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (A review and analysis of David Fincher's FIGHT CLUB is followed by an interview with the director who talks about making the movie.){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (On the reception of David Fincher's FIGHT CLUB at the 56th Venice Film Festival.){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (Edward Norton talks about David Fischer's FIGHT CLUB.){{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) (On the opening of FIGHT CLUB. Includes a list of Brad Pitt top ten wide openings.){{cite magazine}}: Check date values in: |date= (help){{cite magazine}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) (Feature article on FIGHT CLUB.){{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help){{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (Interview with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton on THE FIGHT CLUB){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (On why FIGHT CLUB is 'unmissable'.){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) (A comparison of two drafts of the screenplay by Jim Uhls' for FIGHT CLUB. First draft dated 2nd October 1996. Second draft dated 12th January 1998.){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link){{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help){{cite magazine}}: Check date values in: |date= (help){{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help){{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
