On The Movie The Fight Club
Watched this movie on dvd again. This movie is told from the perspective of a man. He fails to notice women, as he truly fails to notice much of anything. The man's life is one batch of nothing, one giant waking dream that sucks.He is a slave to his life and how he has created meaning in it. He is like most Americans and people who's first concerns are not shelter, food and basic survival. His life revolves around what little joy a man who has a job he hates, joy only comes from purchasing thing, or finding something to purchase that feels like it shows the world who you are.
The narrator has no identity outside of what he owns which is why his life sucks, that and he travels so much he is a visitor in his own life, not even the main character, at least not until he becomes Tyler. Then he starts messing with Marla. Marla is one of the few complicated characters, she is cold and suicidal, yet full of life and she settles for some deranged lunatic. Neither of the representative sexes is shown in a great light. This movie simply shows that something good can happen by living for our most base animal needs rather than those newly aquired needs of a modern human. The narrator only becomes truly alive when he is neither the original weakling or Tyler, and in a way Marla helps him realize who he really is, a person with two personalities.
To me men are only the center of the movie because the narrator is a man, and is trying to tap in to a hidden part of man's desire, which is not to spread his seed as much as it is to do what is forbidden, to fight. The men would not start a fight with a woman, no matter how purposefully animalistic they are going, especially given that the narrator, who is also the rule maker has always thought highly of woman it appears (he was raised only by his mother). I think this movie is simply seen through the eyes of one man, which is similar to sex in the city where the woman are the focus.
Tyler Durden espouses what was basically seen as a sort of “male-backlash” against encroaching Feminism, warped and corrupted as always by the popular media (both the Backlash and the Feminism, mind you) until whatever valid points either one had to make were rendered lost and inert amidst the less accurate but sexier stereotypes and hot-button provocations.
This “backlash” got itself a fair amount of press for while, vis-a-vis its De Facto Spiritual Leader and House Intellectual, the poet Robert Bly, who sort of pioneered a kind of neo-Freudian “We Men have Lost our Balls and Been Turned into Pussies by Our Mothers” mixture of socio-political philosophy and bio-determinism, what they now like to call “Evolutionary Psychology”, as though that meant anything.
Bly’s thesis was that Feminism, in it’s social-reversal of denegrating certain assumed “Male” traits and elevating equally assumed “Female” sensibilities, had gone just a little too far in “Feminizing” society, by making man question the very instincts that make him what he is as a gendered being, the genetic birthright passed down from his spear-chucking, boar-hunting, Cro-Magnon forebears. He (and the small but briefly profitable Male Empowerment Industry that followed) encouraged men to reclaim their lost maleness by getting in touch with their inner hunters, their inner Wild Man, the archetypal and Mythic animus that makes up the Yang half of the great spinning Wheel of the Tao.
And when I say “Industry”, I mean it literally. Suddenly scores of Inner Wild Man books hit the self-help and mass market paperback lists. “Wild Man Weekends” sprang up, where men would gather in some primitive grove to grunt and howl and become, in the tradition of the ancient tribal shaman, the personification of their inner beast. Sorry guys; I know this sounds ludicrous, but I swear I’m not making this up. That’s reality for ya.
Okay: now let’s take a look at Fight Club. One of the earliest images in the film is Ed Norton sitting on the toilet, pants around his ankles, reading a magazine, which he turns sideways in order to peruse an (unseen by us) full two-page photo spread. It’s the classic “Opening the Playboy Centerfold” move, and so we all assume (as we’re supposed to) that he is looking at porn.
Then, in a voice-over, we are actually told, in case we might miss the point, “We used to read porn; now we read catalogues.”
A vastly important line, because it crystalizes this particular theme of the film: Man Has Become Feminized. His natural urge to focus on his sexual, testosterone-fueled instincts have become subverted, by the very Female instinct to nest; to create a safe and protected home, full of the things that makes life survivable and comfortable. Men have become Mommies; the only thing missing is the ability to get pregnant and give birth themselves. They spend their money and time in Gathering, not Hunting; on feathering their nests; not stripping down to their loincloths and going out on the hunt as they should be.
And when, for our nameless protagonist, even this fails to satisfy the emptiness that he feels but cannot fully comprehend, he searches out – what? Fellowship. Companionship. But more – sympathy, empathy, emotional connection – “Female” things, for God’s Sake. What allows him to finally find peace and sleep the sleep of the blessed, is when he can hold and be held in another’s arms, and cry. He has been fully feminized – colonized, if you will.
Enter Marla Singer and Tyler Durden.
Marla is the Other Side of Feminism. She herself is a Wild Woman. Unfettered, Uncontrollable, Sexually voracious, and tough as a she-wolf. She isn’t attractive to Nameless; after all – Nameless is the personification of the Soft Side of Woman. The Feminized Man, remember? But she and Tyler – Nameless’ own, personal Robert Bly, are drawn together like magnets.
Now, let’s stop for a moment. It may be up to interpretation exactly what the film is trying to say about all of these thematic elements, as well as what the film’s ultimate attitude and perspective on them are. But one thing is clear (although we don’t learn this truth until near the end): Nameless has become two people, a split personality, and as with most of these cases, the personalities become distillations of one half of the original whole. And because Nameless has succeeded so well in repressing the “Male” side of his personality, it finally responds to all this pressure by finding a crack in the armor (probably Marla), and explodes out fully formed as Tyler.
And Tyler has a mission; to strip away all of that feminization from Nameless and return him to his natural state of Maleness. The first thing he does is to evict Nameless from his carefully feathered nest, by setting off a bomb and blowing it up. Again – in terms of the theme we’re discussing here, this is very important. Tyler’s first act is an act of destruction. In the religions that recognize a male-female duality in God, the power to destroy is often attributed to the Male: Hindu Shakti (the female) is the life-giving force, but one of the titles for her mate Shiva is “Destroyer of Worlds”, and Shiva was the name invoked by Robert Oppenheimer upon witnessing the first detonation of an atomic bomb.
Tyler is a Wild Man. His home isn’t a nest – it’s a cave. His livelihood consists of breaking into Liposuction clinics and hunting down animal flesh – fat, which he then renders into soap – which is a form of Alchemy – Tyler is a Hunter and a Scientist. When he and Nameless first bond, they don’t do so in a feminine way, as the bonding in all of the support groups happens. First they bond over beer and intellectual discussion – this is where Tyler first puts forth his ideas that gathering and feathering is spiritual slavery and deadly to the (Male) soul.
The next thing that happens is that Tyler requests that Nameless hit him as hard as he can. This escalates into a bloody, bare-knuckle brawl that leaves them both exhausted and battered. The purpose, as Tyler makes clear later, is not to win. The purpose is to both endure and bestow a bloody baptism; a tribal initiation of the absolute essence of what makes a Man a Male. Battle as a Way of Being.
Fight Club is not only Robert Bly’s “Men’s Gatherings” for Weekend Warriors blockbuster magnified to its extremest mutation. Fight Club is a stand-in for all traditional Male enclaves; steeped not only in intense camaraderie but also the highest secrecy; The Masons, The Knights Templar, the Thin Blue Line of the Police – the male organizations for whom secrecy is part of their very architecture. The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. Fight Club is a brotherhood of men who wear their civilized, social selves – the very society that Tyler says has feminized them – as a mask. Beneath the mask, is the Wild Man who can endure the ritual of pain and walk away unbowed.
Fight Club is the extension of Tyler Durden’s one-sided personality, and since part of that archetypal Maleness is (according to some) the instinct to make things, the Creative Urge (how this relates to a reaction to woman’s ability to get pregnant I’ll leave for others to hash out) , then Tyler, as the Archetyal Male, must impose his Will on those around him; and he sets out to remake Man in His Own Image. And so, Fight Club evolves into Project Mayhem. (That touches on another theme, one which shows Tyler to be a classic Trickster God, which he is, but that’s for a whole ‘nother discussion).
Project Mayhem’s highest degree of punishment is, of course, castration: if you are going to act like a woman, think like a woman, you might as well be one. And there is a counterpoint to all this, in the person of Bob; testicle-less, man-boobed Bob. Bob is what Nameless and Tyler add up to: a wholly integrated man who can express himself in “female ways” without it threatening his manhood. The Mantra of the Testicular Cancer group is “I’m still a Man,” and this is true not only for men who have lost their genitalia, but also (as Bob exemplifies) true for men who don’t need to repress either a male or a female aspect of their own personality.
The film illustrates the fact that Bob, as our symbol of the integrated man, is somehow on the outside of this circle of Tyler’s extremism. When applicants for membership in Tyler’s army are initially told to leave, Bob immediately complies, and has to be dragged back by Nameless. Bob is the only one allowed to wear a shirt in Fight Club. Bob is the one who dies (ousted from the Society of Men), and is also set apart by having his name returned to him, while all the others no longer have names. Those are a small details that are nonetheless important, because they’re part of the key not only to Bob but to what he represents.
So; the question: is Fight Club misogynistic? Well, one thing we find out late in the game is that what kept Marla coming around in spite of the abuse she suffers from Nameless is that something of Nameless’ softness, his sensitivity and ability to empathize (as those support-group sessions were anything but faked) managed to get interspersed in Marla’s experience of Tyler’s badass, hypersexual Wild Man. And it’s only when she becomes convinced that the two sides will never be reconciled that she decides she can’t put up with it anymore.
Meanwhile, Nameless experiences a transcendent moment when he “awakens” to the knowledge that he and Tyler are, indeed, the same person. And, somehow, he instinctually does the exact right thing in order to bring them both together again – that is, to suffer a symbolic death-and-rebirth, so that the shattered soul can be reborn whole once again.
And since the denouement of the film is that rebirth, we could say that Nameless’ spiritual journey has taken him into the underworld, and he has managed to find his way back out again, his formerly repressed side now fully integrated into him as a person. And if this is the case, that not repressing Tyler but making him a part of his own self-awareness was the goal in his quest, then this new, integrated man who is aware of all of his aspects, both emotional, rational, male and female, is the measure of his success.
And that suggests that the story sees a man free of having to repress any part of himself as the more evolved. Which is not, I should think, a misogynist notion.
