Fight Club (1999)

[truepenny]

I'm going to leave this up, because, well, truth in advertising, and it's good for me to be reminded that sometimes I fuck up a reading, just like everybody else.

However, after having people argue with me all afternoon, I have realized that I was wrong.

Fight Club starts with two characters, the narrator and Marla. Both of them are equally dysfunctional. Both of them are emotional vampires. We follow one of them (being the narrator) through a convoluted and surreal fantasia of hyper-masculine reactions to the anomie of the white middle-class cubicle drone. Tyler, and the men of Fight Club/Project Mayhem, are the outward flourishes of the narrator's inner fucknutness. Marla stays on the outskirts, providing a baseline against which to calibrate the narrator's escalating insanity, and okay, yes, it DOES matter that in the end he rejects Tyler and holds hands with Marla.

I do think there are ways in which the NARRATOR's view of women and the NARRATIVE's view of women get elided, conflated, and otherwise confused, but the thing I thought I was seeing is not, I now think, a thing that is actually there.


We apologize for the inconvenience, and maybe I'll just shut up for another two weeks.

---

TYLER: We're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.

---

If "chick flick" is a derogatory term, used mostly--but not exclusively--by men, to designate a movie targeted at an audience that privileges a set of "feminine" values in a binary fashion that rejects "masculine" interest, then the equivalent on the other side of the binary would be "dick flick."

Fight Club is a dick flick.

As will be obvious from the scare-quotes around "masculine" and "feminine," I have philosophical objections to the binary view of gender that supports the labelling of movies as "chick flicks" (and "dick flicks," for that matter)--and I object even more strongly to the fact that that binary view of gender isn't limited to the labelling, that it in fact pervades and infects the movies themselves.

I don't like chick flicks.

I liked Fight Club a lot, but I felt unclean afterwards.

This movie is a male-centered fantasy in which violence sublimates (hetero)sexual drives, allowing men to form deep, necessary, and above all MANLY relationships with other men, while leaving women to simper and die, unfulfilled. Or, like Marla, to be used in a perfect Sedgwickian homosocial negotiation between two men.

Marla who--you will notice--fights like a girl.

This is a highly misogynistic movie--misogynistic to the point that it is struggling to imagine a world in which women don't even exist. "The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club." As Tyler points out, that rule gets broken almost as soon as it's made. Arguably, that's what it's for, because how else is Fight Club going to grow? And Fight Club has to grow, so that it can become Project Mayhem. The real first rule of Fight Club--or possibly the zeroth rule, à la Asimov, is: you do not talk about Fight Club to women.

Nobody has to say it, because nobody is ever going to break that rule. And because, in the movie's world, there are no women who might stumble across the evidence. Tyler considers Marla a threat because she's--in his view--close to finding out about [SPOILER], not because the narrator has told her about Fight Club, or even started to tell her about Fight Club. She's compartmentalized off on another track. In the world of Fight Club, the basement world, there ARE no women. No female bartenders, no female waiters, no female police officers. There's a moment where the narrator says something about the house being so full of people it moved (I can't remember the exact line, and I'm really not going to go searching for it), and I thought, The house isn't full of people. It's full of MEN. But it's not an exaggeration to say that for this movie, "people" = "men." Unproblematically.

And I think what makes me uncomfortable and unhappy with Fight Club, as a movie, is that it doesn't seem to recognize the fallacy inherent in that view. The movie is heavily invested in affirming masculinity (e.g., the obsession with testicles, from the initial focus on the Testicular Cancer Group all the way through to the punishment for trying to stop Project Mayhem being castration), and despite the fact that that affirmation becomes toxic, I can't get rid of the nagging feeling that it is also valorized.

Fight Club, of course, has an unreliable narrator, and a great deal of the movie's misogyny can in fact be laid at the door of its highly misogynistic narrator. (Whom Edward Norton plays brilliantly.) mirrorthaw pointed out that what we get in this movie is the view from the inside of the narrator's head, and we agreed, moreover, that it's an allegory, a parable, neither intended for nor sustainable under a realistic reading. But the thing about unreliable narrators is that for them to be successful, you have to show the audience their unreliability. And although Fight Club shows that the narrator is unstable, I'm not sure that it ever shows us that he's wrong.

And if you're thinking about jumping in here to argue that he isn't wrong, I beg of you, take that argument somewhere else. Also, if you're thinking about jumping in to argue that it isn't misogyny, that just because a movie isn't interested in "chick things" doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it--that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the movie's construction of masculinity is a sin both of omission and comission, that it's pretending that middle-class heterosexual white male masculinity, with its obsession with material objects and its obsession with its own perceived effeminacy, is the only kind of masculinity there is.

Marla is, as Tyler says, a predator masquerading as a house pet. I never once, throughout the whole thing, felt sorry for her. And there are almost no other women in the movie--the guided-meditation leader with the lobotomized smile, and Chloe who's dying and can't get laid--nothing to show us that the MOVIE realizes Tyler's chilling misogynistic crack (which I quoted at the top) is so much self-deluding bullshit.

Maybe the ending counts. But I'm not sure. I'm not at all sure the movie understands where Tyler and the narrator went wrong.

Comments

[stevenagy.livejournal.com]

It's certainly a movie you can take a lot of different ways. I can see the arguments from both sides, though I didn't come away thinking about the misogyny as much as how it showed the lengths that are sometimes necessary to start over again. The last scene had a defnite Adam-Eve flavor to it.

[abigail-n.livejournal.com]

I don't think you're wrong about the film's inherent misogyny, but I did think that Marla was a likable character. She was smart and, especially towards the end of the film, a welcome respite from the increasing derangement of project mayhem.

You could argue that this is a case of Bonham-Carter's performance outdoing the script, and that may very well be the case. Alternatively, it's possible to point out that, as the narrator's grip on sanity slackens, so does Marla's anti-social attitude and transgressive behavior, and that she does come to represent a sort of restrictive femininity. By that point, however, she's clearly right, and probably the only fully sane character in the bunch.

[stevenagy.livejournal.com]

And you can see a rejection of her objectification by Norton's character when he flashes on some of the surreal scenes of Marla and Tyler together. Each flashes across the screen with a quickness just like the pornographic frame did when it was added to the children's film earlier.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

A question that interests me is, by your definition, is Master and Commander a dick flick? It takes place in an almost totally masculine world, but then it's supposed to, historically. (Though women did serve as crew in a few of O'Brian's books, but it's rare.) The values of the movie are those historically considered the masculine ones. On the other hand, it's not that women are consciously kept our or disparaged (well, by the mores of the time, maybe, but not by the characters specifically). They just aren't there. I'd say that it is, but in a better way. I didn't feel dirty afterward. What do you think?

[difrancis.livejournal.com]

In M & C, I don't think the movie and the actions are defined by masculinity, though I think you can perceive a commentary on masculinity of the period. But there's not a lot of evidence that the characters are defined by being 'not feminine' which seems to be an element of fight club.

Di

[jodi-davis.livejournal.com]

A really interesting way to view this movie is that Marla is a third part of the Narrator's personality - and that there is an integration at the end. It's a man's changing view of his feminine side and what that femininity actually is and if he needs or wants it.

[difrancis.livejournal.com]

the thing about unreliable narrators is that for them to be successful, you have to show the audience their unreliability.

I'm wondering about that. I'm thinking of course of Humbert Humbert, and trying to recall if he's ever demonstrated to be unreliable. He's certainly unstable, but one of the elements of Lolita is that though the narrative is framed, that frame is still inside HH's pov, so there never is a POV outside of HH to lend any sense to whether he's truly unreliable or not. To my mind, that's the nature of unreliability--you just don't know. You can't know.

I think too in relation to the definition of masculinity in the movie, what is absent is equally as present as what is present and the gaps/lacks constitute a statement of femininity and masculinity that can't be ignored (which is to say that I agree that because the statement isn't overt doesn't mean it isn't there).

Di

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I'd actually argue that Humbert Humbert isn't unstable. He's just wrong. And Nabokov demonstrates his unreliability partly by the unstated constrast to consensus reality--the same thing Twain does in Huckleberry Finn. We're never outside of Huck's head, either, but we know he's unreliable, because we interpret what he tells us by different rules than the ones he uses. We recognize the con men for what they are; Huck can't.

But Nabokov also forces Humbert Humbert to recognize his wrongness--at the end, when he meets Dolly as an adult and sees what he's done to her. (I cannot find my copy of Lolita, so I can't quote directly.)

[roadrunnertwice]

You haven't seen Jesse Hamm's recent mashup with Dennis the Menace, right?

not to be a jerk, but...

[syrimne.livejournal.com]

I'll probably get skewered for saying this, but as a woman who does a lot of work with men AND women on repression of various kinds (I do a form of therapy work that involves uncovering repressed issues/emotions), I have to say I found this movie interested more in terms of the kind of emotions/feelings that PEOPLE repress. I can see how most would view this as "male-only" territory, and it's true that it was written from this standpoint, but as a martial artist (again...I'm a woman) and someone who found I had a lot of repressed aggression once I took up martial arts (not hatred, not anger...just aggression and a want to engage it physically), I actually found this movie an interesting meditation on the total lack of outlets for these feelings in a modern society.

I think a lot of people confuse violence/hate/anger with aggression. I see nothing wrong with aggression if it is dealt with in a clean way and doesn't hurt anyone...it becomes anger/hate/whathaveyou when it is consistently repressed over and over again and judged. It's similar to how sex used to be viewed (and still is by a lot of radical christians). I hate to say it, but a lot of men DO feel held back in this regard, and a lot of them DO blame women (which is silly of course, but often goes into the whole mother issues thing and stereotypes about women repressing men's masculinity, etc). Most of the "nice guys" just feel guilty for feeling this way and repress it. It's only the "a**holes/misogynists" who say it out loud, (trust me, I've have heaps of "nice guys" in sessions who explode into anger/frustration about these issues). To just dismiss this as 'misogyny' is missing the point. This blaming of an entire gender category for our anger/woes/feelings of powerlessness is a part of sexual politics on *both* sides and something that must be outgrown on the individual level before it can be overcome by entire groups.

Granted, fight club was a really violent way to deal with these feelings, but I think the observation that many people feel they are living with the volume turned down is not an illusion, and pretending that's not the case (or that it's only the case for *men*) isn't going to help anyone. I have referred clients to martial arts for this reason and it often does them wonders...makes them more happy, less angry and less violent.

In martial arts, some of the meanest, most violent and ANGRY partners I've had in sparring were women. I don't blame them for this...it was almost always because they had so much pent up aggression, anger and violence that they kind of freaked out once they got in the ring. But some of these women scared the crap out of me...like they wanted to kill their partners, not just fight in a friendly/aggressive way. Over time, they relaxed, lost some of their fear/anger and had more fun. The point is, repressing this stuff just doesn't work. Telling little boys that it's bad to get angry/aggressive is just as bad as the centuries and centuries where we told little girls the same thing. Calling these impulses 'inherently male' or 'inherently misogynistic' only worsens the problem.

And for the record, I thought Marla held her own. She doesn't have to be able to beat the guy in a fist fight to be strong. Frankly I am tired to death of "feeling sorry for" women. To me, a big victory would be no longer valuing the moral high ground over our own personal power.

Re: not to be a jerk, but...

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No, actually, that was the first iteration of my attempts to articulate what disturbed me: "Why aren't women allowed to be angry, too?"

Because I don't agree with the (unstated and unexamined) assumption that only men would be drawn to Tyler's fight clubs. I don't think there's any reason--except narrative misogyny--that this should be a "men only" movement.

But the movie's construction of gender doesn't allow women to be fighters. Which is, you know, only one of the problems with its construction of gender, but I do think it's a major one.

Re: not to be a jerk, but...

[aries-jordan.livejournal.com]

I have to agree about the lack of safe outlets for aggression (other than passively watching horrifically violent movies, which I'm not sure is actually an outlet) in this culture. It used to be that we let boys (or sometimes aggressive girls) "be boys," read bullies, to such an extent that we blamed their victims for being victims. But now we may have gone too far to the other extreme, making kids feel bad not only for acting out negative and angry feelins in a harmful way, but just for having them.

I just friended you, btw, just because I am a writer, forner martial artist, and live in the San Diego area. Hi.

[electricland.livejournal.com]

And there are almost no other women in the movie

Somewhere offscreen there are presumably a lot of women who had liposuction. I'm not sure where that fits in, if anywhere.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ooh, good point.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I'm saying that the movie's construction of masculinity is a sin both of omission and comission, that it's pretending that middle-class heterosexual white male masculinity, with its obsession with material objects and its obsession with its own perceived effeminacy, is the only kind of masculinity there is.

The quality of stridency with which this message is presented, and the clarity with which negative consequences are made visible though not played up, lead me to think that reading Fight Club [ the film ] as actually supporting that construction of masculinity is akin to reading Jonathan Swift as a serious advocate of population-control through eating babies.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I don't think the movie's as clear about its own intentions as you think it is.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

I had an extended argument a couple months back about David Fincher (the director), and how he probably had some serious psychological problems, because taking his works as a group, his treatment of women is for shit.

Because, I mean, this movie plus Seven? I'll stay away, thanks.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Do you regard this as applying also to Alien^3 ?

[underpope.livejournal.com]

I think you may be missing part of the point of the film. It's not a celebration of masculinity and misogyny; it's a condemnation. The out-of-control testosterone that Tyler embodies is shown to be ultimately not just destructive, but self destructive as well. Men so deeply involved in Tyler's super-macho "Project Mayhem" lose any semblance of not only of belonging to society, they lose their own identity as well (every man who dies in service of Project Mayhem receives the same ceremony -- "His name was Phillip Bowman" (or whatever that first dead man's name was), regardless of what their name really was). The narrator only begins to understand that his misanthropic fantasies are spiraling out of control when they begin to impact Marla -- who, I suggest, represents not women, but Ed Norton's character's only contact with the world outside of the self-consuming fantasy that he's created for himself.

The movie itself understands the narrator's delusion throughout the whole progress of the film, and condemns it solidly. As the delusion builds and builds, the narrator is thrust deeper and deeper inside of himself and further away from society; he loses his apartment, he creates a working situation where he is unanswerable to anyone, and so on. It's only at the end when he allows himself to connect with Marla that he can be pulled out of the illusion and the destruction; and then only at the cost of likely self inflicted brain damage.

The film shouldn't be seen as a celebration or even endorsement of Tyler's statement; rather, it should be seen as an outright condemnation of it.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I agree that Tyler's solution is wrong, and that the movie understands it's wrong ...

Maybe it's because I'm Gen X myself that while Tyler's solution is wrong, his articulation of the PROBLEM actually struck a chord. Which may, in turn, be why I noticed so acutely that half the human race is missing from the movie's worldview. Because what he says about the men of his generation is something I think a lot of Gen X'ers feel--and, you know, half of us are women.

Tyler's solution is wrong, but the narrator's soulless Ikea-driven life is just as wrong.

[allaboutm-e.livejournal.com]

Confessing up front that I haven't, I'm wondering if anyone's read the original novel and how it compares to the film version on truepenny's points.

[mincedniku.livejournal.com]

You know, Fight Club is one of my favorite movies. What's interesting, to me, is that throughout all the times I've watched it over the years I have never once noticed the lack of females. What does that say about me?

Anyways, your post was an interesting read. Sorry I have nothing intelligent to offer in return.

[stegoking.livejournal.com]

It says that, unlike others, you're not sexist. You saw people, I saw people, Truepenny saw *men*.

The better question is 'what does that say about her?'

[fiction-theory.livejournal.com]

One thing I think you should keep in mind when thinking about Fight Club is that Palahniuk is not a writer who writes fair. By that, I mean that he doesn't at all intend to write well balanced books that carefully and precisely examine all the critical sides of something.

Palahniuk writes very precarious, unspooled, down-and-dirty novels. And given that the movie, more than most movies, is really a fair adaptation of the book - the movie is not supposed to be fair either.

I usually have a pretty sensitive trigger for detecting misogyny. So much so that I can't really enjoy Raging Bull. But it didn't really get to me in this movie.

I think it's because this isn't so much about misogyny. It's about the fact that you can't be a human and be truly anti-social without being a complete sociopath first.

This is not a movie about grown, intelligent men. This is an adolescent fantasy at best. Notice that nobody really has families in this movie. We get only a brief mention of Tyler's Durden's father, but other than that no other character is shown to have blood relations. We're never shown the consequences of these men running away from their lives to join Project Mayhem.

We're never shown any consequences. What happens to the people they vandalize, what happens to the car they crash into.

Because like all adolescent escapism, the point is never to look back.

As the narrator says, "Nothing was solved, but nothing mattered."

The point of this movie is to show exactly why nothing it shows you is viable. Why Fight Clubs don't work. Why eventually everyone has to grow up.

All the misogyny is really a bunch of boys going "girls are icky and school is icky and I want to live in neverneverland."

It's not about male/female. It's about adult/child.

Think of it as a really violent version of Peter Pan in which Peter figures out that staying a child is actually a far worse prospect than growing up.

Because the difference between the Narrator and Tyler Durden is that Tyler Durden is, in fact, a complete sociopath. The Narrator is not

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Even if you weren't right on target in your interpretation (and it's been a while since I've seen the movie, and I wasn't taken enough to watch it again to see how much I agree or disagree with your thoughts, and the thoughts other people have shared here) this was an extra-specially good discussion, so good for you for starting it up.

[sophia-helix.livejournal.com]

I'm coming in late from a link, after the discussion has died down, but I do recall having a very similar reaction to yours after watching the movie several years ago. I agree that in the end, the movie does condemn the course of action it's just spent the last two hours portraying as successful and desirable. My problem was, and remains, what Roger Ebert said (http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19991015/REVIEWS/910150302/1023):

Although sophisticates will be able to rationalize the movie as an argument against the behavior it shows, my guess is that audience will like the behavior but not the argument. Certainly they'll buy tickets because they can see Pitt and Norton pounding on each other; a lot more people will leave this movie and get in fights than will leave it discussing Tyler Durden's moral philosophy. The images in movies like this argue for themselves, and it takes a lot of narration (or Narration) to argue against them.

It's the kind of movie that I find dangerous and unsettling, not least because I was introduced to it in college via a male friend who was clearly enraptured by Tyler's philosophy. I don't think I need any better argument against it than that.

[tommy50702.livejournal.com]

Fight Club was a box office disappointment ten years ago, but it has gained a HUGE cult following since – and it must have made an absolute mint on DVD