User:Erik/Fight Club (film)

Cultural impact
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.

Overview
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."

Masculinity
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."

Fatherhood
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". 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.

Presentation of penis
The image of the penis is prevalent in the film as representative of authentic masculinity. 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". 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.

Fighting
The fight clubs put the male body on display as a way of showing that women's castration of men is incomplete.

Gay desire
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.

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". 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."

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.

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.

Narrative and structure
"Fight Club has a recursive structure."

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."

The film is also "an hallucination from beginning to end"; the narrator has a dissociative identity disorder that causes him to hallucinate Tyler Durden. 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.

Capitalism
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. Trash is a key element in the film that is tied to use value and exchange value in Marxian economics. With this element, the film is not a revolution against capitalism but instead a revolution of capitalism.

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". 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'.

Boxing
Fight Club bears some similarities to the boxing film genre in how its fight clubs are also a way to express anger when fighters cannot actually attack the source, in this case the consumer culture. The film is like Hard Times (1975) and Every Which Way but Loose (1978) in how bare-knuckle boxing serves to regain masculinity, especially for Fight Club's narrator. The fight clubs permit "primal bonding" of men to ultimately lead them to challenge the consumer culture.

Comparison to Oldboy
The South Korean film Oldboy (2003) has a protagonist, Oh Dae-su, who is imprisoned for 15 years and seeks vengeance when he gets out. Dae-su has been compared to Fight Club's main character in having "a 'cool' postmodern... masculinity that is characterized by isolation (alienation) and psychic fragmentation". Both characters' mundane lives become exciting when they embark to break social rules. Fans of either character relate more to the alter ego, where the true self is "conventional and weak".

Composition
Robert Kolker says David Fincher's Fight Club and similar films Seven (1995) and The Game (1997) "show a strong sense of composition and an ironic perspective missing in much of commercial cinema". Fight Club is one of those that "observe, in characters from various parts of the economic spectrum, the cultures of greed and resentment, of passivity and misaimed rebellion, of urban angst and despair". It has a strong mise en scène with "an expressionist world of anger and resentment, almost literally an internal world of the unnamed main character". Like the films Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Natural Born Killers (1994), it has "a violence that erupts from the disaffected and the psychotic". Kolker says Fight Club's narrative "is a cycle told from some timeless perspective" where the actual storyteller is unclear. The author also says the film "fails as an ironic gaze" since exclusion and alienation from the rest of the world still lingers by the film's end, especially when the characters cause destruction.

Twist ending
Though Fight Club's twist ending of dual identities is not uncommon, with examples like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Norman Bates in Psycho (1960), and Dustin Hoffman's character in Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971), after the film was released in 1999, there was a string of films with similar devices. Session 9 (2001), Haute Tension (2003), and Shrooms (2007) had protagonists who turned out to be the killers. Trauma (2004) and Spiral (2007) had protagonists killing people who they thought were illusions. Imaginary characters were also in films like The Machinist (2003), Dead Man's Shoes (2004), Mr. Brooks (2007), and The Disappeared (2008). The Cell (2000) and Identity (2003) showed dualities of the inner self.

White-collar culture
Fight Club is similar to other films of the 1990s that "reflect the position of the 'disempowered' middle-class, white, heterosexual male—the drone of the new corporatized, managerial culture" such as Falling Down (1993), In the Company of Men (1997), Very Bad Things (1998), American Beauty (1999), Being John Malkovich (1999), and Office Space (1999). In the film, the unnamed narrator and Tyler Durden converse about being alienated from their fathers, but they create "a domestic space without a woman" by taking care of each other. While the fathers as men are blamed for the characters' inability to grow up, the characters depend more on the male than the female. With a lack of a father, the unnamed narrator attempts a shift in masculinity. By the film's end, he shoots himself in the face, and "the man he once was has been irrevocably altered, and the new man he has become is a mangled, uncontrollable replica of his former self".

Contemporary reviews

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Articles to find

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Online resources

 * Fight Club : A Ritual Cure For The Spiritual Ailment Of American Masculinity
 * doppelganger: exploded states of consciousness in fight club at Disinfo
 * Masculine Identity in the Service Class: An Analysis of Fight Club
 * Fight Club: An Exploration of Buddhism

Resources from BFI index

 * (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.)
 * (To celebrate its 200th issue Empire select their favourite songs from film soundtracks covering the period of its 200 issues.)
 * (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.)
 * (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)
 * (DVD review and analysis of FIGHT CLUB.)
 * (Traces Guy Debord's interaction with cinema, looking briefly at FIGHT CLUB.)
 * (A consideration of narrative ambiguity in three popular Hollywood films: The USUAL SUSPECTS, The SIXTH SENSE and FIGHT CLUB.)
 * (Brief reviews of the editor's choice of films of 2000.)
 * (A note of the release in the UK on video of FIGHT CLUB.)
 * (Additional filmographic information on The FIGHT CLUB: certificate 18, length 138 minutes 56 seconds.)
 * (On the use of effects to visualise the narrator's view of the world in FIGHT CLUB.)
 * (Interview with David Fincher who talks about the making of FIGHT CLUB.)
 * (Soundtrack review for FIGHT CLUB.)
 * (On French broadcaster cancelling a planned screening of SE7EN after controversy over David Fincher's latest film FIGHT CLUB.)
 * (On the marketing campaign in Spain for FIGHT CLUB.)
 * (On FIGHT CLUB being the second major US studio title to require cuts to qualify for an 18 certificate.)
 * (A review and analysis of David Fincher's FIGHT CLUB is followed by an interview with the director who talks about making the movie.)
 * (On the reception of David Fincher's FIGHT CLUB at the 56th Venice Film Festival.)
 * (Edward Norton talks about David Fischer's FIGHT CLUB.)
 * (On the opening of FIGHT CLUB. Includes a list of Brad Pitt top ten wide openings.)
 * (Feature article on FIGHT CLUB.)
 * (Interview with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton on THE FIGHT CLUB)
 * (On why FIGHT CLUB is 'unmissable'.)
 * (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.)
 * (On French broadcaster cancelling a planned screening of SE7EN after controversy over David Fincher's latest film FIGHT CLUB.)
 * (On the marketing campaign in Spain for FIGHT CLUB.)
 * (On FIGHT CLUB being the second major US studio title to require cuts to qualify for an 18 certificate.)
 * (A review and analysis of David Fincher's FIGHT CLUB is followed by an interview with the director who talks about making the movie.)
 * (On the reception of David Fincher's FIGHT CLUB at the 56th Venice Film Festival.)
 * (Edward Norton talks about David Fischer's FIGHT CLUB.)
 * (On the opening of FIGHT CLUB. Includes a list of Brad Pitt top ten wide openings.)
 * (Feature article on FIGHT CLUB.)
 * (Interview with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton on THE FIGHT CLUB)
 * (On why FIGHT CLUB is 'unmissable'.)
 * (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.)
 * (Interview with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton on THE FIGHT CLUB)
 * (On why FIGHT CLUB is 'unmissable'.)
 * (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.)
 * (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.)