The Masculinity In Fight Club

The film Fight Club is presented in first person with a narrator speaking throughout. This unnamed narrator is a man struggling with an identity crisis which is fueled by his raging insomnia, weak masculinity, and utter hate for his rigid life. Throughout the course of the film the narrator loses himself in an alter ego, Tyler Durden. Other characters and job related obstacles acts as a catalyst to fuel his insanity. The narrator struggles with balance, reality, and masculinity. The narrator is suffering from chronic insomnia. He explains, “When you have insomnia, you’re never really asleep and you’re never really awake.” (Fight Club, 00:12.56) Insomniacs never achieve enough sleep and often struggle with disruptions in their perceptions of time. The film uses lighting as a tool to emphasis the narrator’s interest. Most the film is presented in very dim lighting. In places like narrator’s office and his home, the lighting is revealing but dim. The narrator does not equate working in an office dressed wearing a suit and tie as an act of masculinity . This

The narrator is unaware that Tyler Durden is in fact himself. The identity crisis the narrator is dealing with is solely based on ideal of masculinity. The masculinity that is acceptable in the modern workplace did not fit with the narrator’s view as masculinity. The narrator is not the only one, in the film many people around the world subscribe to Tyler Durden’s Fight Club. This speaks to the origin of society as masculinity was viewed as a man’s ability to protect and defend, yet today masculinity can now be defined by financial prosperity. Tyler Durden and this film are just a way of getting back to how things once were. The only things that matter must be “essential to survival” (Fight Club, 00:29.30). Yet, the film is meant to explain that there needs to be a balance. Life can backfire if one becomes too dependent on one way of