Fight Club

691 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Hyper masculinity in fight club

Fight Club appears to be a sequel to Clockwork Orange (1971) for the yuppie X Generation, half of whom see their parents get a divorce and are fatherless teenagers. (The word "clockwork" is in the script!) Jack (played by Edward Norton) narrates the film, explaining how his 1997 life of white-collar employment and middle-class materialistic success bored him until he fell under the spell of Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt), who takes on part-time jobs so that he can engage in mischief to deal with his own identity crisis. In the early part of the film Jack has insomnia, but his physician will not give him stronger sleeping pills, urging him instead to attend alcoholics anonymous-type groups so that he will meet those with real problems. Initially, the nightly meetings provide enough emotional catharsis so that Jack can get a good night sleep. Then Marla (played by Helena Bonham Carter), another faker, starts attending the same meetings, so impotent Jack no longer enjoys the experience. Looking for something different, one night in the parking lot outside a bar Jack meets Tyler, who asks him to slug him. The exhilaration of the fight prompts them to repeat the ritual, and ultimately Jack abandons his yuppie lifestyle to live in Tyler's ramshackle house (after Tyler secretly plants a bomb to destroy his condo). Others, watching the two slug it out, soon want to fight, too, whereupon Tyler organizes the Fight Club, eight rules in all, which meets in the basement under the bar. (The eight rules appear patterned on the famous 12-step programs of the AA groups.) Interchangeable parts in an overbureaucratized world, where everyone is employed and thus feels no compulsion to become politically active to get politicians on the ball, the club's members belong to the working class in contrast with middle class Jack and Tyler. Fight Club's camaraderie provides the psychological support so that they can revert to their own animalistic resources. Only Tyler enjoys sex (with Marla). The others seem so crude in appearance that they have obviously not been able to seek release via sex; that they enjoy a nihilistic men's club, where men are topless, is a clear sign of repressed homosexuality. Only through showing muscle can they feel like men after their demasculinized postindustrial jobs. In due course, Tyler changes the Fight Club into Project Mayhem, a club with fascist rules that stockpiles explosives in Tyler's home preparatory to blowing up high rises.

Show More
Related

  • Similarities Between 1984 And Fight Club

    1224 Words  | 3 Pages

    “In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four” (Orwell 250). Winston lives in a time where a set of rules preventing him to be free are imposed on him – the Party defines what freedom is and is not. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows (Orwell 103)”.   Winston expresses his views on The Party within his diary even though he knows it is not accepted by The Party or the Thought Police.  The narrator in Fight Club uses fighting as a form of escapism from his anti-consumerist ideologies revealed by his alter-ego, Tyler Durden. “Fuck off with your sofa units and strine green stripe patterns. I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let’s evolve—let the chips fall where they may. (Fight Club)” Tyler urges the narrator to stop conforming to consumerist-imposed views of perfection and break barriers to evolve. Tyler and the narrator create a medium for people in similar positions to escape from societal bound norms; it is aptly named “Fight Club”. In comparison, both Tyler Durden and the narrator from Fight Club and Winston Smith from 1984 share

    Read More

  • Gender Case Study: Biological Determinism?

    855 Words  | 2 Pages

    Gender by many scholars is deemed to be socially constructed although there is much debate to whether this is actually the case. Simone De Beauvoir (1973: 301) famously claimed that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’. In this undisputed text de Beauvoir argues that women are not born a woman. Instead they have to develop feminine behaviours and traits in order to become a woman implying they were not always a woman. It is not the case that nature causes women to be feminine and men to act in a masculine way. Society has constructed it to be this way. Kate Millet also takes a gender socialisation view. Arguing that one’s gender has nothing to do with their biological makeup instead it depends on their culture

    Read More

  • Literary Analysis of Fight Club

    1468 Words  | 3 Pages

    Fight Club is a novel written by Chuck Palahniuk. This is a story about a protagonist who struggles with insomnia. An anonymous character suffering from recurring insomnia due to the stress brought about by his job is introduced to the reader. He visits a doctor who later sends him to visit a support group for testicular cancer victims, and this helps him in alleviating his insomnia. However, his insomnia returns after he meets Marla Singer. Later on, the narrator meets Tyler Durden, and they together establish a fight club. They continue fighting until they attract crowds of people interested in the fight club. Fight club is a story that shows the struggles between the upper class and lower class people. The upper class people here undermine the working class people by considering them as cockroaches. In addition, Palahniuk explores the theme of destruction throughout the book whereby the characters destroy their lives, body, building and the history of their town.

    Read More

  • Fight Club's Criticism of the American Dream

    1139 Words  | 3 Pages

    "How Fight Club Relates to Men's Struggles with Masculinity and Violence in Contemporary Culture." HubPages. Web. 22 Feb. 2011. .

    Read More

  • Fight Club

    519 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Fight Club, directed by David Fincher, constructs an underground world of men fighting with one another to find the meaning to their lives. Ed Norton and Brad Pitt are the main characters who start the fight club. They make a set of rules that everyone must follow. The fight club exists because individuals get weighted down by possessions, causing them to miss the deep meaning of life. Most of the people in the fight club hold service jobs or lower level management jobs that are meaningless.

    Read More

  • Fight Club and I

    1815 Words  | 4 Pages

    "What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women . . .. I'm a thirty-year-old boy, and I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer I need." These words are from Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club. Tyler Durden is the alter ego, and only known name of the fictional narrator of the novel. Tyler suffers from Dissociative Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Primary Insomnia, and probably a host of other disorders that I am not qualified to properly diagnose.

    Read More

  • Fight Club And Generation X

    1242 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk we are introduced to our narrator, a nameless male who stands atop the Parker-Morris building with a gun pressed to his mouth waiting for the moment when the bombs go off and the building crumbles. Holding the gun to his mouth is Tyler Durden who represents everything the narrator is not. The narrator is a man presumably in his 30's, although it is never stated. He works as a recall campaign coordinator and lives in a condo furnished with the latest furniture. Tyler Durden is none of these things, Tyler Durden works various jobs and sells soap made of human fat. Tyler Durden lives in a dilapidated house with makeshift furnishings and questionable utilities. Tyler Durden is satisfied with his life, unlike our narrator who suffers from chronic insomnia and who often speaks bitterly about the corporate life.

    Read More

  • Masculinity in "Fight Club"

    2237 Words  | 5 Pages

    Fight Club. Novel by Chuck Palahniuk. Screenplay by Jim Uhls. Dir. David Fincher. 1999. 20th Century Fox, 2002. DVD.

    Read More

  • Fight Club

    1347 Words  | 3 Pages

    The main themes of the story are loneliness, materialism, and freedom from society. Tyler was created because of the lack of connection the narrator had with the people around him. The narrator was lonely and attended so many support groups because of it. He was not rejected at the support groups because the members thought he was sick just like they were. Materialism is a reoccurring theme as the narrator mentions how he has worked his entire life for the Ikea items in his apartment. He tried to fill the void in his life by buying worthless, meaningless stuff. People spend too much time working for things they do not need. The narrator comes to the conclusion that, “You are not your job or your possessions.” Only once a person realizes that can he or she finally let go and start living. “It’s only after you’ve lost everything,” Tyler says, “that you’re free to do anything.” In order to be free, we must not care about the stuff we own. Our whole lives are spent working to pay for stuff. If we did not have stuff to pay for, we would not have to work as hard and our time could be spent doing something more meaningful.

    Read More

  • Gender, Gender Identity And Gender: What Is Gender?

    797 Words  | 2 Pages

    Sex is the measurable organs (anatomies), hormones and chromosomes that determines us as male, female or intersex. It is what we are born with, a product of biological processes (DNA, evolution, mutation, replication, reproduction, and selection). Sex is a biological construct, as opposed to gender which is a social and cultural construct.

    Read More

  • Gender Roles: A Personal and Societal Perspective

    1151 Words  | 3 Pages

    My gender was impressed upon me from the minute I was born as I was wrapped in a fuzzy pink blanket and had a bow taped to my bald head. Gender refers to our behavior, feelings, and attitudes as dictated by our society or culture (Defining, 2015). Not only our family, but our peers, schools, and society influence and shape our beliefs and views about our gender (Defining, 2015). It is thought that our gender is socially constructed as our notion of what women and men are and what they are supposed to be is created by the society in which we live (Gender, 2010). As a female born and raised in Philadelphia in the United States in the 1960’s, my gender role, behaviors and attitudes expected of male and female members of a society by that society, was that of a passive, nurturing, and subordinate person.

    Read More

  • The Theory Of Nature: The Definition Of Human Nature

    737 Words  | 2 Pages

    The term ‘human nature’ cannot be defined easily. With respect to different approaches, such as psychological and biological sciences, religious studies, politics and ethics, the definitions of human nature include complex characteristics such as human perception, reasoning, behavior, ways of feeling, and thinking. However, in addition to those definitions formulated in the course of actions performed by an individual in the context of his/her socio-political surroundings, it is commonly claimed that there is no fixed definition of human nature, because of our different attitudes to the questions regarding what causes those characteristics to take shape within the processes of human thought, in what exact manner the casual factors work, how

    Read More

  • Fight Club

    1385 Words  | 3 Pages

    The movie Fight Club made a great achievement in the film industry, and significantly depicted the social system of the late 20th century. According to most of the reviewers, the success of the film lies behind the fact that almost every American man over 25-years of age is going to inevitably see some of himself in the movie: the frustration, the confusion, the anger at living in a culture where the old rules have broken down and one makes his way with so many fewer cultural cues and guideposts.

    Read More

  • How Is Gender Equivalent To Gender?

    1477 Words  | 3 Pages

    Many of us think that ‘sex is equivalent to gender’, yet they are actually very different. In simple definition, sex is determined biologically at birth, and we can tell a person’s sex by anatomy, but there are no definite criteria to determine a person’s gender. All of the articles suggest that gender is not born with, but is socially constructed. In our society, one is expected to perform certain behaviors that are suitable for a particular sex, which is known as gender role, so as to fit into the society. As suggested by Franklin II and Clye W., there are many different agents in the society that shape gender, such as family, education, religion, peer, etc. All of these agents implant values into children about their behaviors so that they can match with the social expectations of their gender. For example, parents usually choose masculine toys for boys and choose neutral or feminine toys for girls, boys are encouraged to engage in larger group games and compete against each other while girls play in smaller groups at school. Through the continuous influence from different agents, children learn their gender role and behave accordingly. Moreover, most people do gender unconsciously, as suggested by J. Lorber. Since gender is too in line with our everyday life, we usually assume that we are born with it, that it’s more

    Read More

  • Marriage And Kinship Case Study

    1908 Words  | 4 Pages

    Sex, for example, refers to the biology of being a male or female (Nanda, Warms, 2017, p.247). On a cellular level there is a definite difference in these two humans, not to mention, structurally as well, a female is built completely different than a man. On average, a female is smaller than a male with a different pelvic structure. Cellular wise, a female DNA sequence is different than a male along with the obvious hormone contrast. So, sex, signifies chemical and structural differences in being a male or female. However, gender refers to the social, cultural, and psychological design that can predetermine the role a person is going to play within their society (Nanda, Warms, 2017, p. 247). This is where anthropology can intercede on behalf of the people who are often forced into these roles even if they do not fit. Culture does relegate the differences between a male and female as well what rules they must adhere to (Nanda, Warms, 2017, p.247). For instance, an industrialized capitalist society, the economy might depend on a male’s participation more, since they typically have a stronger stature. Therefore, as a result, a female might look weaker or not as important, since, their participation in that type of society is not usually seen within its profit margin. These types of gender roles usually reflect the class system and how individuals rate

    Read More

More about Fight Club

Open Document