Violence as Displacement: The Erotic Gaze in Gladiator and Fight Club

Violence as Displacement: The Erotic Gaze in Gladiator and Fight Club

On the screen, two men writhe and grapple on the cold concrete floor. One man on top, holding the other from behind in a chokehold that causes the man on the bottom to succumb to the more powerful man. The dialogue by the narrator states that, “Sometimes all you could hear were the flap, hard packing sounds over the yelling, or the wet choke when someone caught their breath and sprayed” (Fight Club). The soundtrack consists of a few notes repeated over and over again in a steady rhythm to the action that is happening on the screen. The camera focuses on a close-up of the face of the man on bottom as he contorts into an expression of both pain and pleasure and moans loudly. Finally, the two men get up after the action is finished and embrace. Panting and moaning, the last shudders of pleasure leave their bodies as the scene fades out and begins again with another couple struggling on the cold concrete floor.

The scene described above sounds as if it should be found in a pornographic video displayed on the shelves of a sex shop located in the back alleys of Soho in London. However, this scene is taken from director David Fincher’s widely popular film Fight Club. Even though the scene has an intense air of the homoerotic, the characters in the film are actually fighting and not having sex. Steve Neale addresses this phenomenon in his article “Masculinity as Spectacle”. He upholds the view of feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey by maintaining that the spectatorial look in mainstream cinema is always male. A problem arises when the look of the spectator is forced upon an erotic shot of a male figure. The article states, “that in a heterosexual and patriarchal society, the male body cannot be marked explicitly as the erotic object of another male look: that look must be motivated in some other way, its erotic component repressed” (Neale 14). The erotic component is repressed with violence or with mutilation of the male body. This repression is often found in the action genre in such films as Gladiator and Fight Club where the female object of the spectator gaze is replaced with male figures.