Why We Still Talk About Fight Club

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Six years ago, I published this article on a previous blog. Given recent events, and the lasting power of the subject matter, I decided to move the post here to my new home. Some content has been updated, given the passage of time since its original publication. 

For those of us who were initiated by the film, we learned the first rule 21 years ago: Do not talk about Fight Club. 

Shortly thereafter, we learned the second rule: Do not talk about Fight Club. 

So naturally, 21 years later, we are still breaking these rules and talking about it, because Fight Club is the most important film of my lifetime.

Here’s why.

Fight Club Addresses Our Lost Manhood

“We’re still men, aren’t we?” – Robert “Bob” Paulson

In the film’s early sequences, the Narrator attends a support group for men with testicular cancer. The man he meets to cry with, Bob, has developed “bitch tits,” massive chests that poke through his body-building t-shirt. Another man stands and delivers a crushing testimony: his ex-wife recently bore her first child with her new husband.

“We’re still men, aren’t we?” Bob opines.

“Yes,” the Narrator says, patting Bob’s enormous shoulders. “Men is what we are.”

These heart-breaking moments set the stage for the Narrator’s crisis and one of Fight Club’s strongest statements: Men are losing, and desperate for, their manhood.

Fight Club’s Narrator begins the story with a strange problem, especially for a popular Hollywood film: He can’t sleep. However, he quickly discovers a solution: all he needs to do is cry. But this requires emotion, cartharsis. So to get himself into such an emotionally devastated place, he has to pretend that he is dying and force the raw emotions.

In so doing, the Narrator slaps a band-aid on his absent Manhood. He copes with his uncontrollable sadness and anger by joining other men who have no hope whatsoever. Giving up control, or “losing all hope, is freedom.”

But it’s a false freedom that doesn’t last.

When a strange woman, Marla Singer, starts attending the same support groups (for diseases she doesn’t have, either), the Narrator can’t lie to himself anymore. Once again, the Narrator is confronted with a situation that he cannot control. So again, he can’t sleep.

Before Marla came into his life, the Narrator ran to his IKEA furniture and his pathetic corporate job. After meeting Marla, he runs to bare-knuckle boxing and rampant destruction. In all of this he runs away from confronting his emotions.

He must flee the promise of his mortality.

Men experience emotions all the time. Yet, due to false impressions of “strength” and “manliness,” they’re rarely trained to deal with them. Instead, men are frequently instructed to “keep that shit contained,” leading to volcanoes in-waiting. At some point, men as a species were told that emotions were filthy. Worse, emotions were suspiciously ‘girly’ or ‘gay’. Maybe this happened after World War II, maybe on the playground, maybe in the Garden of Eden. We’ll never know.

This is a reality that threatens us all, male or female. The very presence of a negative or conflicted emotion betrays the fact that life is not working out as planned. Disappointment, regret, bitterness, hatred, loneliness, fear – all of these are caused by life’s many cruel injustices, and those injustices often start early.

Manhood should be a full embrace of emotion and the courage required to tackle life’s challenges.

But sadly, many men make the mistake of evading such emotions at any cost.

No wonder so many of us are depressed.

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Fight Club Confronts Our Absent Fathers

“If you could fight anybody, who’d you fight?” the Narrator asks.

“I’d fight my dad,” Tyler replies.

Very few of the men of Fight Club are happy sons or successful fathers.

“My two grown kids won’t even return my phone calls,” Bob sobs, draped in the Narrator’s arms.

Fight Club doesn’t play nice when it deals with Fatherhood, nor is it shy when linking failed manhood to failed fatherhood.

After the Narrator describes his father’s habit of getting divorced, moving around the country, and starting new families, Tyler replies, “The f*cker’s settin’ up franchises.” If franchising is the way of the world now, perhaps it can work for men wishing to plant their flag in as many uteri as possible.

Fight Club assigns much of the blame for male rage to absentee fathers. When there are no fathers to raise their sons, who is left?

The film asserts that nothing is left to parent these young men but soulless corporations and the men who run them. These companies have claimed, through commercials and film and the like, that every young man with a dream would“…all be movie gods and rock stars.” Yet they haven’t. This isn’t a flaw, by the way. It’s a feature of mass corporate capitalism.

Yet the anger exists, all the same. Fight Club’s characters seem to argue that their fathers, whether biological or social, glutted themselves on material possessions and the exhaustive pursuit of them, and then bequeathed this obsessive lifestyle to their sons from afar. This distance isn’t purely physical: it’s emotional as well. Men didn’t learn to cower from emotions on their own; they were shown how by fathers who refused to face their own emotions and ran from them. The first run-and-hide franchises were built long ago, and are continually being built to this day.

Civilization has always been led by its fathers, whether into glory or ruin. Fight Club portrays a generation of men who might be smart enough to realize that ruin is right down the road, and may only be able to stop it with extreme measures.

 

Fight Club is Brashly Prophetic

“Martha’s polishing the brass on the Titanic, man. It’s all going down.” – Tyler Durden

As it depicts the impending fall of civilization, Fight Club daringly bets the farm by naming names.

This is a huge risk. How many films are lost to the pop culture cemetery with their references to hit songs, or defunct websites like MySpace and Napster?

But Fight Club’s jabs are dead-on: Starbucks. Microsoft. Martha Stewart. Even Meryl Streep takes a hit. And a lot of these references were, at their 1999 release, semi-prophetic, and today, in 2021, mostly still relevant.

Yet it is it’s prediction of Project Mayhem that perhaps rings most true in 2021 as protests and acts of violence wrack the globe in many democratic countries, including the United States. Many of the brands that were investment gold in 1999 have fallen by the wayside, as so many do. Toys R Us, Sears, Blockbuster Video…. Whether by Amazon.com or Covid-19, companies rise and fall.

Now, does this necessarily constitute an accurate prediction? By simply predicting that materialism and its manufacturers are “going down,” Fight Club isn’t necessarily insightful, and certainly not prophetic — not in a stock market strategy sense, at least.

But rather, Fight Club’s forecast of things to come was never intended to come true. It’s a satire, a middle finger thrown in the air at everything the world screams is important. That’s why the film is still so damned enjoyable. When a film makes a prediction in the fashion of science fiction, time evaluates its accuracy with exacting cynicism.

Instead, Fight Club comes along and shouts a loud “F*ck you!” to the 1990’s explosion of mass-marketing and product placement. How can you critique its foreshadowing when a single frame of pornography is spliced into it? The satire of Fight Club has become uncannily relevant as it has matured.

Yet amid its name-dropping predictions, the film still spends the majority of its time focusing on a deeper issue: the fractured Manhood of nearly every American male. Fight Club doesn’t reduce itself to a mere list of barbs and pot-shots. It shines a light on a particular strand of seething anger, American Anger, that was forgotten about when we turned our attention to the danger of Islamic extremists. Its both timely and timeless, as anger is an enduring human emotion, but has a unique context for the American male.

It may be difficult to remember, but for a fragile moment after 9/11, America hoped the nation could regain the compassion stolen by Vietnam, Watergate, by crack-cocaine, the men who beat Rodney King, and a steadily widening gap between haves and have-nots. Bumper stickers appeared on every car: “United We Stand.”

How long did it last before the American Anger bubbled back to the surface?

Unlike so many other cultures with clearly drawn lines between the classes, Americans believe that if we truly want to be something, we can work hard enough to get there. Whether or not that’s what the Founding Fathers intended for us to believe, it’s a key ingredient to the American Mythos. Anyone can be President. Anyone can turn a penny into a penthouse. Even the “all-singing-all-dancing crap of the world” can make it happen.

Only in America.

Perhaps our American sense of Hope is our greatest asset – after all, we probably couldn’t have defeated the fascist leviathan of the Wermacht without it.

But perhaps our American Hope is also our greatest inherent weakness. There are only so many dollars to spread around – or better said, there is limited incentive for those with the dollars to share them.

And that unfulfilled hope can turn to bitterness, and anger, and action.

Hence, Occupy Wall Street. Ferguson. Kenosha.

And now Washington D.C.

Social media has uncorked Pandora’s Box and unleashed the raw power crush celebrities and politicians without hesitation or mercy. Twenty-four news, still a relatively new concept in 1999, is now the main vehicle for the transmission of political ideas. The horrors of mankind’s worser demons has been unleashed on the world, and nothing will ever put them back short of an apocalyptic event.

We may not live in a world run by Project Mayhem, but we live in a world where gas station workers, ambulance drivers, and garbage haulers are raising their voices more loudly than ever, and corporations are listening very closely.

“In Project Mayhem, there are no questions.”

How can there be, when all the answers are reverberating in our echo chambers?

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Fight Club is the Story of the American Soul

Tyler: “What will you wish you’d done before you died?”

Jack: “I don’t know! Nothing!

Fight Club is a film about the lives we wish we live, but don’t.

Take, for example, the film’s only sex scene.

In a way, it isn’t even really a sex scene. Rather, it’s a dream sequence involving blurry still-frames of “sex”. It’s more question-mark than pornography, a confused, man-made fantasy of a perfect lover enjoying perfect but impossible sex. Even though the Narrator is technically making love to Marla, we know where his head really is: it’s outside the bedroom, stuck in a tortured, sexless, lonely psyche, listening in to the fun he’s not having.Few of us will ever venture over the schizophrenic cliff that Fight Club does, but we daily (and willingly) spend our lives fantasizing about being something more, just like the Narrator does.

And like him, we as Americans are constantly reminded that we aren’t living life like we should be. If only we could have a better car, granite counter tops, or the newest smartphones.

And it leaves us always wanting more, but rarely doing anything to filfill it other than making the drive to Target.

Perhaps the most fitting scene to describe Fight Club’s poignant illustration of the American Soul is the infamous “Human Sacrifice” scene.

Dragged behind a convenience store, poor Raymond K. Hessel must answer a question with a gun to his head.

“What did you want to be!?” Tyler yells at him.

He stammers and stutters until Tyler cocks the gun behind his ears. Under threat of execution, Raymond swears that he will begin school to become a veterinarian, else his family may have to identify him using nothing but dental records. He runs into the night, and Tyler opens the gun.

It was empty.

Tyler never planned on sacrificing any humans that night. But he had to convince Raymond K. Hessel that he meant business, otherwise he’d have never persuaded the lousy convenience store worker to make something of his life.

Understandably, Jack is indignant. Speaking for the audience, he cries, “What the f*ck was the point of that?”

“Tomorrow will be the greatest day of Raymond K. Hessel’s life,” Tyler murmurs as his victim flees. “His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted.”

Why?

Because suddenly his life will have meaning. Purpose. 

But the cost of such things is human sacrifice.

Get it? “Human sacrifice?”

This isn’t just an American issue. It’s a human one. Our souls are not happy with what we have, and we ache for more. And when we come back from the mall or the store or that package arrives from Amazon, we’re happy for an hour or two.

And then what?

“You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake. You are the same, decaying organic matter as everything else,” Tyler preaches to his space monkeys.

Is that what the film is really saying? Is the miracle of life simply an accident? Am I totally the same as everyone else? Does life even have a purpose?

“This is your life – and it’s ending one minute at a time,” drones the dead-inside Narrator.

Maybe Fight Club is satirizing two extremes that America has foolishly embraced. Maybe it’s encouraging us to be thankful for what we have, and yet irate over what’s being unjustly withheld. Maybe it’s pushing our asses off the couch or our hands to the grindstone. Maybe it’s saving us from a fatal identity crisis.

“You are not your job,” Tyler preaches. “You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your f*cking khakis.”

The film’s conclusion hardly offers a succinct answer to all of the film’s questions. To rid himself of his dual personality, the Narrator blasts a hole in his cheek.

Yet shooting yourself in the mouth muscle won’t save you from lethargy, angst, or disenfranchisement. Neither will a trip to the IKEA labyrinth, nor a membership in a troupe of guerrilla terrorists.

Instead, the answers can be found in the film’s small moments of outcry, the moments when:

• lonely men curse their absentee fathers and turn to violence for solutions;
• men raise their voices and fists in search of something more meaningful than a latte;
• people long to be comfortable enough with their own lives that they can stop fantastizing about the person they’d rather be.

What would it look like if we answered these cries? If men stood up to the challenges of fatherhood and faced their emotions with courage? If they shunned much of the commercialized world, put down their phones, and looked one another in the eye? And if they found peace in themselves, the peace to be grateful and purposeful about making the necessary sacrifices to live lives of purpose and meaning?

Maybe we have what it takes.

Or should we just give up and start a boxing club or terrorist group?

We’re still men….

…Aren’t we?

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