Fight Club

 This week I watched Fight Club. And well, rule number one about fight club is don't talk about fight club. That's all.

Jk. I will talk a bit about it! But I'm not going to reveal the main spoiler of the movie, because this is definitely the type of movie you don't want spoiled for you.

The Fight Club plot follows this white collar, Kafka-esque, tired office worker, with no purpose or direction to his life, and living with crippling insomnia. His materialistic, consumerism lifestyle is extremely monotonous, only broken up by his routine visits to support groups for various ailments and addictions, until he meets an interesting man named Tyler Durden on a business trip flight. The man is a soap maker, but his mannerisms and carefree way of speaking draw the (lets call him the narrator) in. Once the plane lands, the narrator discovers that his apartment has been blown up, and since he has no one else in his life (besides a woman named Marla he met who also goes to support groups without any terminal illness), he decides to call up Tyler Durden from the business card he gave him. They start living together, and slowly Tyler helps the narrator on his journey to "hit rock bottom," and to let go of the materialistic life, saying to him, "Once you let go of everything, you can do anything." The two of them start a fight club, which quickly gains underground popularity among other dissatisfied white collar workers, all of them feeling as though they live an emasculated, purposeless life. As the movie continues, the fight club becomes more wide spread, connected, and cultish (though rule number 1 about fight club is you don't talk about fight club). The narrator grows increasingly concerned over the lengths Tyler is making the members of the fight club go to to "let go-" assigning them homework to start fights with people, vandalize, and eventually, stage large scale bombings of financial buildings to "bring everyone back to net zero." Since the members are completely willing and seem blinded to the consequences of these severe actions, the narrator decides he must stop this before it is too late. 

                                                    Narrator on the left, Tyler Durden on the right. 

With that summary (though I will say I left one of the most interesting layers of the movie out), I think this movie is clearly about the lengths people will go to- specifically emasculated men- to exert control over themselves and their masculinity. Though there is one female lead character in this film, the plot revolves around men, as the main focus is on traditional masculinity in an age where the use for it is not as clearly understood or needed. As Tyler Durden says in one scene at the Fight Club, "We have no Great War. We have no Great Depression. Our Great War is a Spiritual War, our Great Depression is our lives." The movie establishes this need in disempowered men in a capitalist system to make something of themselves, which manifests itself in acts of violence. Just like with American Psycho, it's very interesting to observe some of the fanbase around this film. On the Fight Club hashtag on tik tok, some of the top posts are young men doing the trend of "me before Fight Club-" and it's them appearing relatively normal-and "me after [..]," which shows them with a shaved head, possibly buff, glaring into the camera. Perhaps they are implying that they are now in an underground fight club aiming to destroy government and financial buildings? I'm not trying to bring them down, and it's obviously just a bit of fun and trying to be a cool reference. However, I do find it interesting how those videos prove the exact point the movie is trying to make about masculinity: how it's not something you talk about- it's something you perform.