Apologia for the Interpretable
Gender and Masculine Violence in Fight Club
I was recently asked what film would make for fruitful discussions about masculinity in a film and literature course. I submit that Fight Club is a perfect vehicle for analysis. First, unlike the usual gender-theory suspects, whose stances and problematics tend toward the polemical or obvious, David Fincher’s 1999 classic about disaffected capitalist ennui and the neutering of male energy is nuanced, self-conscious, and sufficiently complex to warrant an in-depth analysis as a class and individually. Its main benefit is its resistance to easy answers, and the slippery way the text weaves in and out of parody, making its thesis into a moving target. Viewers can see it as a vindication of violence; a condemnation of male violence; a vicious critique of capitalism; a commentary on prosperity; and a bewailing of our increasingly “feminized” American culture. Often the art that endures is art that invites multiple—even opposite—interpretations, and while more sententious works don’t require much penetration to understand (while certainly deserving their place in classroom discussion) the true meat of the discourse lies where are no easy answers.
The film’s messaging dances around a central question; what is masculinity; what are the consequences of repressing it; and how do we express it responsibly? The two central characters (the film ultimately reveals that they are the same character) are the multi-named/unnamed narrator and his alter ego Tyler Durden, and together they dance around various definitions of masculinity over the course of the film. The narrator, played by Ed Norton, is feminized and circumspect, emotionally dead, a cubicle-slave who travels for work and finds meaning going to various self-help groups for diseases he doesn’t have just to feel something (albeit something falsely “feminine”). By contrast, Durden, played by Brad Pitt, is a trickster figure of great masculine prowess who is, through most of the film, a “chaotic neutral” agent of disruption. He is amoral, a creature of instinct, a sower of anarchy, who, along with the narrator, starts a fight club where men beat the shit out of each other night after night in senseless acts of performative violence, thereby reclaiming their sense of selves as men. A straightforward-enough sounding plot summary—one that would trouble the most skeptical interrogator of gender theory, but the devil is in the film’s details. Just when the viewer gets a handle on a message, Fincher throws in a confounding factor. In “Fight Club: Historicizing the Rhetoric of Masculinity, Violence, and Sentimentality,” Suzanne Clark notes that one of the confounding factors of the film is that the viewer never quite knows whether the fight club itself is “the problem or the cure” (412). Is Fight Club a warning against male castration in contemporary culture? Is it rather a representation of a fascist group that gives reclaims its masculinity through ritualized violence? It appears as if the answer to both questions is, paradoxically, yes. This strange “yes” is what makes the film work so well for a film and lit class. As a feminist viewer, I can see the film as a condemnation of toxic masculinity, as a celebration of reclaimed agency, as a skewering of consumer culture, as a heady and fizzy romp through the reductio ad absurdam feminization of urban men, and the contradictions don’t rankle. I can disapprove of Durden’s antics and still find him attractive as a character; and I can condemn violence and still revel in the final scene when the buildings fall as the lovers clasp hands as a glorious expression of, at last, self-definition.
Helena Bonham-Carter’s character, Marla Singer, is what continually subverts the film’s otherwise single-minded goal. She is both an embodiment of the feminine and, in many ways, the embodiment of the ideal masculine. She is the film’s only truth-teller (not less so because she lies), and she is the only one who sees events and characters clearly. In one scene, Norton’s character is asked to find a “spirit animal,” and his is a penguin, a silly, feminine animal “dressed” like a servant, who nevertheless advises him to “slide” down an ice chute, with all the imperative’s associations of “letting things slide” and of freedom and deliverance, of liminality. The penguin later becomes Singer, who gives him the same imperative. Singer shares more traits with (and is the lover of) Tyler Durden, so in many ways she is the female counterpart of Durden’s chaos, the one to carry his message forward in a more tempered way. While the final scene is one of violence (especially in a post 9/11 world), the viewer sees it as a fusion, finally, of Durden’s manic agency and the narrator’s servile passivity, and it is Marla’s hand he takes, fusing the halves of his identity into a man who, the viewer has the sense, is finally made whole. Thus the film doesn’t advocate for either side of its binary. In a Hegelian flourish, it takes the masculine/feminine dialectic and offers a strange, ironic, and highly symbolic synthesis in its place. It appears, to this viewer, to advocate for finding the “middle way.”
In sum, the film is the perfect object of examination for questions about gender. There are few questions posed by the theoretical frame that can’t be interestingly answered in discussion, and these can be answered quite differently depending on the student. Such films and texts, I argue, are close to perfect for group analysis. It is the texts that challenge and provoke, ultimately—and the ones that refuse easy interpretation—that endure, and that can teach us most about ourselves, our priorities, and our world. As Clark notes, the film teaches us that one antidote to the “pleasures of illicit fighting” and toxic masculinity are the other kind of fight: the “more intellectual pleasures of rhetoric through critical argument” (419). That, I posit, is what a “Film and Literature” course is all about.
Works Cited
Clark, Suzanne. “Fight Club: Historicizing the Rhetoric of Masculinity, Violence, and Sentimentality.” JAC, Vol. 21, No. 2, Spring 2001, pp. 411-420.
Fincher, David. Fight Club. Performed by Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham-Carter, 20th Century Fox, 1999.