"Fight Club": Masculinity in David Fincher's Film

The 'Fight Club' masculinity essay critically examines the portrayal of masculinity in the renowned film and delves into life struggles without father. In spite of the fact that “Fight Club” evokes somewhat mixed feelings among many viewers, a few years after the premiere, the film was recognized as one of the most outstanding pictures of our time and rallied around itself an army of ardent fans who preached Tyler Durden’s philosophy. 'Fight Club' was created based on the novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk, published three years earlier. The main roles are played by Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter. Norton plays a nameless narrator - an impersonal common man who is dissatisfied with his life in a post-industrial, white-collar consumer society. He creates the underground organization “Fight Club” along with Tyler Durden, the seller of soap, played by Brad Pitt. The similarity of the social thriller, an unequivocal hint of anti-utopia - in the end, the movie turned into a stinging sarcastic portrait of modern society. The deep meaning and criticism of capitalism are combined with a beautiful picture and product placement. In the following essay detailed analysis of the film will be provided and the main aspects of hidden ideology will be taken into consideration.

Movie Review 'Fight Club': the Concept of Masculinity 

First of all, when Jack was 6 years old, his father left the family, married another woman and had children, and he repeated this every 6 years. Like any boy, Jack needed his father as an authority who could teach him what it means to be a man, what you should strive for in life and how to achieve it. The question “what's next, dad?’”, which he asked his father on the phone with a frequency of several years, means: how can I find myself, who should I be? But it is obvious that Jack’s father did not know the answer himself, as well as all the men of modern culture, so he could only share those templates that the society provided for him: study, work, get married. You look, maybe some of this will suck you so that you forget about your questions.

It is obvious that in such conditions of upbringing a boy cannot become a man and even at the age of 30 he remains a sexually mature child. Due to the inability to acquire male self-identity, he has problems with women. Jack was raised by his mother, and the mother can not teach her son to be a man. As a teenager, Jack is not psychologically separated from his mother, and continues to live using a childish model of behavior. That is, it strives to remain in a comfortable state under the protection of parents, only now not real, but symbolic.

His symbolic father is the boss, the firm in which he works is the symbolic mother feeding him, and the apartment is the mother's womb. He is committed to creating a housing for women, thus drowning out the inner anxiety that has arisen from the inability to develop, leading such a lifestyle. Jack is lonely, and comfort cannot satisfy a person’s need for communication and intimacy. His inner anxiety accumulates his energy and begins to manifest itself in the form of insomnia and suicidal fantasies.

And what decision comes to mind when something bothers him? Take something. So Jack wants something to drink to drown out the symptoms of his problem. Fortunately, the doctor did not indulge in this infantile desire to relieve anxiety through oral satisfaction. Jack finds relief in psychological support groups. Big Bob's chest becomes another mother's surrogate for him. She is alive, you can cling to it and cry, returning to the infant state. In addition, in the group, Jack found sincere attention to his persona, which satisfied his need for acceptance from other people.

Thus, Jack found a way to alleviate the symptoms of his inner problem by regressing into an infant state. He felt himself under the protection of a symbolic mother and received the necessary bodily contact with other people. But the problem itself remained unconscious and unworked.

The Motive of Castration Which Runs Through the Entire Film

And if at first he symbolizes the inability to become a man, then at the end, when the main character threatens to castrate to other men, and then he risks losing his dignity again, this motive points to Jack’s terrible fear of being untenable. The infant idyll reached by Jack was easily destroyed by the appeared Marla. Her image somehow hooked Jack, and he becomes literally obsessed with her, but does not recognize the love attraction in himself. Jack sees Marla in the cave, which means that she has occupied the very core of his personality. Probably because he projected onto her the image of his own mother, which we later find confirmation of. Marla is a type of “fatal, or, as psychoanalysts say, castrate women. Probably, Jack's mother had a similar character and held a dominant position in relation to the child, so Jack, not having a pattern of masculine behavior before his eyes, grows up as a ductile person and subconsciously feels his inferiority. Every time during the film Marla's appearance means for Jack to deprive him of something important. She seems to be pursuing him, selecting what he finds with such difficulty. Having lost his peace because of Marla, our hero again falls into insomnia, which causes Tyler to appear.

Tyler takes on an important function: performs the ritual of initiating Jack, i.e. symbolic transition from boy to man. What is ritual? This is any external action that confirms the fact of an internal, mental event. The ritual of male initiation, which existed in ancient cultures, introduced the young man to the male element, to the realm of the spirit, to those values ​​that lie outside the plane of the natural and the natural, that is, female. But, unfortunately, our culture has lost touch with patriarchal values ​​and the corresponding rituals, as a result, according to psychologists, 'In our culture, only very few people manage to make a psychological separation from the parent family and become adults.' D.Hollis. Under the shadow of Saturn.

The Most Modern Men are Experiencing a Crisis of Male Identity

The boy, becoming a man, must break away from the maternal element, so Tyler blows up Jack's house, forcibly removing him from the power of the symbolic mother, who is personified by everyday comfort, security, satiety, security and no need to change anything. The task of the protagonist is to become a man without the help of his father. And carrying out this task, he goes from his resentment and pain associated with the lack of a father figure. The offense of the protagonist on his personal father is projected by him on “the father in general”, on the supraindividual father, by which he understands God. All the claims that Tyler makes to God actually relate to his father. And this shows us the depth of his trauma.

“If my father left me, I will do without him” - this is his life pathos. So far, Jack has ousted the pain of the wound inflicted by his father, but now Tyler makes him resurgent and aware of it. This phrase is pronounced in the context of the awareness of paternal trauma. Therefore, “losing everything” means abandoning the hope of a father’s love and becoming a man without his help.

The logical continuation of this is the desire to destroy civilization, that is, revenge on all the fathers who built it. Just as a child who lacks love, begins to behave disgracefully to attract the attention of parents, Tyler wants to draw the attention of God to himself by bad behavior, ie Big Parent. In addition, the desire to destroy the whole world indicates a persistent infantile aggression. Maliciousness directed at the whole world, and not at a specific subject, suggests that the person still has an unhealed infant trauma, most likely due to the fact that he felt abandoned. A child up to a certain age does not distinguish the inner from the outer and his own states are projected onto the outer world. Therefore, experiencing “I feel bad” is equivalent to experiencing “everything is bad” or “the world is bad.” And such experiences can persist until mature age.

At first, at the stage of creating a fight club, Tyler and Jack were partners for each other (a married couple). With the help of Tyler, the protagonist seems to have found what he wanted, and besides Tyler, he no longer needs anyone. He even ignored the manipulations of Marla, who played a suicide. But suddenly it turned out that Marla needed Tyler. So, it was necessary for something to Jack himself.

What for? To play the script from childhood and once again feel abandoned. In the film you might think that Jack is jealous of Marla, but in fact, he needs Tyler's attention. Jack has recreated a situation in which Tyler begins to play the role of the father, and Marla, respectively, the role of the mother; and now it becomes clear why Marla from the very beginning hooked Jack so much. The hero of Norton regresses emotionally to six years of age.

“I'm 6 years old again. Parents pass messages through each other through me”. Jack pereprozhivaet relations with his parents, and in the nature of these relations it is easy to recognize the negative Oedipus complex, when the child feels love for the parent of the same gender and hostility towards the parent of the opposite sex. It must be said that we very often in our relations with partners reproduce the scenarios of our child-parent relationships. Throughout life, we can reproduce the same scenario from time to time, and in order to get out of it, we need to realize it, reprime in imagination and allow ourselves to do otherwise than we decided to do in childhood.

Thus, Jack resumes his script: the mother takes away his father from him, and then the father leaves him. For the second time, Marla takes away the object of his love from Jack. Can he get out of this scenario? So, if at first Tyler was a friend of Jack, now he became his symbolic father. And, founding the project of rout, Tyler becomes the new patriarch, Father with a capital letter, to which his “children” - the participants of the project - unquestioningly obey. Participants of the Defeat are attached to Tyler, donate everything for his sake. And this is another indicator of the eagerness of men to be necessary to the father. To sacrifice everything for the sake of involvement in something or someone stronger.

“Why does a weak person reach for a strong one?” To join his strength. But are the protagonist and participants of the Defeat project become men? It is easy to see that the teenage subpersonality of the protagonist realizes himself in the Razg draft. The whole project is a revolt against the father figure and a statement of itself in its place. All acts of vandalism committed by project members are typical for adolescents. To spoil for the sake of lulz and rejoice when they say about it in the news. To attract the attention of the Big Parent. In all these actions there is no wisdom, because the main character has no place to get her.

Jack's children's script is played on. Tyler, in whom Jack saw the newfound father, is increasingly moving away from him. First, his treacherous rapprochement with Marla, then the project Crushing, in which he did not dedicate Jack, all this makes the main character relive his pain of an abandoned child.

His frantic desire to destroy something beautiful is anger at his father, who is leaving him again; now in the face of Tyler. Jack is not free from emotional attachment, and Tyler forces him to do it. Jack’s self-destruction is a desire to free himself from all emotional attachments that cause his mental suffering. The desire to stop the internal pain with the help of external pain. In the end, Tyler leaves. Children's script completed. What to do next? And then Jack plays Tyler script.

Tyler appeared in Jack's life to start a “spiritual” war against his father, who preferred to communicate with his mother, rather than with his son. Then Tyler himself became a symbolic father (and began to communicate with Marla, forgetting about Jack). Accordingly, now Jack must start his war against Tyler in order to take his place and marry Marla.

The turning point for Jack is the death of Bob. That is, affection for a living person, which Jack has preserved, which he has not yet killed in himself, helps him to start a fight with Tyler. And here we can assume that if Jack repeats the already established scenario, then a similar turning point should have existed before Tyler appeared. That is, if a person’s death caused a desire to fight Tyler, then perhaps someone’s death earlier caused Jack's desire to fight an imaginary father, which caused Tyler to appear. It is possible that such an episode happened during one of Jack's business trips. Well, what happened next, you know. Jack takes the place of Tyler. One can hope that he has integrated the best qualities of his alter-ego and will behave with Marla not as a child with his mother, but as a full-fledged partner.

Conclusion

The story of the main character of “Fight Club” is an attempt to become a man without a father, an attempt to become a father in the face of a loss of continuity with the fatherly tradition. The film shows how difficult it can be for a young man without a father; how much suffering his absence causes (whether actual or emotional); to what kind of despair can attempts to cope with the emptiness in the soul that remains in the place of the father figure? And how self-destruction and masochism become a means to stifle internal pain. 'Fight Club' is an image of one of the many paths that you have to go men of our time to gain their courage in a crisis of patriarchal society. The image of a man, which turned out as a result, combines not only brutality and courage, not only indifference to pain and indifference to appearance, but also infantile aggression to the whole world, adolescent maximalism, and mortification in oneself of any attachments. I think there is more work to do.