- deepdivemovie
[FIGHT CLUB] REPRESENTATION
-gender
There’s a huge change in the present of gender from the 80s to the 90s. Especially in the form of “men” and “masculine”.
Gender is not fixed but unstable and shifting in movies. From early on films such as the Rocky Horror Picture Show [1975]. Historically, the male body is viewed as the norm and the female body as a deviation, as inferior, a poor copy. Yet, many monstrous figures are, on a closer exclamation, associated with aspect of femininity.
To the film Fight club, the narrator lacks masculine, in the definition of Hollywood, being a man means you have to had bold body built, tanned, etc. The narrator in the film represents the disaffected, feminised, young white American male and his frustration with capitalism in late-twentieth century life. The film’s central discourse suggests an uncertainty about men’s role in society and a lack of purpose in life. [We are the middle children of history with no purpose or place. We have no great war or great depression. We were raised by television to believe that we’d be millionaires. But we won’t. And now we’re pissed.] [1:10:39-1:11:07] The film in very different ways to the 80s cult movie, suggest an unease with taking on a feminised role and desire for certainty in respect of what it is to be masculine.
-Hurt, agony, pain- love it.
Display early in the movie, the narrator had a fight with his alter Tyler, thinks it’s nonsense at first but soon love the rush and hopes they can fight again. Also pain plays an important role in the film. It’s how all the things starts. The narrator went to support groups to get empathy and relief the stress and pain he got in work. So that he could sleep at night.
-effect to the audience
Also in representation of the film, it spells out the pleasure the audience gains from being placed in the position of masochistic and therefore feminised spectator. The horror/ action film audience, whether male or female, takes on a passive, classically feminine role, identifying with the pain and suffering of the protagonist. Film is a manipulation to the audience, mainstream film makes use of similar tools to feminise the audience, we ‘surrender ourselves’ to the film, we expected to be manipulated, surprised and kept in suspense. Therefore the assumed dominant, sadistic role ascribed to the male viewer is under question.
-early childhood trauma
Lack of fatherhood in early years could lead to confusion and lack of purpose in later years.
In the movie, both the narrator and Tyler is having a rather successful life, but both of them don’t exactly know what they are working hard for. They are the ‘lost boys’. A generation whose the father left home and have given no masculine guidance to their sons; they have no clear role or function in society and their lives are without meaning. The crisis in identity exemplify by Jack’s split personality is alluded to throughout the film, although not revealed until near the end. Tyler is jack’s physically perfect alter ego and also his dark side. A role played by brat Pitt whose muscled body is often on display. In the first half of the film jack has a homoerotic [a description of a text-prose, poem, film, painting, photograph-conveying an enjoyable sense of same-sex attraction.] fascination with Tyler but in the latter section the two characters, facets of his personalities, battle with each other for survival and jack’s sanity. Jack represents the passive, domesticated male and Tyler the fighter who is almost neanderthal and ultimately destructive.
-female in male
The emsaculated male, in need of testrostone, is evident from beginning of the film, which opens with a phallic image of jack with a gun in his mouth. There are many reference throughout the film to fear of castration and phallic inadequacy. Jack is feminised, he is obsessed with decorating his flat with IKEA furniture and has an apparently money, meaningless but domesticated existence. Again these reference suggest fear of castration, fear 0f losing control of are number of parallels with falling down, which depicts a man’s extreme reaction to losing power and control in his life.
Identity is literally torn apart in the oil and this is exemplified by the fight club, where fighting is not only a spectacle but a test of one masculinity and how much pain can be taken, or can be suffered. The masochistic desire for self-destruction/self-punishment and the belief that pain through suffering is somehow redemptive or a transformative exeperience is a nostalgia for the past rituals of primitive societies; there is a nostalgia for an age when the role of masculine and feminine are imagined as being more clearly defined. [self-improvement is masturbation, self-destructive is the answer.]The fight between Tyler and jack are how ever later shown as elusions, and jack’s self-mutilation is presented as an aspect of self-hate, guilt, confusion and inner torment; we understand in retrospect that he is a deeply disturbed character.
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