There are very few movies that have left such an impression on me as Fight Club (1999) has. I finished the film last night and even though it is already the following afternoon, the movie refuses to leave my mind. I feel a bit embarrassed, to say the least. The movie is essentially a film adaptation of the Bible for far right incels. Much like the Barbie movie was made for women, Fight Club is most definitely for ‘the boys.’ Tyler Durden is a role model for Discord video-gaming teenagers, and they idolize the character as much as I idolized Harry Styles in my pre-teen years.
The funny thing is, Fight Club was never created to be an emblem for this particular group of people. Sometimes, I wonder if it keeps the author up at night that the film adaptation of his book has drawn out such a crowd from the shadows. I know that if my material ever had such an impact, I’d wish I had never written it.
Fight Club is a movie very similar to Barbie, in that it’s an empowering movie for a specific gender, but in Fight Club’s case, the messaging is so subliminal that it has been lost in the noise. Barbie has been criticized for being too ‘in your face’ with its antipatriarchal messaging, but when you look at the impact of Fight Club, it’s easy to see why Greta Gerwig didn’t want such an important message to be entangled in metaphors and double meanings.
Fight Club is a film adaptation of a book written by Chuck Palahniuk. It follows the story of an unnamed protagonist (whom many fans call ‘Jack’) who leads a very relatable life: he has a 9-5 white collar job and a lot of fancy furniture from the IKEA catalogue, but that’s about it. When his apartment burns down, Jack has no one to call but a woman, Marla, whom he briefly met while hopping around support groups and a mysterious man, Tyler Durden, whom he had just met on his flight home.
Jack has achieved what we like to call the ‘American Dream’. He has a cushy, white-collar job where all he must do is make phone calls and fly out to California occasionally. He has a very cool yin and yang table in his apartment, very fresh and very new from the IKEA shelves. But Jack is not happy, even though he very much should be by societal standards. Jack hates his job. He has no friends. He feels a great sense of disillusion in that even though he is ticking goals off his list in a timely manner, he is still very, very far from happy.
Tyler Durden is the opposite. He’s a flashy, confident soap seller that defies the rules and expectations set on him. When confronted with the same disillusion as Jack, he ends his complacency and seeks to redefine his life. He makes soap out of liposuction fat. He lives in a house that’s very close to disintegrating. He constantly laments the woes of consumerism, so much so that he almost sounds like a communist. Where Jack has nearly given up, Tyler seeks new avenues. One such solution is Fight Club, a club that meets every night where men of all ages can beat the shit out of each other.
Suddenly, Jack’s seemingly boring life has found a spark again. When he’s not making calls during the day, he’s getting his face smashed in by some random guy while a circle of men watches and shouts in tandem. Through Fight Club, Jack finds the confidence to go to work without a tie. He also finds the confidence to write a haiku during work hours. He is still incredibly lonely, but he has gotten rid of the yin and yang table.
As the movie progresses, Jack descends further and further into his madness. The pacing of this descent is exquisite. It is produced so beautifully that Jack’s progression seems almost inevitable. At the very end of the movie, shoeless and bloody, the Jack we see barely shares a hair of resemblance with the Corporate Jack that we met at the beginning of the movie. Astronomical growth is seen in the Fight Club members: when they first joined Fight Club, they had a name and an identity, but by the end, they are indistinguishable with their all-black uniform and their namelessness. These men wanted freedom of expression but ended up being just another pawn in Durden’s cult. In fact, they ended up with even less freedom than before.
As Fight Club turns into Project Mayhem and becomes a crime and theft group, it retreats from being a symbol of marginally helping men through throwing punches and instead becomes a tacky crime group that smashes in car windows. Fight Club is an angsty, immature, teenage solution against the uncomfortableness of existence. Fight Club starts no grand movement. Every fire they set will be cleaned up. Every prank they pull will be reversed. Society remains unchanged, and Fight Club just makes life even more annoying for everyone else.
The greatest symbol of change, however, is at the very end of the movie, where Jack realizes that what he has created is out of his own control and that it has not materialized in any real change at all. It is only when he finally musters up the courage to open up to Marla that we truly see a solution to his sadness. As their hands join, the financial buildings in the skyline beautifully crumble, and the end credits roll.
Fight Club represents every teenager’s fantasy of simply burning the world to the ground in the face of adversity. Indeed, Jack’s first instinct was to seek the most toxic masculinity route possible: get into fights. However, if you really look at it, Fight Club served to no one’s benefit. As Fight Club grew, Jack grew crazier as well. As much as he tried, going to work with a busted lip does not count as liberation.
What liberates Jack in the end is breaking past the societal pressures of toxic masculinity. This is foreshadowed in the beginning, where Jack goes to support groups. These support groups help Jack sleep at night because being around people and connecting with them is truly what makes one feel alive. Knocking someone out provides temporary relief but makes no concrete changes. It’s simply a cheap Band-aid, and any satisfaction derived from it is quickly ripped off by the next problem that arises. Forming meaningful relationships is the only way that we can make sense of existence, and it is the only way that we can make it any less uncomfortable.
Connecting with others is seen as a form of ‘weakness’ in our patriarchal society, because it invokes emotion, and emotions are associated with women. For a patriarchy to function successfully, women must be oppressed to alleviate the standing of men. Indeed, a deep hatred for women has spanned humankind for ages: Aristotle, one of humanity’s greatest philosophers, once wrote; “The female is, as it were, a mutilated male … only not pure; for there is only one thing they have not in them, the principle of soul.”
I was appalled to learn a few years ago that many of my male friends don’t know how to cry. They were taught from a young age that crying is a great weakness, and men don’t cry – women do. Unfortunately for them, crying is one of the very actions that make us human and not animal. To be unable to do so prohibits one from reaching the heights of the human experience.
It saddens me that we teach boys from a very young age that emotions are something to be distant from. By doing so, we forever hinder their quality of life with an inability to truly understand oneself and the people around them. Research shows that men experience a worse quality of life in nursing homes as compared to women. In such environments, men are more likely to “[spend] a substantial amount of time alone in their rooms, watching TV or listening to the radio” while women formed more positive relationships with other residents and the staff (Being Patient 2022). Indeed, CNN Health reports that “social pressures remain that make it difficult for men to express the vulnerability and intimacy needed for close relationships”, and as a result, 1 in 5 men say they have received emotional support from a friend in the last week, compared with 4 in 10 women (Survey Center on American Life 2021). The patriarchy serves to benefit no one, and I believe that we would all understand each other better if we were all a bit more feminist. Contrary to popular belief, feminism serves to dismantle the patriarchy and elevate both men and women from our current system's toxic ideals, which is not so far-fetched from the message that Fight Club is trying to convey.
The meaning of Fight Club is miles away from the messaging of the incel groups that it now seems to represent. It’s quite ironic; but it’s also quite pitiful. Fight Club does not offer a person or group to blame. Instead, it forces one to look within themselves and to confront one’s complexities. Joining Fight Club is an amateur way of dealing with one’s emotions – connecting with others and experiencing your emotions is incredibly harder. Only by understanding our own madness can we truly reach out to others, and only by the latter can we truly liberate ourselves from the monotony of existence.
Works Cited
Chan, Nicholas. “Acclimating to Life in a Nursing Home Is Different for Men.” Being Patient,
Being Patient, 29 June 2023, www.beingpatient.com/nursing-homes-gender-
differences-quality-of-life/.
Cox, Daniel A., et al. “The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss.” The
Survey Center on American Life, 7 Apr. 2022,
challenges-and-loss/.
Holcombe, Madeline. “Why Most Men Don’t Have Enough Close Friends.” CNN, Cable News
Network, 29 Nov. 2022, www.cnn.com/2022/11/29/health/men-friendships-
wellness/index.html.
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