¶ … Fight Club" and the creation of a false urban masculinity in cinematic and real life One of the most interesting aspects of the narrative art is seen in the unpredictable ways in which individuals are apt to embrace filmic narration and cinematic narrative techniques and to transfer them into the narrative texture of their own lives. Also reflected in this phenomenon is the fact that viewers can develop ways of approaching and understanding films that depart entirely from the filmmaker's original conception and intent. For instance, in the case of "Fight Club," the evident intent of the filmmakers was to create a film that was highly deflationary in terms of masculine posturing. The film depicts a number of highly paid executive young men who create societies devoted to bare-fisted pugilism. These boxing societies are held illegally and underground. The film is fictional, and began as a fiction. Eventually, the societies flourish and spread all over the nation, as membership is limited to fifty within each boxing 'cell.' However, reality eventually mirrored filmed narrative life, as many individuals who saw the film were inspired to create fight clubs of their own across the nation.

The protagonists of "Fight Club" consider the club to be a viable antidote to the modern lives they are subjected to as corporate drones. The film's depiction of a bar of soap in its advertising media meshes with the entire film's concerns with the way identity is constructed through consumerism in America. Individual's gender identities are bought and sold like soap in contemporary capitalist American society,...

Soap is used to clean the sweat from the fighter's gym-hardened bodies. Soap is also part of the cultural narrative the men sell in their cushioned day jobs as advertising executives, or as other cogs in the fabric of corporate America.
The filmmaker's intentions thus suggest the over-scrupulous attention to cleanliness and detail that is characteristic of modern masculine life. The fighters attempt to subvert with constructing their own violent narratives through the textures of the fight club. However, ultimately the fight club is shown to be a simulacrum of masculinity, much like the simulacrums of identity sold by modern corporate advertising. Although the members of the fight clubs look down upon the gym's sculpting of useless muscle, ultimately their use of fighting is equally purposeless.

However, simply because an individual ideology is subverted in the texture of a particular narrative does not mean that individuals who watch the film cannot glean a different message from that narrative. In fact, this accusation has been leveled many films. Even films that attempt to counsel viewers against violence, for example, actually ultimately end up glamorizing violence by simply showing violent acts on the screen. Much as in the way that a viewer may be inspired to live a 'decadent lifestyle' by seeing such decadence showing on screen, thus making furs and gold alluring, individuals were inspired to create their own fight clubs when they saw fighting glamorized in the persona of Brad Pitt's impressive physique.

Simply by elevating a phenomenon, such as an ugly form of boxing, to a status worthy of being seen on the screen gives it a legitimacy and…