Masculinity, homosexuality, and the Romantic hero in Fight Club and Casino Royale

Fight Club and Casino Royale

Representing Masculinity in Fight Club and Casino Royale

If, as R.W. Connell implies, antagonism toward homosexual men may be used to define masculinity, both Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club and Ian Fleming's Casino Royale exude a kind of machismo that may be categorized as virile. However, the kind of masculinity depicted in Fight Club (both book and film) and in Casino Royale is indicative of a much deeper social trend: the male obsession with gadgets, demeanor, violence, and place. Assuming that masculinity is macho, tough, cool, on-the-edge, and concerned with action, women and cars, both Fight Club and Casino Royale may be viewed as reinforcements of masculinity -- and, conversely, as antagonistic to homosexuality. But while Casino Royale navigates a much more superficial heterosexual fantasy construct, Fight Club deals deftly with the modern male consciousness as it loses all its modern underpinnings. To say that either is an overt commentary on homosexuality may be an overstatement -- but one may suggest without fear that both may be analyzed as representations of heterosexual roles. This paper will analyze the ways in which the definition of homosexuality as the negation of masculinity is both reinforced and challenged in Fight Club and Casino Royale.

Understanding the Masculine Role

Neither work makes any explicit display of antagonism to homosexuality per se, but both do display antagonism to that which is soft according to their own standards of masculinity. The self-admittedly homosexual Palahniuk is also a self-admittedly violent person upon provocation: indeed, the inspiration for Fight Club stemmed from the reactions he received to a black eye he got from a fight in the woods during a camping trip (Fight Club DVD Special Edition 2000). In other words, just because the author is homosexual and the book is preoccupied with unbridled machismo and combat does not necessarily mean the two -- homosexuality and the masculine identity -- are any more than superficially connected. Indeed, Fight Club is a narrative that challenges and reinforces traditional norms simply because it challenges everything in the hero's worldview and ultimately falls back on the traditional values of the Romantic hero. Palahniuk has described himself as neither a nihilist nor a fascist but as a Romantic (Kavadlo 2005:5). The Romantic is typically composed of one part old world and one part new world: at the same time he holds to traditional beliefs -- chivalry, truth, beauty, etc., he also fails to anchor himself in the old world faith -- and sets about attempting to correct the real world with hopelessly idealistic and unrealistic plans.

To this end, Tyler Durden is both savior and bully -- savior because he draws the hero out of the mire of his own lifeless consciousness, and bully because he ultimately fails to allow the hero any real control over his own life. Durden is the epitome of Romantic/Enlightenment doctrine -- but he is not the hero of Fight Club, he is merely the foil. The hero is the nameless narrator, who in the novel is locked away in an asylum at the end and in the film is catapulted to the head of an underground militant group staring into the face of a revolutionary uprising for which he is responsible. David Fincher's film adaptation closes on the image of the world's financial banking institutions collapsing (a prophetic glimpse) and the hero taking Marla's hand in his own, as though they are now responsible for the furtherance of civilization. If consumerism, materialism and corporatism have destroyed the world, erotic love, platonic love, spiritual love, procreation and a good look at real human nature are offered as hopes for the coming future. Fincher's final thrust before the film's credits roll is to splice a clip of an erect penis into the film, as though suggesting that human nature is not for prudes, cannot be suppressed and is not leaving anytime soon: in a word, there is a little Tyler in all of us. If, as Terry Lee comments, "consumer-materialist culture defines masculinity and what men desire," then Fight Club is not about hetero- or homosexuality -- but about "manly efforts to be mature, to be responsible, to be breadwinners in the public sphere, where self-restraint was championed" (Lee 2002:418). Homosexuality may only be read into Fight Club -- just like it can only be read into Casino Royale. Neither work directly addresses the issue of homosexuality. Fight Club does attempt to understand the masculinity of its hero, a lonely man who feels stifled and isolated and wants to reach out to the world. Casino Royale does end with Bond falling in love -- and then losing that love. But Fleming's Bond is as romantic and unreal as Palahniuk's Durden. Neither can be considered a true representation of masculinity.

The Heterosexual Male and His Female Romantic Interest

To a certain extent, both the hero of Fight Club and the hero of Casino Royale may be understood in the light of their respective love interests. If masculinity is to regenerate, it depends upon femininity -- and so the female character of each narrative gives a compelling perspective of the masculinity of the respective hero.

Fleming's Vesper is to Bond like an oasis -- a lover who is passionate and able to make love sweetly. She is almost too good to be true, and, of course, she is. Bond's love interest and potential life partner is taken from him right when he thinks he was finally won her. She kills herself.

Yet, it is a mixture of self-sacrifice and despair that prompts Vesper to suicide: as she reveals in her intimate letter to Bond, she meant only to save him from her controllers who were using her to get to him. By taking herself out of the equation, she spares him -- even though she admits, "You might save my life, but I couldn't bear the look in your dear eyes" (Fleming 2009:92). She is haunted by her own guilt, and thus denies Bond the matrimonial bliss he might have known.

Instead, Bond is forced to resume his hard-boiled posturing: when he phones headquarters, he can only assert that his former love was a double-agent and insist that "was" is the correct word because, as he states, "The bitch is dead now" (Fleming 2009:94). It is the last line of the novel and a harsh note to end on -- but its bluntness is precisely what makes Bond who he is: an inhuman, machine-like spy, whose fantastic life forbids him from any normal relationship in which masculinity can truly thrive through regeneration. Were Bond to settle down and have children, he would cease to be Bond: the fantastical world would collapse -- the adult fantasy would disintegrate.

Thus Bond is drawn back into an imaginary world where the heterosexual role is reduced to gambling, spying, driving fast cars, foiling enemy plots, drinking martinis and seducing women. There is no substance in any of it, and James Bond becomes another step in degeneration. It is, in other words, Bond's world that Palahniuk's hero must break out of: a world of disinterested participation, whose role is merely to provide meaningless entertainment and diversion from the fact that real regeneration is being stymied and that real masculinity is being ignored. Bond is, in the end, a homosexual fantasy. Fight Club (the book) is, in the end, a Romance. Fight Club (the film) is, in the end, a return to hetero-normativity.

The book, of course, also is. As Marla states, referring to her masturbatory device, which she assures the hero is no threat to him, "Don't be afraid" (Palahniuk 1996:61). If Marla is the woman counterpart that the hero is seeking, she is -- unlike Bond's Vesper -- ready to take a chance on heterosexual love. Masturbation, she assures us, has no future in it -- and the orgasm stimulated by the dildo is not what she is seeking. Pleasure of self is no answer for Marla -- nor is it any real solution to the modern tension for Palahniuk. His books are romances -- and in that sense they are concerned with integration into real community, even if that integration is idealistic.

Yet, Marla is also a contradiction that some critics view as a cover. "Palahniuk's sexuality is not important," Jesse Kavadlo reminds us (Kavadlo 2005:5). What is important is that "Palahniuk's particular, one might say queer, morality" is to a certain extent buried in the narrative and only "subsequently" revealed (Kavadlo 2005:5). Fight Club, in other words, "ultimately proposes that what [its] characters, and all of us, need is -- love" (Kavadlo 2005:5). Marla fits into that proposal, of course. Yet in the book, her role in the fulfillment of the hero is less obvious than in the film. Marla, in the book, wants to "have Tyler's abortion" (Palahniuk 1996:59) -- but the censors of the film found the phrase too alarming and had it replaced. Marla's morbidity is thus replaced by a more traditional femininity -- even if it is lurid and lewd. Of course, Marla is also seen as a satirical commentary on modern femininity, which has no desire to conceive. Here, again, is the problem at the heart of Fight Club -- even in heterosexual love, the masculine impulse is stunted by feminine counterparts who refuse to allow the seed to fertilize the egg. Abortion is preferred to life. Regeneration is denied. The film abandons the idealism and settles for a fantastic kind of realism, the underpinnings of which are hetero-normative. Marla and the nameless narrator hold hands as they embark on a new adventure in a new world that is open to them for the first time -- and the image of the nameless narrator, whose pants are still missing (from an earlier altercation), suggests that he is already half-primed to begin the process.

As Peter Matthews states, Palahniuk "peppers the novel with religious motifs" (Matthews 2005:91) -- and the religious devotion that the hero has to Tyler's message is part of what allows him to begin his search for his lost masculinity. Religion is as much a part of the old world as the ideals of truth and beauty -- but the god has changed. Jesus Christ -- the most masculine of men in the old world -- is exchanged for Tyler Durden, the Byronic hero, the James Bond of the 1990s. If the religious god of the old world is too worn out for the modern world, Palahniuk at least feels comfortable referencing the old world means of attaining peace of mind and soul -- prayer. The hero of Fight Club prays -- but it is an ironic prayer to the Romantic revolutionary Tyler Durden. Bond is a man of action -- not of prayer. As Davadlo states, it is Fight Club's "masculine emobidemnt…[and] existentialist exterior that conceals the sentimentalism in the closet" (Kavadlo 2005:7). If the relationship between Marla and the nameless narrator is real, however, there is no need to insist that it is sentimental. Sentiment is the correct word -- and sentiment is what drives the hero to reclaim his masculinity in Fight Club. Society (at least in the film) is leveled (or at least everyone's debt is reduced to zero), and the two lovers, now cognizant for the first time in their lives it seems, provide the viewer with a hint of the regeneration which their love implies. Society, it appears, will continue and rebuild.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Palahniuk's Fight Club and Fleming's Casino Royale both tackle the issue of masculinity but in different ways. Fleming's Bond is a fantasy -- a man whose masculinity tends not toward regeneration of life (Fleming does not allow it) but rather toward regeneration of the fantasy, allowing the Bond adventure cycle to continue. Bond is, then, more homosexual in his masculinity than Palahniuk's nameless narrator, who actually ends the tale with a woman, who has stated that she wishes to have his child (if only so she can abort it -- but we are under no compulsion to take this wish literally). If masculinity is antagonistic to homosexuality and therefore to masturbatory love, then it is the nameless narrator of Fight Club who truly discovers his masculinity in the end -- not Bond.

Reference List

Fight Club DVD Special Edition, 2000, motion picture, 20th Century Fox, USA

Fleming, I 2009, Casino Royale, Penguin, NY

Kavadlo, J 2005, 'The Fiction of Self-destruction: Chuck Palahniuk, Closet Moralist,'

Stirrings Still 2(2), pp 3-24

Lee, T 2002, 'Virtual Violence in Fight Club: This is What Transformation of Masculine

Ego Feels Like,' Journal of American & Comparative Cultures 25(3), pp 418-423

Matthews, P 2005, 'Diagnosing Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club,' Stirrings Still 2(2), pp 81-

Palahniuk, C 1996, Fight Club, W.W. Norton, NY