The Meaning of Fight Club

Sociology Film Review: Fight Club
Fight Club was produced in 1999 and has a running time of two hours and 19 minutes. The film is narrated by a nameless hero (played by Edward Norton) who suffers from insomnia. It opens with him tied to a chair, a gun held to his head by a man named Tyler (played by Brad Pitt). The narrator speaks directly to the audience and tells how he arrived at this moment through a flashback which essentially serves as the bulk of the film, the opening scene also serving as the ending scene and setting of the film. Throughout the film, the audience learns that the hero created an alternate ego for himself (Tyler) to help him address his malaise—his boredom with his work, his home, his life—in other words, his inability to find satisfaction in the materialistic existence he has created for himself. He introduces Tyler into his life to help him emerge from his cocoon of safety. Tyler’s method is to employ violence—to start a “fight club” in which mean can beat one another in an underground boxing ring. The idea is to allow men to tap into their suppressed masculinity and take back ownership of their lives and culture. This latter point is important because it is what compels Tyler to develop fight club into a movement: the membership spreads across the country, and the members engage in guerrilla-style tactics aiming at subverting the corporatized culture that continues to dominate. A woman named Marla falls in love with Tyler, the narrator’s alter ego. For much of the film, the narrator does not realize that he is actually Tyler, and once he realizes it he feels he has to stop fight club. He fears the club is going to kill innocent people by blowing up the buildings of the credit card companies in town. Tyler tells himi the buildings are evacuated—all that is being blown up is everyone’s data: everything will go back to zero. The narrator still feels he has to kill off Tyler and take back possession of his whole self. He does so, the buildings blow up, and the narrator is reunited with Marla. The film ends with them holding hands as the skyscrapers out the window fall.
The social problem that is addressed in the film is the problem of materialism and emasculation. At one point in the film, Tyler says, “We’re a generation of men raised by women. I don’t think another woman in our lives is what we need” (Fincher, 1999). The dialogue between Tyler and the narrator is full of this type of idea. The idea is that men need to take back their lives from the insipid consumerism that is zapping them of their masculine spirit. Tyler states at another point to the members of fight club: “Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.” To make sense of this malaise, this spiritual emptiness and lack of masculine ambition, Tyler explains to the members: “We’re the middle children of history, man. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives.” He thus indicates that the men need a mission, purpose—something beyond being empty consumers of products sold to them by corporations, products they’ve been tricked into thinking they need. He further explains: “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off” (Fincher, 1999). The answer, Tyler asserts, is to blow up the corporations, kill off the spirit of empty consumerism, and unabashedly assert their masculinity. Thus, the film blames society in general for the social problem and shows that the solution is for men to tap into their masculine spirits and renounce the materialism and political correctness of the modern world—i.e., to quite being “snowflakes,” as Tyler calls them.
The film itself is also full of imagistic barbs intended to skew the culture of political correctness, which the film’s heroes view as stifling. For that reason, both Tyler the character and Fincher the director of the film insert pornographic still shots of male genitalia into the frames of both a film within the film and the film itself (indeed, the last frame is a frame of male genitalia, literally announcing to the audience that the spirit of the film is going to live beyond the flickering lights of the cinema).
The film seems to reject both the functionalist and conflict perspectives of sociology. Its perspective is wholly unique in the sense that it does not promote a perspective. The film mainly focuses on undermining all current perspectives. In fact, the corporate world that is attacked in the film could represent the functionalist perspective, and the fact that the narrator feels he has to kill off Tyler in the end could represent the idea that the conflict perspective also has to go. The film seems to suggest that a more traditional, spiritual perspective is required: indeed, the last scene is of the hero reaching out and holding Marla’s hand, as the Pixies’ song “Where is My Mind?” plays and an enormous male genitalia cuts briefly across the screen. The point? The film seems to suggest that the Old World patriarchy has to reassert itself and soon.
Had the film adopted a sociological perspective, the story would probably be less dynamic. There perspective of the film is rooted in rejecting modern culture. As most sociological perspectives are derived in modern culture, the film would lose its edge and really would not have a leg to stand on. The story would be just as insipid as the hero’s life before he creates Tyler to lead him out of his malaise.


References
Fincher, D. (1999). Fight Club. LA: Fox 2000.