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.

Virility and Virtue

Both Fight Club and Casino Royale begin with heroes exhibiting what are popularly conceived as masculine traits: a flair for pain, guns, gambling, technology, swanky bars, fast cars, and stoic cool. One may, of course, observe that the emphasis on uber-masculinity is an attempt to appeal to a specific section of society; but one may also suggest that the emphasis acts to subvert the view of homosexuality as a gender norm. To suggest the latter, one must first accept the definition of homosexuality as a negation of masculinity. Second, one must define masculinity. Connell defines it as anything antagonistic to homosexuality -- but such a definition only provides us with a kind of circularity. Masculinity, as portrayed in the films and pulp fiction of the recent past, have included such types as the John Wayne, the man-with-no-name, the loner, whose moral compass is neither wholly self-centered nor wholly guided by sympathy/empathy.

The nameless narrator of Fight Club may be attempting to understand his masculinity -- and if he suffers from a negation of masculinity it is only in the sense that he suffers from a lack of virility. Tyler Durden appears (with gun in hand -- with holes drilled into the barrel) to revive virility -- but it is, ultimately, a false virility; and Tyler Durden is finally dealt with accordingly. The real virility that the nameless narrator -- the Everyman -- of Fight Club seeks is to be found in the root word of viril: vir, Latin -- man. Vir serves as the base of virtus -- or virtue, and here is where the real search begins to find fruit. Virtue is, according to the ancient Greeks, nothing more than a habit that is good. If manliness is associated with good habits -- vir, virtus -- then it follows that what Fight Club's hero needs is not Tyler Durden and machismo -- but reality and virtue. Tyler frees the hero from his consumer/materialistic slavery, like Moses leads the Hebrews from Egyptian captivity -- but fails to lead the hero to the Promised Land (just as Moses fails to see it himself). Tyler is the springboard from which the hero discovers real masculinity -- neither in materialistic comforts nor in mindless action and violence -- but in true knowledge of self, out of which springs a true awareness of others: the hero escapes isolation and alienation and embarks on a relationship with another real human being -- Marla (at least, this is the ending that the film allows -- which Palahniuk himself confesses is better than his own vision). The ancient Greek maxim etched into the Delphic Temple, "Know Thyself," becomes the foundation upon which masculinity in Fight Club finally comes to rest.

If homosexuality is the negation of masculinity, it is because the homosexual union does not permit fulfillment of the masculine function, which is ultimately an act of regeneration. Fight Club is consumed by a single generation's tension, built up through masturbatory acts. Fight Club is a release from masturbation because it is a release from the fraudulent "self-improvement" exercises of modern civilization: the Better Bodies, the IKEA catalog (depicted as a kind of pornographic magazine in Fincher's film, with the hero looking at it -- as one would a centerfold -- while on the toilet), the meaningless self-defining techniques of the psychotherapists. Each is an attempt to deal with the pain of the built-up tension of a generation steered away from regeneration -- from life. "Don't deal with it the way those dead people do," states Tyler in the film, as he attempts to teach the hero the way to true enlightenment -- that human nature and masculinity are real and must be dealt with. With the embracing of pain and the possibility of heterosexual union, Fight Club resolves the tension at the heart of the narrative: the materialistic comforts must go and real human hetero-normative interaction must replace it, simply because it offers natural fulfillment of the sex function. If homosexuality is the negation of masculinity, heterosexuality is its positive assertion.

And yet heterosexuality in Casino Royale is fantastical, unreal and unconvincing. Ian Fleming's James Bond is a kind of high-stakes, high-rolling international playboy who dabbles in espionage as though for kicks and loves women for sheer entertainment. He is just as surreal as Palahniuk's Tyler Durden, and yet he is not freeing any hero from consumerist enslavement but -- on the other hand -- burying the reader behind a false and deluded masculine mythology -- namely, that a masculine hero is virile not because he "knows himself" and seeks virtue but because he knows how to drive fast cars, win at cards, be physically fit and agile, and out-step evil doers. Bond does not embody the traditional masculine role or even the Romantic hero that Palahniuk's hero represents, but rather the kind of self-centered, egomaniacal machismo fantasy that springs out of the head of Hemingway in the early 20th century, like Athena out of the head of Zeus. Bond is not truly antagonistic to homosexuality because he fails to secure for himself a feminine mate: even though he offers to marry Vesper, she is pursued by something outside of his ken and cannot reciprocate the offer. His romantic pursuits are foiled by her apparent suicide. His masculine urge to regenerate is foiled by her death. Bond, who has seemed like the most masculine of men, is, in the end, disappointed in his desire for erotic fulfillment.

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.