Sociology Film Review: Fight Club and Masculinity Crisis

Film Summary and Narrative Structure

Fight Club was produced in 1999 and has a running time of two hours and nineteen 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 explains how he arrived at this moment through a flashback that essentially constitutes the bulk of the film; the opening scene also serves as the ending scene and its primary setting.

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, and his life, and his inability to find satisfaction in the materialistic existence he has constructed. 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 men can beat one another in an underground boxing ring. The idea is to allow men to tap into their suppressed masculinity and reclaim ownership of their lives and culture.

This latter point is important because it is what compels Tyler to develop the fight club into a broader movement. Membership spreads across the country, and members engage in guerrilla-style tactics aimed at subverting the corporatized culture that continues to dominate society. 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 does, he feels compelled to stop the 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 assures him the buildings are evacuated — all that is being destroyed is everyone's data, and everything will go back to zero. The narrator still feels he must kill off Tyler and reclaim full possession of himself. He does so, the buildings blow up, and the narrator is reunited with Marla. The film ends with them holding hands as the skyscrapers outside the window fall.

The Social Problem: Materialism and Emasculation

The central social problem addressed in the film is materialism and emasculation. At one point, 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 sentiment. The core idea is that men need to reclaim their lives from the insipid consumerism that is sapping them of their masculine spirit.

Tyler states 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 spiritual emptiness and lack of masculine ambition, Tyler elaborates: "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 argues that men need a mission and a purpose — something beyond being empty consumers of products sold to them by corporations, products they have been deceived into thinking they need.

Tyler 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 destroy the corporations, extinguish the spirit of empty consumerism, and unabashedly assert masculine identity. The film thus blames society at large for the social problem and presents the solution as men tapping into their masculine spirits and renouncing the materialism and political correctness of the modern world — that is, to stop being "snowflakes," as Tyler calls them.

Conclusion: What a Sociological Framework Would Cost the Film

Had the film adopted a conventional sociological perspective, the story would probably be less dynamic. The perspective of the film is rooted in rejecting modern culture. Since most sociological perspectives are themselves products of modern culture, adopting one would cause the film to lose its edge and deprive it of a coherent foundation. The story would become 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.