Fight Club Masculinity

In the movie Fight Club, Edward Norton stars as an unnamed man, who is both the narrator and the protagonist. This man is discontent with his white-collar job, depressed, and plagued with insomnia. His only solace is to attend support groups for various afflictions and illnesses, none of which he possesses. In one of his various support groups, he meets a woman named Marla Singer, played by Helena Bonham Carter, who is also a support group imposter or “tourist.” Her presence robs him of his comforting release and forces him to search elsewhere for a new source of mitigation. On his way back from a business trip, the narrator meets a strange man named Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt, and exchanges numbers with him. After arriving back at his …show more content…
We find him in a support group for testicular cancer, where men are sitting in a circle. They are expressing their feelings, crying and embracing each other in open arms. In effect, Palahniuk is showing that men have lost their way. Men are being castrated by society; a cancer is infecting their masculinity, slowly and painfully robbing it from them. The narrator tries to fill the void inside himself through the physical and emotional outpourings of pain from others. However, after Marla Singer is introduced, the narrator no longer feels special for attending these support groups and he has to find a new way to deal with his disenfranchisements. At this point in the movie, the narrator meets Tyler Durden. Despite their meeting, Tyler is actually a fabrication of the protagonist`s mind, a personified version of his id. The narrator begins to act and behave as Tyler does, slowly becoming his alter ego and listening to his inner instincts, in turn regaining his masculinity. In order to escape this ego/id polarity, the narrator shoots himself, symbolically ending his duality and being reborn. Just as the trigger is being pulled, the narrator says, “My eyes are …show more content…
This alternate ego of the narrator embodies an entire generation of those who have been robbed of their masculinity and brainwashed through the endless tides of media and consumerism. Tyler states that “The things you own end up owning you.” He is completely and utterly unconstrained by ego and requires no need for societal approval. He creates Fight Club in order to bring together all of the men of his generation and connect them with their primal and instinctual selves, bringing them the thrill of rebellion and freedom. Tyler