FIGHT CLUB AND HYPERMASCULINITY [2000 WORD ESSAY]

PLAN

✓ PARAGRAPH ONE: Introduce Fight Club/The essay talking points/main

sources/key terms
This essay will be exploring the way that men are represented in Fight Club (1999)
along with the way gender roles are portrayed and different points making up this
idea of hypermasculinity throughout the film. This essay will be using key scenes
from Fight Club and Jacob Wiker’s Romance and Idenity in Fight Club, along with
other sources such as: Rober Ollman’s article: Fight Club Analysed Through a
Gender Role Lens, M. Keither Brooker’s book: Postmodern Hollywood and Maggie
Kathwaroon’s article about the contrast between Tyler and Jack: The First Rule Of
Teaching Fight Club.
[FIGURE 1]
Fight Club is a David Fincher drama/action film based on the novel: Fight Club by
Chuck Palahniuk (1996). The film is about a man with no name, who will be referred
to as ‘Jack’ throughout this essay, and his internal battle with another side to him that
manifests as a hallucination called Tyler Durden. The internal battle becomes a
battle of the hypermasculine ‘id’ versus the more feminine ‘ego’. The film then follows
their joint journey to an equilibrium.

☐ PARAGRAPH TWO: ISSUE 1- Characters and Masculinity (brief)

[FIGURE 2]
Looking at Jack, how he is presented as small and scrawny, unable to perform
masculine tasks, works in an office and resorts to the ‘nesting’ instinct, like a woman
would. Then looking at Tyler, and how he is the complete opposite, strong and
intelligent, handsome and sneaky about getting around the system (part of what the
film is about, consumerism), he is everything Jack wants to be. And Bob, a
bodybuilder who ended up pushing his masculinity so far that he got testicular
cancer, so his literal physical masculinity had to be removed from his body, he then
grew ‘bitch tits’ to emphasise this loss of masculinity. Marla, the only female
character in the film who ends up being more ‘masculine’ than most of the men we
see and ends up kind of saving Jack in the end too, reversing the roles of a typical
film.

☐ PARAGRAPH THREE: ISSUE 2- Feminine Men (Jack)

‘In the early 90’s the view that culture was becoming feminized was emerging, ‘real
men’ had no place; the world has become emotional, soft and feminine, Activities like
shopping are often assumed to be a female past times, and in Fight Club our
narrator is a male who is obsessive with the Ikea furniture in his flat, he also holds a
second job as a waiter, a traditionally female service job’ (Things- 2017)
Expand on this quote, exploring the character of the narrator to be feminine at the
start of the film, lost his way and cries a lot. He is trapped in an office job, where
women are more likely to be while men are meant to be out doing physical labour-
and this affects his sleep causing him to be an insomniac.
[FIGURE 3]

☐ PARAGRAPH FOUR: ISSUE 2- Feminine Men (Marla and Narrator)

Following the previous paragraph, looking at feminine men- now feminine traits that
transform throughout the film. Marla begins more tough, smoking, masculine looking
compared to scrawny ‘Jack’, but by the end of the film after going through a lot of
different scenarios they seem to swap back their roles and become male and female
as they typically would be in a ‘normal’ world. By the end of the film, Jack is able to
take charge like he never could when we meet him at the beginning of the film.
‘Both Marla and Jack go through tremendous changes in character throughout the
movie. The violence they both experience transforms Jack into a stronger person—
making him more self-aware and assertive—and Marla into a more sensitive
person—making her softer and less callous. Whereas Jack displays the more
feminine traits in the beginning of the film, and Marla the more masculine, now each
has given up some of those opposing gender qualities and absorbed more of that of
their own gender.’ (Tori. E. Godfree, 2010)
[FIGURE 4]

☐ PARAGRAPH FIVE: ISSUE 3- Masculine VS Feminine (TYLER VS JACK)

This paragraph will be exploring how the film portrays a ‘manly man’ and a feminine
man- the real roots of the hypermasculinity in the film by looking at key scenes- the
Calvin Klein ad on the bus, the difference between Jack and Tyler even though
they’re the same person. This internal struggle between what Jack wants to be, and
what he is to the rest of the world. ‘Edward Norton stated, “We decided early on that I
would start to starve myself as the film went on, while [Brad Pitt] would lift and go to
tanning beds; he would become more and more idealized as I wasted away.” ‘To
emphasize that these are merely performances of (hyper)masculinity, I show them this
scene from the film, in which Edward Norton’s character and Tyler Durden gaze at a
men’s underwear ad.’ (Kathwaroon, 2013)

☐ PARAGRAPH SIX: ISSUE 4- Men with ‘no purpose’

In the film, Tyler says ‘We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or
place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war,
our great depression is our lives, we've been all raised by 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.’ The fact is that the
men in the film all work in consumer jobs, serving the public, or stuck in offices. They
aren’t exerting their energy or using their strength in any form, so they’re frustrated
and unsure why. They were raised purely by women as Tyler also points out, where
we see that Jack’s father left when he was young (and they are the same person).
‘We’re a generation of men raised by women’. This could be why Jack is the way he
is, his father was never really around to teach him ‘how to be a man’. ‘The absence
of fathers on military service (and mothers engaged in war work) destabilised the
family, leading to a ‘relaxation of sexual morality’ and to ‘neglect of children and so to
a rise in juvenile delinquency.’ (Chopra-Grant, M. 2006) And following up this quote,
by the end of the film Jack and Tyler end up committing a lot of crimes, backing up
the increased delinquency.
[FIGURE 6]

☐ PARAGRAPH SEVEN: ISSUE 4- Homoerotism/Romance

The film is centred around Jack and Tyler- but the romance is between Jack and
Marla. There is some homosexual tension between the two men, but this is
corrupted by the fact that are the same person, but then also re-enforced by the fact
that Tyler is exactly who Jack wants to be- so if Jack can be attracted to Tyler, other
people can be too.
‘Critics have picked up on a considerable number of homosexual elements,
specifically, a great deal of sexual tension between Tyler and Jack. Of course, this is
complicated by the fact that Tyler is actually Jack, which makes his homosexual
attraction to Tyler narcissistic, as well as love for a hypermasculinized vision of
himself.’ (Wiker, J. 2013)
There is the idea of a love triangle before the audience find out that he would make
Tyler part of Jack until the end when the twist is revealed, even the author himself
wasn’t sure what was going to happen until he wrote it- so the possibility of a
homosexual relationship in the making was definitely a possibility.
[FIGURE 5]

☐ PARAGRAPH EIGHT: CONCLUSION

Discuss the overall reality of the men in Fight Club, and how the film tackles real
issues. Sum up how the men in the film differently portray aspects of masculinity,
how it can go too far, be stereotypical or not exist at all. Do gender roles need to
exist- the characters don’t rely on masculinity after their experiences throughout the
film. (and literal fighting)
 Illustrations:

Figure 1, Original Fight Club (1999) Poster Figure 2, Tyler VS Jack [Still]

Figure 4, Jack and Marla [Still]

Figure 3, Jack's IKEA Nesting [Still]

Figure 5, Jack and Tyler in the Hotel [Still] Figure 6, Bob has Tits [Still]
Illustrations:
Figure 1- Original Fight Club (1999) [Poster] At:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/mediaviewer/rm590641920 Accessed on:
28/02/19
Figure 2- Tyler VS Jack [Still] At: https://scroll.in/reel/860272/book-versus-movie-
david-finchers-fight-club-breaks-the-first-rule-of-adaptations-its-better Accessed on:
28/02/19
Figure 3- Jack’s IKEA Nesting [Still] At: http://wakeuphumans.com/2015/10/19/fight-
club-and-buddhism/ Accessed on 28/02/19
Figure 4- Jack and Marla [Still] At: https://www.themoviedistrict.com/fight-club/3/
Accessed on 28/02/19
Figure 5- Jack and Tyler in the Hotel [Still] At:
http://mymeaningfulmovies.blogspot.com/2017/05/fight-club.html Accessed on:
28/02/19
Figure 6- Bob Has Tits [Still] At: http://thelistlove.com/10-facts-to-make-you-talk-
about-fight-club/ Accessed on 28/02/19

PROFORMA:

Author: Joseph Oland

Critical Position: Photojournalist
Title: Lensebender
Publisher/publication: Wordpress
Place of Publication: Online at: https://lensebender.org/2015/04/01/fight_club/
Date: 1st April 2015
Chapter/ Article: Fight Club and Modern Masculinity
Subject/key points and potential for use: Masculinity conflict within the characters
surrounding the Narrator in Fight Club.
Quotation: ‘In a film about modern man’s struggle with his own masculinity, it makes
sense to surround the main character with post-surgical victims of testicular cancer –
men who have literally been castrated.’

Author: Tori. E. Godfree

Critical Position: Editor and Writer
Title: Film & Media
Publisher/publication: Inquiries Journal
Place of Publication: Online at: http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/227/a-
generation-of-men-raised-by-women-gender-constructs-in-fight-club
Date: 2010
Chapter/ Article: A Generation of Men Raised by Women: Gender Constructs in
'Fight Club'
Subject/key points and potential for use: Gender issues and feminine men
Quotation: ‘Both Marla and Jack go through tremendous changes in character
throughout the movie. The violence they both experience transforms Jack into a
stronger person—making him more self-aware and assertive—and Marla into a more
sensitive person—making her softer and less callous. Whereas Jack displays the
more feminine traits in the beginning of the film, and Marla the more masculine, now
each has given up some of those opposing gender qualities and absorbed more of
that of their own gender.’
‘The impression we are left with at the end of Fight Club is that the rearrangement of
Marla and Jack’s masculine and feminine traits leads them to become better people.
Marla, as a more feminine woman, is more tender towards Jack, and thus more
appealing to him. Jack, as a more masculine man, is more confident towards Marla,
and thus more appealing to her. This suggests that only through the proper
alignment of masculine and feminine traits can one truly achieve good character and
proper ethos. While feminists and supporters have worked vigorously in an attempt
to blur the lines of gender constructs, this shows that despite the progress made,
they are still very apparent in modern culture, and modern society.’

Author: Things That Are Hard to Explain

Critical Position: N/A
Title: Things That Are Hard to Explain
Publisher/publication: Wordpress
Place of Publication: Online at:
https://thingsthatarehardtoexplain.wordpress.com/2017/01/15/gender-in-fight-club/
Date: 15th January 2017
Chapter/ Article: Gender in Fight Club
Subject/key points and potential for use: Gender issues and feminine men
Quotation: ‘In the early 90’s the view that culture was becoming feminized was
emerging, ‘real men’ had no place; the world has become emotional, soft and
feminine’
‘Activities like shopping are often assumed to be a female past times, and in Fight
Club our narrator is a male who is obsessive with the Ikea furniture in his flat, he also
holds a second job as a waiter, a traditionally female service job’

Author: Maggie Kathwaroon

Critical Position: Men’s Studies Teacher
Title: Masculinity Bytes
Publisher/publication: Wordpress
Place of Publication: Online at:
https://masculinitybytes.wordpress.com/2013/04/26/the-first-rule-of-teaching-fight-
club/
Date: 26th April 2013
Chapter/ Article: The First Rule of Teaching Fight Club
Subject/key points and potential for use: The contrast between Tyler and the
Narrator (Masculine vs Feminine)
Quotation: ‘Edward Norton stated, “We decided early on that I would start to starve
myself as the film went on, while [Brad Pitt] would lift and go to tanning beds; he
would become more and more idealized as I wasted away.”
‘To emphasize that these are merely performances of (hyper)masculinity, I show
them this scene from the film, in which Edward Norton’s character and Tyler Durden
gaze at a men’s underwear ad. The underwear model’s torso sports an enviable six-
pack. Edward Norton’s character turns to Tyler Durden and asks, “Is that what a man
looks like?” Tyler replies, “Self-improvement is masturbation.” At this point, the irony
of this scene is not lost on my students: Brad Pitt looks exactly like the underwear ad
model’
Author: BetaCandy
Critical Position: Journalist
Title: The Hathor Legacy
Publisher/publication: The Hathor Legacy
Place of Publication: Online at: https://thehathorlegacy.com/fight-club-a-generation-
of-men-raised-by-women/
Date: 10th April 2005
Chapter/ Article: Fight Club: A generation of men raised by women
Subject/key points and potential for use: The contrast between Tyler and the
Narrator (Masculine vs Feminine)
Quotation: ‘Our society hasn’t just broken its promises to women; it’s broken trust
with all of us. And the people at the top are neither men nor women; they are
genderless piles of insecurity in the form of human flesh.’
‘it’s all about a man’s search for identity in the form of manhood in a world of men.’

Author: Stella Bruzzi

Critical Position: Author
Title: Men’s Cinema: Masculinity and Mise en Scene in Hollywood
Publisher/publication: Edinburgh University Press
Place of Publication: Cheshire, UK
Date: 2013
Chapter/ Article: How Mise en Scene tells the mans story
Subject/key points and potential for use: Masculinity in film
Quotation: ‘ The strains, the repressive instincts, the disavowals and all other
attendant strategies deployed to hold up the ‘normality’ and hegemony of white,
middle class, heterosexual masculinity emerge furtively but frequently within
classical Hollywood cinema, at a time when the explicit questioning of masculinity’s
status would have been more problematic. Though the cinematic expression of male
anxiety is evidently not confined to melodramas and film noir, the evocation of the
‘strain’ of masculinity is particularly interesting when functioning within a markedly
feminised space.’
‘Ultimately masculinity is stopped from descending into ‘pure spectacle’ by the
acceptance of Mulvey’s psychodynamic paradigm , a paradigm that is here reiterated
at the expense of further discussion of style and aesthetics as generators of
meaning.’
Author: M. Keither Brooker
Critical Position: Author
Title: Postmodern Hollywood
Publisher/publication: Praeger
Place of Publication: USA
Date: 2007
Chapter/ Article: Breaking up is hard to avoid
Subject/key points and potential for use: Capitalism/ historical context
Quotation: ‘Despite its embedded critique of capitalism, the portrayal in Fight Club
of the anticapitalistic guerrilla force seriously diminishes any potential impact of that
critique. For one thing, the bloody violence of the fight clubs hardly seems feasible
as a means of transcending the antagonistic social relations of capitalism. Nor does
this fighting really seem preferable to the acquisition of IKEA furnishings.
Furthermore, the guerrilla force that arises in opposition to capitalism seems to have
no ideological agenda other than pure destruction.’
‘After all, films such as Fight Club, Natural Born Killers and Requiem for A dream are
so thoroughly about the impossibility of utopia that they can offer a little in the way of
utopian alternatives to the contemporary America they present as such a psychic
wasteland.’

Author: Mike Chopra-Gant

Critical Position: Author
Title: Hollywood Genres and Postwar America
Publisher/publication: I.B Tauris & Co Ltd
Place of Publication: USA and Canada
Date: 2006
Chapter/ Article: The troubled postwar family
Subject/key points and potential for use: Historical context
Quotation: ‘ The absence of fathers on military service (and mothers engaged in war
work) destabilised the family, leading to a ‘relaxation of sexual morality’ and to
‘neglect of children and so to a rise in juvenile delinquency.’

Author: Robert Ollman

Critical Position: Blog Writer
Title: Fight Club Analysed through a gender role lens
Publisher/publication: Wordpress
Place of Publication: Online at:
https://robertollman.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/fight-club-analyzed-through-a-
gender-role-lens/
Date: December 10th 2012
Chapter/ Article: Analysing Fight Club/Prototypical Male
Subject/key points and potential for use: Gender Roles
Quotation: 'This book is trying to replicate how society views how men and women
are suppose to look, act, and perceive themselves in everyday life. This text
suggests that Palahniuk is giving the reader another way to view how society
perceives the difference in gender roles.’
‘In today’s society, males have been increasingly looked at as having power, being
big, not showing emotion in public, and having to seem tough at all times. Michael
Kimmel, a scholar of masculinity, refers to a traditional model of masculinity that
contains four rules: no sissy stuff, be a big wheel, be a sturdy oak, and Give Em Hell
(Kimmel). When he states “no sissy stuff”, he is referring to no acts that may make
you look like a homosexual or anything that the typical female would do (Kimmel). By
“being a big wheel”, he is referring to measuring masculinity through the amount of
wealth, power, and overall status you have in society (Kimmel).’

Author: Jacob Wiker

Critical Position: Student
Title: Romance and Identity in Fight Club
Publisher/publication: Engaged Scholarship PDF
Place of Publication: Online at:
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1501&context=e
tdarchive
Date: 2013
Chapter/ Article: Identity in Fight Club
Quotation: ' Fight Club’s romance is an engine of the fluctuation of the narrator’s
identity – in fact, it actually instigates his masculine crisis. In the beginning of the
novel, the narrator (who, in the critical convention, is usually called “Jack”) is
essentially emasculated and without any form of identity.’
‘When Jack meets Marla Singer, it is her presence that instigates the disassociation
of his two identities (Jack and Tyler). The narrator is then caught between the
influence of Marla and of Tyler: he moves away from demasculinization and lack of
identity towards Tyler’s ultra-violent, “macho” hypermasculinity and then diverges,
“killing” Tyler by shooting through his own face, and, thus, reaching an equilibrium –
in Freudian terms, a “maturity” that allows him to the opportunity to “commit,” to set
aside his own self-obsession in favor of another.'
‘Fight Club is undeniably gender-centric, and, though it appears to be more explicitly
concerned with the male gender, it is more implicitly concerned with the female one.
It is against the work’s lone female character, Marla Singer, that the narrator must
define himself, and it is she who is the constant objective of his attention, and, finally,
his savior – an interesting reversion of what one might usually expect from
something which is purportedly a romance.’

Author: Jacob Wiker

Critical Position: Student
Title: Romance and Identity in Fight Club
Publisher/publication: Engaged Scholarship PDF
Place of Publication: Online at:
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1501&context=e
tdarchive
Date: 2013
Chapter/ Article: Homosexual Relationships
Subject/key points and potential for use: Homosexual Romance
Quotation: ‘The narrative of Fight Club is driven by a specific romance – that
between Jack and Marla – or, rather, Jack/Tyler and Marla. Boiled down to its
essence, Fight Club’s romance takes the form of heteronormative “pursuit,” the
archetypical fictional and cultural ideal of the woman “pursued” by the man.
However, the novel’s heterosexual romance is complicated by the quasi-homosexual
romance between Jack and Tyler. In fact, numerous critics have remarked on the
visible, or, perhaps, rather ill-disguised homoeroticism in Fight Club. Indeed, Fight
Club’s homoeroticism indicates a more complex “love triangle” than traditional
interpretations of romance might initially suggest: however, surprisingly, it is by that
heteronormative romance that Jack is finally redeemed, or, at least, saved from
Tyler.’
‘Critics have picked up on a considerable number of homosexual elements,
specifically, a great deal of sexual tension between Tyler and Jack. Of course, this is
complicated by the fact that Tyler is actually Jack, which makes his homosexual
attraction to Tyler narcissistic, as well as love for a hypermasculinized vision of
himself.’
‘Tyler, of course, “is” Jack, so any homoerotic attraction between the two must,
again, be narcissistic. He is also the literal embodiment of Jack’s own distorted
yearning for a hypermasculine identity – a yearning so strong that it manifests itself
in an entirely different personality, which must, again, be dealt with before he is
“worthy” of Marla.’

Author: Sally Robinson

Critical Position: Professor of English
Title: Feminized Men and Inauthentic Women: Fight Club and the Limits of Anti-
Consumerist Critique
Publisher/publication: Colorado Education
Place of Publication: Online at: https://www.colorado.edu/gendersarchive1998-
2013/2011/05/01/feminized-men-and-inauthentic-women-fight-club-and-limits-anti-
consumerist-critique
Date: May 1st 2011
Chapter/ Article: Genders
Subject/key points and potential for use: Gender Roles
Quotation: ‘It is no accident that the film dwells on the testicular cancer support
group, or that it uses Marla’s participation in it as the narrator’s breaking point. Both
the narrator and Marla are faking all the illnesses whose support groups they attend;
neither has blood or brain parasites, neither has tuberculosis, neither has any form of
cancer. But, what makes Marla’s faking of testicular cancer particularly galling to the
narrator and significant to the film’s logic is that it proves that gender itself can no
longer be authenticated.’
‘Fight Club does not simply argue that an authentic masculinity needs to be rescued
from the wastes of an inauthentic and feminizing consumer culture; it argues that we
need to think about masculinity asoutsideof culture itself. The logic goes something
like this: while femininity is a social construction—and, thus, “fake”—masculinity,
rooted in the male body and its elemental sensations and desires, is a brute fact of
nature. The film pursues a masculine authenticity, rather than an authentic
masculinity, and masculinity, thus, becomes the location of the real, the authentic.’