Fight Club Masculine Lens

The masculine lens aims to see how men impact societies or works as a whole they're in. It also aims to see how societies will impact men, how women will impact men, or even how men will impact other men.

Fight Club, (the 1999 film adaptation of the book by Chuck Palahniuk) was directed by David Fincher, who is well known for psychological thrillers such as Seven and Zodiac. Fincher is known to heavily research before writing his scripts, and for his attention to detail. This should be considered while viewing Fight Club as most everything is done on purpose and with a more than surface level meaning. His mother was a mental health nurse, which could have heavily influenced the themes he'd choose to explore, such as depravity, loneliness, and

The man's name is never learned, but he is referred to as the Narrator by many outside of the text. The Narrator has insomnia, but other than that he is fairly normal on a surface level. It is only once you truly pay attention to him that you notice several oddities. The Narrator eventually begins to attend several different support groups for diseases he does not have, as it helps him cry, which in turn helps him sleep at night. He meets Marla at one of the meets, and quickly realizes she goes to all of them as well. Not long after this, he takes a flight for his job. On this flight, he meets a soap salesman named Tyler Durden. Not long after this interaction the Narrator loses his apartment in an explosion and moves in with Tyler at a run-down house. They start to fight and people quickly join them, forming a fight club in a bar's basement. As Tyler's goals grow beyond the Narrator, he begins to feel unimportant. As he digs deeper, he learns that they're in fact the same person, and the Narrator has been imagining Durden all

The characters in Fight Club do not fight because they are angry with each other. They do not fight to get better. They fight to feel free. The Narrator talks about how every day is much more bearable when there is a fight at the end of it. It is an outlet for their rage, their rage at their emasculation, at their forced conformity. Another thing is that when they fight they're shirtless. This evokes the sense that they are primal men, which is further supported by Angel Face and the Narrator's fight for supremacy in the latter half. This primal state is valued by the characters in the movie, as it makes them feel more connected to themselves and their masculinity, instead of the facades society forces them to