Masculinity In The Hurt Locker And Fight Club

1012 Words5 Pages

This progression is mainly seen in the fight scenes as the narrator becomes more careless about how he is hurting other members. At first, “the director elected to take a more objective view of the fights, often locking the camera down to a fixed position. However, the filmmakers did want the fights to become increasingly brutal as the story developed. At first, the camera was more of an observer. As the fights progressed, the camera took more of the point of view of the fighter” (Probst 6). The growth of camerawork is effective because we feel that we are becoming overly aggressive fighters.
The mise-en-scene in Fight Club creates the distinction between the narrator’s new and old life. Fincher paid specific attention to what we could see in the shot and ensured that there was difference between the narrator’s two lives Although it was not too noticeable, "in all of the 'normal' reality situations, the look was supposed to be fairly bland and realistic. For the scenes when he is …show more content…

Although each film wants us to feel a different way, they both share the same motifs. In The Hurt Locker, Sargent James builds a wall of masculinity and likes to face anything that can kill him. He acts so hard that he starts to feel hard and loses his human emotions, and therefore has a difficult time controlling himself when he does develop a relationship. In Fight Club, the narrator becomes his alter ego because he wants to be more masculine and puts himself in situations that make him feel like he is about to dy. He goes to support groups, burns his hand with acid, almost gets into a car accident and creates a club where men fight other men. As he combines with his alter ego, he loses himself and his true feelings. Both films use basic film techniques to build their own styles and were successful in making the audience feel