Alejandro Nina Duran is a first-year undergraduate student planning to study economics and public policy. He is interested in history, American foreign policy, Latin American politics and the intersection of cinema and philosophy.
America’s young men are at a crossroads. The paradigms of masculinity that once forged American men——rugged individualism, camaraderie forged in war, and romanticized industrial work——have become obsolete. Today, American men are trying to define a new ideal of masculinity for an era in which everything has seemingly gone awry. Many men feel increasingly detached from society and relegated to the doghouse of public discourse, their shortcomings neglected by the broader focus on race, gender, and disadvantage. Never has the classic 1999 film Fight Club, directed by David Fincher (based on the novel written by Chuck Palahniuk), been so painfully relevant. Finding a productive new masculine ethos in this country may require revisiting this provocative and difficult film.
If you haven’t seen Fight Club, I suggest you skip this paragraph—this is not a movie you want spoiled. Better yet, go watch the film and come back to The Lemur afterward. But here’s a quick primer: in Fight Club, we follow an unnamed protagonist (“The Narrator”), played by Edward Norton, an insomniac barely toiling through a meaningless white-collar existence. He sees life as a blurry “copy, of a copy, of a copy.” He spends his free time flipping through a thick IKEA catalog and inundating his apartment with superfluous commodity items like a Yin Yang table and a Johanneshov sofa—just to name a few. He desperately searches for meaning by crashing a suite of support groups (like one for men suffering from testicular cancer), consoling his lonely, deeply emasculated existence through the search for unconditional attention and sympathy, deserved or not. Norton’s narrator starts to envision an imaginary embodiment of his masculinity, a friend and idol, named Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt). Under the guidance of Tyler—a real man, self-assured, sexy, and fearless—everything our protagonist is not, the narrator jumps off the treadmill of corporate capitalism and embraces a lifestyle of self-denial and austerity. Together, the “two” men conceive of a revanchist neo-masculine world in an imagined community inside a dimly lit basement where they start the titular “Fight Club.” Before fighting, each member swears upon an elusive set of rules, “The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club!” It’s a secret society where men can be men; everything a white-collar office can’t provide. Beyond its litany of memorable quotes and the bisexual adoration for Brad Pitt, Fight Club has endured in the American psyche because it reflects something suppressed yet unmistakably true about male self-perception in America in the past twenty-five years.
Fight Club outright rejects the most ancient—and perhaps most American—of masculine tropes: the link between manhood and the creation of wealth. American capitalism and the “Protestant ethic” have long placed a high premium on financial self-sufficiency. We pride ourselves on being a “nation of self-made men,” as Henry Clay called it. Fight Club emerged in the ascendant years of globalization, a deregulated Wall Street, and the information technology revolution, trends that only elevated the importance of lucrative work in American society. Up until this point, conventional masculine wisdom has always given men an orthodox path, namely, all men had to do was “show up for their life.” Do that bare minimum and “they’ll get a job and have a family and be provided for because they’re men.” Yet, Fight Club rockets us into the minds of men who reject the premise of “showing up” like society wants them to do. The members of Tyler Durden’s Fight Club are hellbent on rejecting traditionalist masculine norms; they paint their lives with an anti-consumerist brush that also wipes away the pressures of the man-centered Wild West economy of financialization and office culture. In the indelible moment in the movie when the Narrator blows up his chic apartment, watching the vestiges of his self-commodification wisp away into the night sky, he is thrown into a more challenging ring of the world, in which he must lace up his gloves to pound the meaning out of the feather sack of life.
Masculinity in Fight Club oscillates between a self-hating emasculation and the impossible self-realization of the Übermensch. The superman Tyler Durden tells his followers that modern life is to blame for that emasculation: “Our Great Depression is our lives,” he tells them. This battle hymn calls to action the members of the Fight Club to resist the external social pressures that prevent them from achieving masculine self-fulfillment. Fincher revels in the ultra-satisfying imagery of flames incinerating symbols of capitalism as the men of Project Mayhem seek vengeance for the erosion of traditional masculinity in society. But today, instead of throwing Molotov cocktails at buildings, most aggrieved men are far more likely to become keyboard warriors, not full-fledged terrorists. Entire generations of men are growing up without positive social models for healthy masculinity, and are desperately seeking refuge in online communities, some of which turn out to be breeding grounds for misogynist extremism. We know these men; they once had a Fight Club.
This form of digital escapism—the impulse to escape one’s problems through separate online lives— was foreseen, at least indirectly, by Fight Club, and has had uniquely strong effects on men. Men are often more prone to find comfort in online communities that promote counter-narrative campaigns against outward groups—in the case of incel culture, women—onto which they affix blame for their failures and shortcomings (think about those meetings for the terminally ill frequented by Edward Norton’s character). In the film, the insidious “Project Mayhem,” which springs out of Tyler’s Fight Club, covertly converts its emasculated members into bona fide terrorists: it’s an organization that weaponizes the anger seated deep in hypermasculinity as a purported solution to huge problems (sound familiar?). But Fight Club doesn’t try to glorify these men and their unhealthy coping mechanisms; rather, it tries to shine a light on how these applications of the powerful energy generated by hypermasculine resentment prove frustratingly unproductive for men trying to build a healthy masculine image. The film cautions against the perils of radicalism hiding under the guise of counterrevolution and liberation.
This cultural black hole of masculine guidance is not just a cinematic trope meant to rile men up in the theaters; rather, it is reflective of disturbing trends in masculine self-perception in America. Political sociologist and author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Robert D. Putnam reminds us that “people divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.” Some ascribe this crisis to the loss of external masculine role models for young men. In an interview, Palahniuk agrees with this argument: “so many of these secondary fathers are being brought down in recent history. Sports coaches have become stigmatized. Priests have become pariahs. For whatever reason, men are leaving teaching.” When they disappear, he adds, this begs the question: “what are [men] left with? Are these children or young men ever going to grow up?” Palahniuk’s own club reflects this anxiety leading us to ask where are the “father-figure” presences in his protagonist’s life?. Palahniuk is also worried about our dearth of brotherhood and masculine kinship, forces which help cultivate healthy masculinity. In the ‘90s, he says:
“…bookstores were full of books like The Joy Luck Club and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and How to Make an American Quilt. These were all novels that presented a social model for women to be together. But there was no novel that presented a new social model for men to share their lives.”
Although Fight Club clearly foresaw the extremism attractive to many men online, it of course did not anticipate the full political implications of this extremism: namely, the way that millions of men have been drawn to the ostensibly masculine, “strongman” appeal of Donald Trump and MAGA. It could not have anticipated the alienating effect that progressive ideals of “male privilege” and “toxic masculinity” would have on pushing men out of the Democratic camp and away from support for gender-equality altogether. Just as Fight Club seems to reveal a less-taken path to masculinity, Trump’s raucous, counter-cultural masculine image broke the norms of political correctness. His MAGA faction has presented itself as a contrarian force seeking to expunge newfangled notions of equity and feminism from the cultural fabric. It is a message that has captured the hearts of millions of young men disheartened by the elitism of the Democratic Party.
Fight Club should not be misconstrued as some modern-day Machiavellian guide to reclaiming masculinity (as it too often is); rather, it is a stark warning to men about hypermasculinity. A movie that initially bombed at the box office has been salvaged from cinema obscurity now that it has become rightly seen as a provocative meditation on how to rewrite masculine norms in American society and culture. It is this masculine appeal which gives us the best lens through which to peer into the behaviors that drive misogynist extremism and the broader masculine appeal of MAGA. Fight Club may help us determine whether this “cascade of resentment,” as writer Sarah Bernstein puts it, will fade into mere sea form on the shore, or become a tsunami.
By Alejandro Nina Duran
