What does it mean to be a man? In a world ruled by large corporations, where there’s nothing to fight for and nothing to hunt, more and more men are struggling with the so-called masculinity crisis. Consumerism has them working jobs they hate and buying things they don’t need. Living from paycheck to paycheck, driven by the same insatiable urge to have more. There’s no way to express oneself anymore. Everyone’s a copy of a copy of a copy.
An identical scenario is shown in the movie Fight Club where our nameless protagonist is a miserable office worker who’s suffering from insomnia. We quickly learn that he has become a prisoner of the consumerism lifestyle – constantly buying Ikea furniture and flipping through catalogs in search of something “unique” that would define him as a person. His purposeless and sleep-deprived life guides him toward support groups where he gets to express himself around other miserable men. Seeking comfort in each other’s male despair allows them to find that sense of human connection that’s been missing everywhere else. Misery is the only thing that brings them together, the only thing reminding them that they’re still men.
But why have men become so weak? Why has their male expression changed so much? The storyline of Fight Club lets us tap into that problem as we watch our protagonist struggle to become his most authentic self. In a society where everything is shallow and limited to surface-level contact, there’s nothing out there to explore, nothing to overcome. That has become a problem for many men who feel lost and frustrated with their inability to express themselves. Their true identities fade behind the different-colored ties and the Ikea coffee tables. As the director of Fight Club, David Fincher said: “We’re designed to be hunters and we’re in a society of shopping.” Living against their innate instincts, men are being deprived of their masculine features, losing their strength and their freedom of expression.
How does our protagonist deal with this? Pretty simple – to explore his masculinity, he creates an alter ego, Tyler Durden, who‘s everything one would search for in a man. He’s careless, fearless, and liberated from the consumerism culture around him. As Tyler puts it in the film – “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no great war, no great depression. Our great war’s a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives.” To rebel against the system, our main character along with his masculine alter ego, starts an underground fight club where the male members can release their aggression and feel connected by the same longing for change in a money-dominated world. This quickly evolves into a terrorist group that plants bombs in the headquarters of large corporations, trying to break free from those at the top of the capitalist chain. For these men, violence is the only coping mechanism there is – the only way of unleashing their last scope of masculinity.
The story portrayed in Fight Club delivers a strong message, revealing the dark side of our modern society. We’re living a life of wasting time – doing unfulfilling tasks and following the same miserable routine over and over again. There’s no challenge, no battle. In an environment like that, there’s no room for self-expression. Men become slaves of the monotonous, nine-to-five lifestyle that makes them weak and vulnerable. They lose any sense of what it means to be a man, feeling confused and ashamed about their “unmanly” behavior. What Fight Club strongly underlines is how destructive society’s influence can be. This idea to “adapt” and create a socially acceptable image is extremely limiting and destined to fail. As viewers, we get to observe this phenomenon closely and watch as the masculinity crisis unravels before our eyes. To keep it from happening we must fight against that strong human urge to “fit in” and never give up on a battle of finding one’s true self, no matter how painful it may be.
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