Fight Club is a cult classic. It tells the story of a cynical anarchist who leads a group called Project Mayhem the goal of which is to bring down the capitalist establishment and set everyone free from their debt.
It lives up to its popular motto which says "rules are meant to be broken" in a nutshell. But a lot of people who watch and have watched Fight Club don't really have that as a take away. Instead, many of its male fans think it's about masculinity and their entitlement.
“In the decade and a half or so after its release and reception as a cult classic, Fight Club has been embraced by the loose collection of radical online male communities (known as the ‘manosphere’) as a kind of gospel text,” Paulie Doyle wrote for Vice.
“The manosphere’s affinity for Fight Club stems from a common central, biologically deterministic claim: Men are naturally predisposed to being violent, dominant hunter gatherers, who, having found themselves domesticated by modern civilization, are now in a state of crisis.”
But that's not what Fight Club is about. In her article, Rebecca Renner, who is a die-hard fan of the novel and film, sets things straight about the real point of Fight Club.
(Image credit: 20th Century Fox/IMDb)
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I watched Fight Club at the exact right time in my life when I needed it. The narrator talks about how he's living a lie, desperately trying to acquire things that are meaningless. I was, too, and knew that I needed to break out. I thus found Fight Club helpful to me at that time.
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I think the author of this article is using a little bit of trickery to take jabs at men. She complains about masculinity and "entitlement" from the male fans of Fight Club. But she wouldn't write an article complaining about the masculinity and entitlement of Polar Bears, for example. Male Polar Bears do what they do because of determinism - not toxic masculinity or entitlement. Determinism doesn't care how you feel about it, whether it's male or female determinism. Also you can't argue that "rules are meant to be broken" is the only point of Fight Club. If that were the case, why are most of the characters in Fight Club male? Would the movie be exactly the same if it were 90% females? Also let's not forget that, no matter how many "rules you break", you never get away from rules and consequences. Everything in the universe is always following rules. If you remove the biology aspect of Fight Club (and it were just about breaking rules or the American Dream or "debt") it wouldn't be half as good of a movie. Biology is on a spectrum, and it matters. Biology is always "part of the point"."Men are naturally predisposed to being violent, dominant hunter gatherers, who, having found themselves domesticated by modern civilization, are now in a state of crisis.” I can tell you that, as a male, this is how men actually feel about the modern world. And it's a big part of what Fight Club is about. Many women have found the man they were looking for in life, and they are not bothered by their "masculinity" or "entitlement". As buddha said "life is suffering", and not everyone is blaming the opposite gender for everything .Creating simple theories (and attempting to umbrella everyone under it) is a dangerous game.
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