Gray-Collar Workers

Gray-Collar Workers

This film will be more enjoyable for those who see it first and then read this analysis because, like The Sixth Sense or The Crying Game, Fight Club has a secret, which this discussion will reveal.

As does Natural Born Killers (www.geomatics.kth.se/sjoberg/homepage/nbk.htm), this film addresses morality and society by using the motif of violence. But like that film, it is not primarily about violence any more than Dog Day Afternoon is about bank robbery. Nonetheless, Fight Club (www.foxmovies.com/fightclub/) will inspire wringing of hands as critics and commentators call it a mirror held up to an empty and tormented contemporary consciousness. This is a misinterpretation and not the central point of the film.

Prima facie, Fight Club is also about masculinity, but with the crucial proviso that it is about masculinity among a specific class of American men: the burgeoning stratum of service or gray-collar workers. There was a time when blue-collar workers could invest in a kind of honor and mythology of hard physical work, but "the world has changed" (as one Bruce Springsteen song laments (www.musica.org/letras/ing1/Y19049.htm)) and now former steelworkers are parking cars, waiting tables, and watching security monitors. They have not even the solace of big muscles and the solidarity of unions from which to construct their identities and with which to salve their bruised egos. And as a character says in the film, they lack a great cause, like a war or depression, in which to test themselves.

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2 On Being a Man Who Serves Others

With nihilistic aphorisms and near-poetry, the story is told by the narrator (Edward Norton, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/movies/oscars/edward_norton.htm), whose name we never learn, although he has aliases. Call him Jack. After suffering from insomnia for sixth months and developing a dependence on a comically wide array of support groups (testicular cancer, brain parasites, tuberculosis, and various 12-step groups), Jack first encounters another faker at the support groups, a derelict young predator named Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/filmgrph/helena_bonham_carter.htm) and soon after an alter ego who blows up his condo unit (unbeknownst to him). Condoless, he moves into a dilapidated house in the warehouse district with his new friend, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt, washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/filmgrph/brad_pitt.htm). Thus he begins a series of adventures: fistfighting with a growing circle of other men for fun, giving assignments of starting fights with strangers, becoming increasingly more defiant at work, making premium soap from the fat discarded by liposuction clinics, and ultimately building an army of gray-collar workers to wreak havoc around the unnamed city (perhaps Los Angeles) -- first in a transgressional way and then more and more destructively.

In a twist that will catch most viewers by surprise, Tyler Durden turns out to be a fragment of Jack's personality, but this is merely a device to have this mysterious and powerful character (and manifestation of wish fulfillment) appear in Jack's life. (An analysis of Tyler Durden's name reveals that in antiquated English, "Tyler" means gatekeeper or house builder. "Durden" has the word root dour meaning hard (as in "durable"). His initials, T.D., invoke Todd or death in German or perhaps D.T. (delirium tremens), since Tyler is a hallucination of Jack, the waking person. Although a second viewing shows that the first understanding of the film meshes successfully with subsequent viewings, the narrative device of the alternate personality is just that and does little to tap into what is understood about multiple personalities. One of few consistencies with psychological literature is that Jack, the waking self, is depleted and becomes less powerful as Tyler becomes more dominant. An aside, it's interesting to note that this is the second film in Norton's short but meteoric career in which he has played a character with multiple personalities, the first being Primal Fear (1996) (www.aboutfilm.com/movies/p/primalfear.htm), in which Norton made his film debut.

Fight Club is really about what it is to be a man who serves others (as women have traditionally) and how such men construct identity and meaning in their lives. That women now can take most of the jobs that men can is certainly a background fact, but the film explores other issues or sources of masculinity. The first of three pivotal scenes in this film is a moment of intimacy between Jack and Tyler when they confide that their fathers are distant and disengaged. Jack's father left when he was a small boy and married subsequent wives and had subsequent families. Tyler says that his father didn't go to college and so this was very important for Tyler to do (and Jack comments that this sounds familiar.) He says that his father was not able to adequately answer his series of questions of "now what?" Later, when Tyler subjects Jack to a deep chemical burn on his hand (which leaves a scar curiously like puckered lips), Tyler makes this empty silhouette where the father-deity should be more explicit, asking Jack, "What if God doesn't want you? What if you are one of his unwanted children?" This is echoed when the Tyler personality "leaves" (and Jack must pursue him) and Jack laments, "My father dumped me. Tyler dumped me."

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3 "A Very Strange Time in My Life"

Another potential font of masculine meaning, a man's identity in contrast to (and potentially in harmony with) women as partners is touched upon briefly and discounted. Tyler says in his heart-to-heart with Jack: "We are a generation of men raised by women. Do you really think that women are the answer?" At the prospect of marriage, in hypothetical response to Tyler's questions of "what next?" Jack says, "How can I get married? I'm a 30-year-old boy." Not until Tyler becomes a threat to Marla, who has been Tyler's lover, does Jack take steps to protect her. In the final moment of the film, he can acknowledge that he has been part of this relationship (which he believed only to be between Tyler and Marla) and can be tender to her. By way of explanation, he says, "You met me at a very strange time in my life."

The film, though violent and brutally blunt, is remarkably nonsexual. The love in the film is not love between Tyler (or Jack) and Marla, nor is it homoerotic (the idea that heterosexual men need to integrate their feminine side or embrace some of the sensitivity of gay