Gender and Commodity Culture in Fight Club

Sara Ezzat – December 2020

In a scene from David Fincher’s 1998 film Fight Club the unnamed narrator, played by Edward Norton, gestures to a Gucci ad; “Is that what a man is?” he asks Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt. In this brief moment Fincher has encapsulated the central issues of this film, commodity culture and masculinity two forces which Tyler presents as a binary. In Tyler’s world, masculinity is authenticity, artifice is feminine; the more masculine on shows oneself to be the more authentic, and Tyler’s definition of masculine is that which is not feminine. Tyler resists because he feels society is feminizing men by indoctrinating them into consumer culture and thus re-establishing masculinity is the only way to resist consumer culture. As Tyler’s is the dominant voice in the film, scholars and viewers are left wondering if this is the thesis of the film. In fact, response to Fight Club falls into its own binary with people debating if this is a progressive film about rejecting capitalism, of a regressive film about reasserting hegemonic masculine patriarchy. I would contend that that binary is false, just as Tyler’s binary is false. There is room for multiple readings in this film as it is an encapsulation of a moment in the conversation about gender and commodity culture. I intend to examine the binary Tyler presents between masculinity as authentic and feminine as artificial and how the culture industry’s response to feminist resistance to that construction is what creates the cultural condition Tyler reacts against.

The Narrator asks, “is this what a man is?” of the Gucci ad, looking at the headless torsos of two male presenting models. One model faces forward, presenting his underwear to the viewer and the other faces away showing his unclothed rear to the camera. It is the male body as an object for the viewer’s pleasure, a human reduced to an erotic spectacle for the viewer’s pleasure in looking. This would be eminently familiar to feminist scholars such as Laura Mulvey, who looking at female bodies presented in just such a way coined the term “Male Gaze” in her 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. When Mulvey was writing the power imbalance between man and women was such that the active “power of looking” belonged to men and the position of being looked at was the passive role of women (62). Mulvey and her contemporaries were surrounded by images in advertising, film, and every other facet of popular culture and seen images of female presenting bodies on par with the Gucci ad The Narrator reacts to. They could and did ask “is that what a woman is?”. They argued that constructing images of women in this way is bad for women seeing themselves over and over again as an object, and bad for men to see women this way. Mulvey’s focus was on women as spectacle in cinema but women as spectacle and commodity was the exclusive norm in popular culture of the day. It was a part of hegemonic patriarchy. Hegemony is a system where those who hold power in society maintain their authority over others by convincing those beneath their power to that that power is natural and good (Hebdige 150). In this case by presenting women’s position as passive subordinate as part of the natural order. Presenting women as the natural object of being looked at with men in the position of being the active looker is a very much an example of that system.

 Nearly three decades separate Mulvey’s identification of the woman’s position in media and the Fight Club’s Gucci ad, much changed in that time, but much of the hegemony remains. As feminists demanded change the hegemony adapted to preserve itself employing a various strategy to deflect that resistance and undermine feminist critique of patriarchy. Over the 1980s and 1990s the hegemony allowed some measure of feminist critique, employing a strategy of repressive tolerance. The criticism of the male gaze was gaining some acceptance but the response was to deflect from the critique that presenting women as an object to be looked at, and to reframe it as an objection that it was only women who were being looked at. The response in the culture industry was to present a form of equality by framing men as objects to be looked at too. Surely if both sexes are exploited then there would be no grounds to complain. This ignores the spirit of the critique of the male gaze; that to position a person as an object to be looked at constructs them as passive and powerless, as less of a person. Mulvey herself points out that this is not a position that men wish to see themselves in, they “cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification” (Mulvey 63). Yet the 1990s brought a culture images of men as sexual objects, employing the same techniques used to construct images of female sex objects before. This is how we get from Mulvey’s frustration with cinema to that Gucci ad on the bus.

Discomfort on The Narrator’s part at seeing a man objectified makes sense in a similar way that feminists are discomforted at seeing women objectified, but in Fight Club this objectification is seen as feminization. The Narrator may be a man, but that does not mean he is part of the dominant order in the hegemonic patriarchy. He is a blue-collar working-class young man, he is every bit as indoctrinated by it as any woman taught to see herself as an object. In her 2004 essay “Understanding Patriarchy” bell hooks writes about how patriarchy operates on men as well as women (1). The Narrator has been taught that the role of being looked is a woman’s role, thus in seeing a male body presented in the same manner he views it not as sexualizing of the male presenting body, but as feminizing it. Tyler, in actuality a voice inside The Narrator’s mind, sees everything wrong with The Narrator and the wider society as a matter of feminization.

 Sally Robinson in her 2001 article “Feminized men and inauthentic women: Fight Club and the limits of anti-consumerist critique”, discusses how Tyler constructs a binary between masculinity as authenticity and inauthentic consumerism as a feminizing influence she states “while femininity is a social construction–and, thus, “fake”–masculinity, rooted in the male body and its elemental sensations and desires, is a brute fact of nature” (para 7). The Narrator is constructed as feminine when he took an interest in home décor, and so that home must be destroyed in favour of living in a decaying mansion. His co-worker is framed as feminine for having a preferred shade of blue and is therefore unsympathetic. There is nothing inherently female about liking home décor or having a favourite colour, however caring about aesthetics is constructed by society as feminine. It connects the woman, who is the object to be looked on, with a care for the looked-on function of other objects. Having any preferences or feelings about anything other than violence is constructed as unmanly in Fight Club. The Narrator is unable to express any emotion at all until he joins a support group for men with testicular cancer. These men are the first of many representations of castrated men in the film, men who the film portrays as feminized, even giving Meatloaf’s character Bob breasts. This support group is an island away from the binary, where men as allowed to cry and be authentic in a way other than Tyler’s world of violence and decay. However, when Helena Bonham Carter’s Marla joins the group The Narrator’s safe bubble is burst and the binary returns. A woman being in the space reminds him of his masculine role and he loses access to emotions. It is shortly after this point that he begins to see Tyler who gives him a passage out of the life he sees as feminized and into his more authentic and masculine life.

It is telling that Tyler’s discussions of masculinity say little of what masculinity is but focus on what it is not. We have already established that is not caring about home furniture or cornflower blue ties, that it is certainly not displaying emotion in front of a woman, but what is masculinity. Tyler says that as a “generation of men raised by women” he does not think another woman (implying wife) is the answer, but he does not say what might be the answer. Instead Tyler offers violence and pain. To return to bell hooks, she points out that this is exactly how patriarchy operates on men. “To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings” (hooks 2). For Tyler the path to authenticity is masculinity, and indoctrinated into patriarchy, he sees that path as pain and self-denial. The path to not being an object to be looked at like the headless torsos in the Gucci ad, is pain and violence. Yet that idea of masculinity as formed in violence and pain is as constructed as the commodified vision of femininity is. This is indoctrination, it is a taught thing. Before their first fight The Narrator tells Tyler he has never been in a fight, this lack of experience of violence, lack of scars, is presented as part of his femininity. Having been raised by women, The Narrator and his generation have not had their share of the pain of the indoctrination hook’s describes. Yet, with nothing to replace it but commodity culture, which as discussed is constructed as false and feminine, he goes in search of that indoctrination, desires an authentic masculinity which Tyler constructs for him.

Robinson describes this nature of this desire for authentic masculinity as part of a strain of antimodernism. The way Tyler constructs his generation as the “middle children of history” suggesting they are outside of history they are “stuck in a moment of stasis, looking back nostalgically to a (fantasized) moment when masculinity and authenticity were guaranteed, and forward longingly to a moment of rebellion through which that masculinity and authenticity might be restored” (Robinson para 11). Tyler is then presenting his vision as both counter culture and saving culture; destroying the bad, feminine modern culture by returning to a time when men did not know what duvets were or what shades of blue is called cornflower. What is unsaid is that for this world to still have duvets, someone must know what they are called. Tyler’s construction of masculinity requires either that there be no comfort at all, or that women act as the container of all comfort for men.

In perhaps the most famous scene in the film, Tyler gives The Narrator as chemical burn and insists he stop resisting the pain. The lye Tyler uses to burn him comes from a liposuction clinic, The Narrator describes it as “selling women back their fat asses”. So, Tyler is using the product of women’s bodies, which they had removed to better fit the construction of femininity. And he is using that to cause pain to The Narrator as a way of teaching him authentic manhood. Is this resisting culture or is Tyler following the patriarchies pattern of reducing women to objects to shape the man into participating in the hegemony? It is certainly more violent than the subjects in the films Mulvey looked at, but it serves the same purpose.

It is difficult to frame Tyler’s worldview as either countercultural or not; it is reactionary, not revolutionary. The challenge it presents to the hegemonic culture is in complicating the effectiveness of its attempts to contain the challenge presented by feminism. The commodification and objectification of men which the Tyler is reacting against were a response to women objecting to being the main object of commodification how should the industry respond to that reaction. It seems the culture responded, not by ceasing to objectify men as well as women, but by appropriating aspects of the reactionary counter culture. Tyler’s critiques of culture have been part of the marketing of Fight Club. The casting of a sex symbol like Brad Pitt the film participates in the same kind of objectification as The Narrator objects to in the Gucci ad. The film features many long lingering shots of Pitt shirtless, Pitt is the focus of the camera’s gaze more than Helena Bonham Carter is. So, if the film is employing the very commodifying and objectifying practices its characters decry the question then becomes is the film co-signing or contradicting Tyler’s masculine authentic versus feminized artifice binary?

Viewers and critics have always been divided as to whether the film is sympathetic or critical of Tyler and his world view. There is evidence for both readings. There is a glamour and a charisma to Tyler, there is a spectacle to the violence and nowhere in the text is his rhetoric contradicted or challenged. He is even successful in his goal, at the end of the film his planned bombing takes place and The Narrator offers no context save to say it has been a strange time in his life. On the other hand, there is subtextual evidence that Tyler is wrong. The most telling of which is the character Marla and how she is constructed.

Marla is the sole female character of any significance. Given Tyler’s ideological binary of masculinity as authentic versus feminized artificiality, one would expect the female characters to be constructed as artificial, feminine objects. Marla is not Marla resists not only this expectation of female artificiality, but also challenges deeper binary expectations of gender. Marla is introduced as a woman entering a support group for men with testicular cancer. This might be interpreted as artificial or phony as The Narrator calls her, but as she points out he is faking too. They are therefore on equal footing. Marla resists the interest in aesthetics and décor that the binary of the film presents as feminine. She is unfazed by the decay of the Paper Street house and happy to wear clothes from thrift shops. Marla’s aesthetic is a mix of masculine and feminine; with boyish hair and silhouette, but also make-up and jewelry. In a film preoccupied with gender and reactionary masculinity, it is odd to have a character who resists expected gender norms unless that deviation from the norms serves a purpose. The Narrator’s hostility towards Marla may reflect his attitudes to resistance to gender norms, that hostility dissolving as he questions Tyler’s worldview. In the end, though Tyler’s plan is successful, it is Marla who The Narrator turns to.

Fight Club is a many layered film full of contradictions, but perhaps that is fitting for a film that examines gender, identity and the meaning of masculinity at the close of the twentieth century. Twenty years later theses conversations are still in flux. Conversations about how we confront the male gaze, on the constructions of gender and in the culture and the culture industry have grown only more complex. Fight Club raises many questions but offers few answers, it can be read as critical of hegemonic masculinity or as a desire to restore it depending on how one reads the subtext. For direct criticism we might better look to bell hooks, “To end male pain, to respond effectively to male crisis, we have to name the problem. We have to both acknowledge that the problem is patriarchy and work to end patriarchy”(hooks 6). Fight Club never names the problem, placing its critique on consumerism alone without acknowledging that consumerism, the cultural industry and hegemony are all interwoven and inextricable from patriarchy.

Works Cited

Fincher, David, director. Fight Club. 20th Century Fox, 1999.

hooks, bell. Understanding Patriarchy. Louisville Anarchist Federation, 2010.

Hedige, Dick. “(i) From Cultural Hegemony; (ii) Subculture: The Unnatural Break.” Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works, 2006, pp. 144–162.

Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. 1999.

Robinson, Sally. “Feminized men and inauthentic women: Fight Club and the limits of anti-consumerist critique.” Genders, no. 53, 2011. Gale OneFile: Business, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A254403941/ITBC?u=uvictoria&sid=ITBC&xid=c06919a