One Woman’s Love and Hate of/in Fight Club
Fight Club (1999) is a great movie, to start with. Whether it be culturally or aesthetically, popularly or critically, it’s simply GREAT (maybe then that it is problematic and continues to be lashed out against up to today is also part of its greatness? The enduring legacy of reductionist thinking and binary logic; the epitome of every-lasting toxic masculinity)! BUT, as a Gen Z who loves problematizing everything the pop culture and herself has ever loved, watching the masterpiecey movie two decades after its initial release and rewatching it four months later for pure scientific reasons, I say that “Fight Club” is a dissatisfactory movie falling short in today’s politics and aesthetics (which are objectively the same — okay at least as intertwined as a Chinese knot) because it is women-hating.
Broad picture first: the film is told in flashback in a low husky voice-over narration throughout. Our narrator Jack (actually, our narrator remains unnamed throughout the film but who speaks in his internal monologues a lot about him as some organs or sensations of “Jack” and nobody else that we know of is called Jack in the film so it is no hurt if we will call him Jack for the sake of this article), played by Ed Norton, appears with a gun in his mouth and arms tied to the back of a chair. Brad Pitt stands with the gun in hand, pulls it out to let Norton articulate his mumbles and walks towards the office windows overseeing the fluorescent city at night, lamenting how it will all soon be destroyed. Jack looks worried and explains in voice-over that there are bombs installed at the foundation of a decade-or-so skyscraper buildings. Brad Pitt says Jack should be proud of what they have achieved together. Bad boy destroying the world fantasy realized.
Then Jack says, “and suddenly I realize that all of this — the gun, the bombs, the revolution — has got something to do with a girl named Marla Singer.” Pause. Assuming you haven’t watched the film and don’t know Marla Singer is only significant female character in the film and has no backstory whatsoever and is not interested in approaching or getting entangled with Jack Our Hero in the first place, does this sound familiar to you? Yes! Since when has blaming women for troubles men have created worked out well in history? Already don’t like him. Mark one down.
Then we found out Jack has insomnia and is in pain and his doctor is basically useless except the half-joking suggestion that he should go to cancer support groups to see people who are really in pain. So he goes and miraculously he can sleep again! He goes to every kind of support groups, listens to others’ tragedies, speaks nothing, cries in others’ chests and shoulders and leaves happily. Being an emotional vampire helps! So yayyyyy!!!!
Now before Marla Singer appears and ruins our male hero’s therapy psychologically, there comes the greatest moment of the film when Jack became the crying partner of a big guy with huge tits due to hormonal issues at a testicular cancer support group.
Ed Norton (voice-over): And that was where I fit…between those huge sweating tits that hung enormous the way you’d think of God’s as big.
Okay I know some may argue that Helena Bonham Carter has her shining moment when she teases Ed Norton while bargaining for the support groups he wants to divide up with her, but THIS IS ACTUALLY THE MOST EMPOWERING MOMENT IN THE ENTIRE FILM!!!!!!! For all the emasculation, alienation and physical and spiritual weakness that the film has so far and continues to establish and associate with femininity, here Ed Norton is basically saying God is a girl. Man, whatever you say. GOD IS A GIRL:)))))))
It is all downhills from here. Marla Singer, like I said, is the only female character of any significance in the film (the Bechdel Test failed at the doorstep). Marla first appears when she walks into the same testicular cancer support group that Jack is in, for reasons that are never explained (no need to explain at all why a woman in dark dirty faux fur jacket with messy curls piled on her head walks into a testicular cancer support group — I mean, why would a woman do anything?). Since then, Jack couldn’t get her off his mind. Her shadow follows him everywhere literally and metaphorically. Jack can’t sleep again. Jack takes the initiative, and during a break at a cancer group at a church, Jack approaches Marla who is getting water at the food table and — this is where it’s real fucked-up — grabs her elbow and pulls her away from the table because he thinks they “need to talk.” That’s right, he did it and remember, they have never spoken before. Two. Complete. Strangers. Regardless of the psychological dramas that have played in Jack’s head and how he might think they should have known each other by now because they are and have been the only fakers in the situation, that it is appropriate to grab and drag her by the arm. It is so much more disturbing to write than to watch actually. David Fincher must have enlisted Ed Norton because he is moderately tall and barely buff. Imagine how it would be if Chris Hemsworth were to play the part!
Then they made a deal and divided up the sessions until Jack meets Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, a nonchalant sardonic flamboyant soap-maker and exact opposite of everything Jack is and represents. They meet on an airplane on Jack’s trip back from work. Jack says Tyler is the most interesting single-serving friend he has made. Tyler scoffs. Arrived, they break off; Jack squeezes into a taxi; Tyler hops into an unlocked convertible; Jack gets back; Jack sees his apartment is bombed and everything gone; Jack calls Marla; Marla takes the call; Jack hangs up and hesitates and calls Tyler; Jack and Tyler go for a drink and have a fight and Jack begins living with Tyler in his shabby filthy house or discards of a house.
From this point on Marla is basically forgotten and any other female characters — even the silent ones — gone. One day, Marla calls and asks why Jack hasn’t been coming to the support groups and Jack snubs her while leaving the phone hanging as Tyler picks up the phone. And then Marla, the girl who crosses the street without looking out for cars and whose philosophy of life is that she might die at any moment, begins having sex, a lot of sex, with Tyler. She even wears a wedding dress once in the morning and tries to seduce him (it was Jack actually, but, spoiler alert — maybe too late but whatever since this is the major tea — Jack and Tyler are the same person as we will find out). Maybe, just maybe, there is some character incongruities, and maybe, it would be a good idea to substantiate it or cut it. And a thought, maybe, if there is someone in “Fight Club” in any crisis that we should really care about, wouldn’t it not be the person who says the greatest tragedy is that she still hasn’t died yet and gets by by selling stolen laundry clothes and overuses Xanax and who-knows-whatever drugs and goes to all kinds of random support groups that she does not belong to for people who “really listen…instead of waiting for their turn to speak”? And now she is coming to Jack, and in all his sane right mind, he cannot fix her with help if not sex. That’s why I don’t easily befriend men. Got it.
I started the piece kind of doubting myself on the choice of roasting a film and a director I have really admired (“but it’s not the point!! The point is the hero is in pain and struggle!! The existential dread is real!!”) Thought experiment: switch the gender of Ed Norton, substitute Helena Bonham Carter for the protagonist and Helen McCrory for Brad Pitt’s part, would “Fight Club” still be as good? Given both actresses gave top-notch performances (um, but still would that be possibly comparable to Ed Norton and Brad Pitt though)? Absolutely not. Does women have existential dread? Yes. Does women experience ennui? Yes. Are women capable of extreme violence and devil-may-care adventures? You wouldn’t believe. But, in the most likely case, a woman wouldn’t think of crushing one another’s heads against bloody walls, threatening ordinary strangers’ lives with guns or bombarding skyscrapers and then blaming it all on an alter ego and a hot faker she met at a support group she does not belong to and which she leeches on. If the protagonist of “Fight Club” is a woman, “Fight Club” wouldn’t exist at all. A sequel with Marla Singer the protagonist? A derivative movie of the “Fight Club” franchise? I already bought the ticket. I am a genius;)
In conclusion, “Fight Club” is a story about a guy with multiple — dual actually (so lacking even in his imagination…) — personality disorder whose alter ego creates a terrorist group that threatens the destruction of modern civilization while blaming it on a woman that he has barely known or spoken to, and sadfishing for audience sympathy (uh-uh, not buying it this time) while an opportunity for a real badass female antihero is missed. In short, “Fight Club” is not that great a movie after all, culturally and politically speaking (and politics and cultural shifts are definitely part of aesthetics).
