The Relevance of ‘Fight Club’ in Present-Day Western Society

A Story of Consumerism, Perfectionism, and Toxic Masculinity

By Jacob Tucker

If you want to be a member of society, you need to follow some rules. You’re expected to earn money, to keep fit, and to obey the law. You’re expected to smile when you’re sad, to be nice to the neighbors, and to buy things you’ll never really need. You’ll barely go ten minutes of your waking life without being advertised to – products, slogans and corporation names are flashed at you from every direction. You’ll own everything you need (and much more besides), but at some point you may realize that the things you own actually own you.

If you rolled your eyes while reading that last paragraph, it’s unlikely that you’d enjoy David Fincher’s 1999 post-modern film Fight Club. Based on a book written by Chuck Palahniuk, it under-performed in the box-office when it was released, and quite a few critics wrote awful reviews for it. In the last twenty years, however, it’s become something of a cult classic, and many have tried to dissect what the film actually means. To me, it’s mainly a satire on the American consumerist lifestyle, the prevalence of advertising, and masculinity. Some see it as a very political film, throwing around words such as “Marxism” or “propaganda.” To others, it’s about spirituality. Everyone has their own take on Fight Club. Personally, I think it’s some kind of combination of all of these ideas, and I’m dedicating the rest of this article to explaining why I believe that Fight Club has inadvertently become much more relevant now than it was in 1999. 

Fight Club focuses on consumerism, and especially how consumerism and the lifestyle it creates is bad for the mental health of the people who live in a society where it is prevalent. The Narrator (the character played by Edward Norton, otherwise referred to as “Jack”) is plagued with insomnia at the beginning of the movie, which causes him to, in effect, sleepwalk through his life, depressed and sluggish. It’s clear that The Narrator is meant to represent the “everyman” – the perfect member of a consumerist society. He has a neat, nine-to-five office job, a well-furnished apartment, and is in good shape physically. But he’s empty inside – he has no known personal connections, and when he leaves work all he does is go back to his apartment and clean. It’s not explicitly stated whether his insomnia is caused by this lifestyle (I personally think that it is), but it functions as a sort of ironic metaphor – he’s a good member of society, but he has sacrificed his humanity (his soul, if you like) to achieve this. And for what? He’s just one in millions of people who are exactly the same – The Narrator has no real name in the film, because he could be anyone.

“Worker bees can leave 
Even drones can fly away 
The queen is their slave.”

That haiku, written by The Narrator, is an often overlooked part of the film. It could be taken to mean many things, but personally I think it sums up the entire point of Fight Club (the actual, in-universe club, not the actual film). The worker bees are, of course, a metaphor for the workers in society. The queen, in my opinion, is the corporations that the workers “feed.” The haiku expresses the sentiment that corporations depend on those who buy their products, and anyone is free to quit the consumerist lifestyle and “fly away.” It’s safe to say that we live in a more consumer-based society now than we did then in 1999 – everyone “needs” to have the latest mobile, the latest car, the latest television, even more so than when this film was originally released. Fight Club’s message on consumerism is only getting clearer, and more relevant. 

Marla represents the people who are oppressed by the current system – she’s forced to steal clothes to get money for food, and evidently has lost all hope in life. The Narrator states that “Marla’s philosophy is that she might die at any moment. The tragedy was that she didn’t.” Like The Narrator, Marla also needs to seek out support groups in order to achieve genuine connection with people. She’s been driven into this state of isolation and hopelessness by society, and has no means to better herself. Marla rebels by refusing to even give the pretense that she is a perfect member of this society – she smokes, steals, is openly sexual even with strangers,  and is not ashamed of any of it. The Narrator rebels openly and is openly confrontational towards society, while Marla rebels more passively. Both of them have been completely hollowed by the society they live in, but find solace with each other, knowing that eventually more people like them will make a stand. 

Tyler Durden (the other side of The Narrator’s personality) wants to tear society down, and rebuild something from the rubble. He’s also a hypocrite. He’s repulsed by a society where individuality has been crushed, and where men are forced into gyms to fulfill the standards of physique they’ve had imposed on them. In contrast, Tyler Durden subsequently rejects these ideas – in Project Mayhem (the natural successor to Fight Club) none of the members are given names. Another nameless character, as I already mentioned, is The Narrator – this hints that Tyler Durden, in his quest to create an equal society, has simply replicated the old system in miniature. The only member of Project Mayhem referred to by name is Tyler himself – inequality has arisen. Tyler also criticizes the way in which advertising has imposed an unfair standard of beauty on society – men are expected to be handsome and muscular, and women are expected to be thin and pretty. This is entirely hypocritical – Tyler himself is the ideal male in a physical sense. Brad Pitt (who plays Tyler Durden) is well known to have resented body-building for the role – if Tyler upheld his principles, he would not feel any need to conform to any standard. Beauty, society will tell you, is achievable for everybody. This is not true. Not everyone is a model, and not everyone can maintain the physical standards deemed ‘ideal’ by advertising. But this is not a flaw within ourselves; it’s a flaw in society. 

Masculinity (and the repression of it by society) is a key theme in the movie, and can be perceived in different ways. Some say that the movie is an indictment of “toxic masculinity,” where violence is idealized and physicality is everything. I personally think the movie is really a parody of these ideas – the movie does not approve of the violence, and instead treats it as rather absurd. The masculinity expressed by the members of Fight Club is a release for them – the film presents males as aggressive by nature, and shows how the repression of this tendency by society only leads to more violence. In the same way that The Narrator finds some kind of release when he cries at support groups, members of Fight Club release all of the aggressiveness that’s been building up inside them. The movie does not condone “toxic masculinity” – it parodies it, and shows how it’s the result of societal influences. 

Fight Club was an eye-opening movie for me. It made me realize that corporations are not the friends of the consumer, and material possessions are not as important as happiness. Those are the main messages I took away from the movie – some critics at the time saw it as some type of propaganda, intended to incite violence. Anyone who thinks that that’s the message of Fight Club simply did not understand the movie. It’s a rather beautiful story of freeing yourself from the society you live in, and reconciling the different parts of yourself to achieve happiness, as opposed to sticking to the eternal cycle of working and consuming. There’s probably enough to say about Fight Club for an entire book on the topic, but these are just my main thoughts on the themes and ideas presented in the movie. Is it a perfect movie? No, but then again no movie is perfect. Has it opened the people’s eyes to the negative impacts society has on them? I wouldn’t go so far as to say that every person who’s ever seen this film came away as a more enlightened person, but I’m sure that there are many people, like me, who appreciate the ideas the movie conveys, and the ways in which it conveys them. Is Fight Club more relevant now than it was when it was released? Definitely, and I see no reason why this relevance won’t become even clearer in the coming years. Society is evolving very quickly now, and it’s important to realize that you’re not obligated to live up to the standards it imposes on you. After all, you’re the reason society can exist at all.  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jacob Tucker is an avid reader and writer, and has written articles on art, film and the environment. He is currently writing a satirical pseudo-political novella in the rare moments when he can drag himself away from the piano, and is not at all used to writing in the third person.