men will never understand "fight club"

people are always asking me if i know tyler durden

“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”

Fight Club is the epitome of a filmbro movie. Other than Marla, it features no women, and tells a story about men. It’s the movie that the weird guys who don’t know how to talk to women in college watch. But it’s also my favourite movie, and my favourite book too. While the novel was written by a (gay) man, Chuck Palahniuk, and the movie was directed by a man (who I do believe understood the story and turned it into one of the best book-to-movie adaptations of all time), I think that there is something very simple that stops male viewers from fully understanding what Fight Club really is - their masculinity.

I’ve seen Fight Club fifteen times since I turned thirteen. I own two copies of it on DVD and one copy on VHS (my mom gave me a weird look when I bought it, but hey, in my defence, it was only a dollar!) and I’ve spent much time thinking about this movie. I’ve got two copies of the book. So I think I can make the assumption that men don’t understand Fight Club as I do. This movie wasn’t made for me, a lesbian woman, but I do think I’ve reached a greater understanding of it than most men do. Every guy you know has seen Fight Club, but how many of them get it? I believe that is it my lesbianism and my female identity that allows me to see through the sweat and swears of disgusting men and understand what Chuck Palahniuk and David Fincher were trying to say.

“I love everything about Tyler Durden, his courage and his smarts. His nerve. Tyler is funny and charming and forceful and independent, and men look up to him and expect him to change their world. Tyler is capable and free, and I am not.”

I think that Fight Club is about a lot of things. Toxic masculinity in society and homosexuality and repression, consumerism and pain. Tyler Durden is everything that men should not be, and yet, men watch this movie and yearn to be him. These men feel seen by Edward Norton’s The Narrator (who we’ll call Jack, as the screenplay does), because they, too, long to be everything that Tyler Durden is. The epitome of Man. They pray to the church of Tyler Durden. He tells these men everything that they are, how small and nothing that they are, and how they need to become something more. They need to hit rock bottom, and then they can go up. These men have been told that they’re gods, that they’re the very stars in the sky, the thing that keeps the earth going. They destroy themselves with the idea of all they are supposed to be, famous actors and CEOs and richer than God. And then when they are not that, they turn into something disgusting, like they’ve been robbed of something.

“We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”

In Fight Club, Tyler Durden believes that men have gone too long being emasculated by society, been turned into something other than what a man should be, and have forgotten what it means to be a real man. That to be a real man is to undergo pain and dish out pain to others. Basically, to be hurt, and to hurt people. So, they join fight club for the chance to knock out some guy’s teeth. Masculinity, to Tyler, is all about how the male body looks, how you present yourself. And fight club whips you into shape. But the book and the movie try to tell us that this kind of masculinity is just as dangerous as the consumerism and emasculation of men in society. That this is not the answer. Fight club turns into Project Mayhem, into a cult-like project where members go out committing acts of terrorism on their disgusting, faceless city. These men take their anger and put it out into the world in the most harmful way possible. Like how Tyler says. To be a man is to give pain just as you take it. Fight club starts off as a way to let off steam, and it simmers down into violence. Fight club, which was already destructive before, becomes even worse when it turns into Project Mayhem.

And because women, and anyone who does not look like the men who participate in fight club, do not, cannot, act out in this fashion, they see it as the danger that it is. Men with Tyler Durden personalities are not heroes, they are something almost terrifying. And because the society we live in will protect men like this, they are able to do as they please.

While I myself have used the bathroom scene in Fight Club as as example of how homosexuality is one of the cores of the movie, I do think that this (in the above still) line could have another meaning. That these men, that Tyler and fight club participants, blame women and femininity for their lack of manliness. That how women display themselves and interact with men is at fault for turning these men into what they are. And that they no longer need women in their lives to continue to rot them. What they do not understand is that mothers and daughters and the women around them are not the villains. And the men of Project Mayhem are not the victims. And not only are they dangers to the people around them, they are dangers to themselves. Blowing up their apartments and beating the shit out of a guy you don’t know.

I think men watch this and think of it as vindication. But that’s not what Fight Club is. They think of Fight Club as a pep talk, when it discourages all this. Fight Club is not to encourage. It shows us the disgustingness of men and the decline of the narrator Jack is not something to be adored. These men take Fight Club as an understanding of their feelings, and they see themselves on screen because the way that the men act in the movie is the way they act, and Tyler’s thoughts are already in their heads, and take it to be something it is not. They’ve grown up with these thoughts, since they were boys, and because nobody stopped them, they’ve become something terrible.

The use of the word “snowflake” is often credited to Chuck Palahniuk. Tyler Durden says that they are not unique or special, like snowflakes. While it could be debated that Palahniuk is the creator of this term and its use, I think it does work as a good example for how men misinterpret Fight Club. Fight Club mocks them, but they don’t see it that way. They felt understood by it. And I get this. I’ve felt understood by the movies I watch. But being seen in a movie like Dead Poets Society is not the same as this. Movies like Dead Poets Society do not take bad people and make them even worse. The way I see it is, if a man worships Tyler Durden in an unironic way, Fight Club didn’t make him evil. These thoughts and feelings existed in him already, and by not seeing that Fight Club warns us about men like this, he suddenly thinks he is a god. Because Brad Pitt and Edward Norton feel the same way.

Fight Club seems to have spawned “male manipulators”. Well, not invented them entirely. But they did get louder after Fight Club. However, this is not the fault of the text. This is the fault of the men who do not see beneath the story, and are unable to understand what it is really trying to tell them. Anyone who is not a heterosexual, cisgender man will take this movie, this novel, to mean something else. To know it as it is. They do not glorify it, because for the most part, these feelings and thoughts that Jack, and subsequently Tyler, have do not exist in us already. And Fight Club is not the only victim to this phenomenon, for lack of better word. American Psycho and Taxi Driver, movies also about men and the violence that simmers within them, have created the same kind of “fans”. Taxi Driver and American Psycho and Fight Club are not about “men being cool.” They are about the dangers of men letting their masculinity grow and rot into something dangerous, and using their manliness to act out. The ending of American Psycho tells us (sorry if you haven’t seen the movie) that it doesn’t matter if Patrick killed Paul Allen or not. Because he is a wealthy, white, heterosexual man. He can give into these fantasies because his status protects him. Make the same movie but with someone who is everything that Patrick is not. The movie will end very differently.

Fight Club is about ruining yourself. These men with their dangerous methods and thoughts are killing themselves one step at a time. Not the women around them. Being dangerous and cruel is not what it means to be a man.

Now, of course, you can take my words as lightly as you’d like. Disregard them completely, I don’t care. The fact remains that since Fight Club’s release in 1999, men have been misunderstanding and misusing its message, when it is so much more than they say it is. Fight Club is not their friend.