Jon Milani

Consumerism and Masculine Crisis: an Analysis of David Fincher’s Fight Club

Fight Club, directed by David Fincher, is a 1999 film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel by the same name. The events of the film are narrated from the perspective of Jack (Edward Norton), a nameless office worker, profoundly dissatisfied both by his job and by his life. In order to combat his depression, Jack cultivates a consumer identity, filling his condo – the metaphorical representation of his empty life – with IKEA furniture and other meaningless consumer goods. It is only after Jack meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a soap salesman with a radical anti-consumerist philosophy, that Jack begins to liberate himself from his emasculated role as a “white-collar slave”. By founding Fight Club, Jack and Tyler are able to redefine their masculine role through male solidarity, violence, and self-destruction in a quest for enlightenment. The film’s violence – permeated by homoeroticism – represents the conflict between a generation of disconnected men and the system of advertising and consumption that has stripped them of their masculine utility; much of the film is, therefore, a critique both of the feminizing influence of modern consumerism and its affects on masculine identity. Although Fight Club achieves masculine redefinition through Project Mayhem and fantastical acts of social upheaval, the film nevertheless appropriately portrays the masculine crisis of an increasingly feminized, consumeristic culture and its affects on self-definition for modern men.

Much of Fight Club is a contemporary commentary of the decline of masculinity and the consequences of contemporary consumerism. Consumerism found in the mass media was the ideal vehicle both for its self-definition and for its dissemination, and consumer ideals enjoyed significant uptake during the latter part of the twentieth century. As Celia Lury notes, personal identity should be independent of any material context; however, identity in twentieth century consumer culture was defined primarily through the exchange, possession, and use of goods. This form of masculine self-definition is problematic because market forces have increasingly alienated men from the products of their labour; the exchange, possession, and use of goods is detached from meaningful creation. Faludi argues that the crisis of modern masculinity is rooted in the development of an ornamental culture that stripped men of any real sense of utility, replacing traditional male values with commercial values. Through advertising, meanings are spuriously attached onto commodities, which are then presented as the bridges to fulfillment and happiness. According to Lury, consumerism has contributed to the development of the possessive individual, where the individual becomes the owner not simply of accumulated property, but of his self-definition. In Fight Club, Jack demonstrates that his consumption is a conduit for self-definition: “… what kind of dining set defines me as a person?”

Fight Club also illustrated challenges to the relationship between consumption and self-identity. As Lury notes, consumer culture contributed to self-identity through its provision of lifestyle, taste, health, fashion, and beauty. While Jack seeks – and ultimately fails to find – happiness through consumption, Tyler rejects consumption as a means of fulfillment, arguing that men have become “byproducts of a lifestyle obsession.” For Bauman, the widespread adoption of the consumer attitude means that, while public issues are individualized, what it is to be an individual is defined by consumer activity. Fight Club challenges this assumption; although Jack laments the loss of his condo (and his identity), Tyler reminds him that “[t]he things you own, end up owning you.” More importantly, this feminized mass consumption invariably leads to self-commodification. While riding the bus, Jack and Tyler muse about the gendered meaning behind an underwear advertisement with a half-naked male model. Tyler concludes that “self-improvement is masturbation.” Tyler’s implication is that attempts to improve the body by conforming to commercial standards of beauty is a self-abusive exercise. As Tyler later remarks, the ornamental culture renders men of late capitalism as the “middle children of history” without a purpose or a place. Consumer society represents a false sense of purpose; Tyler thus rejects both consumerism and self-commodification.

The feminization of consumer culture was aggravated by the encroachment of women into every facet of society; the fundamental material social change of expanding women’s employment is linked to the gradual decline of the male breadwinner role. Furthermore, John MacInnes argues that men’s material privileges in law, economy, and politics came under increasing scrutiny; manly virtues such as heroism and independence increasingly became understood as destructive aggression, detachment, and isolation. According to Michael Kimmel, by the mid 1990s, a gnawing sense that the world was hollow, meaningless, and inauthentic led to an inclination toward violence. Jack aptly illustrates the frustration felt by many middle class office workers when he presents his boss with a hypothetical scenario of an employee “pumping round after round into colleagues and coworkers.” As Anthony Rotundo notes, the restoration of confused or missing masculinity was often found by immersion in the mythology and rituals of the premodern man. For Jack and Tyler, Fight Club offers an escape from white-collar slavery in an environment of homoerotic, ritualized male solidarity, free from both consumerist and feminist influence. More importantly, fighting represents the destruction of the commodified body; Tyler’s inclination toward self-destruction is, therefore, the most fundamental rejection of consumerism and, in terms of the films fantastical resolution, the means to achieving enlightenment.

The degree of violence in Fincher’s film can be justified when it is properly understood as a mechanism for resolving the emasculating effects of contemporary consumerism. Fight Club is particularly appealing to middle class office workers like Jack – Tyler’s “white collar slaves”; however, the film is more widely appealing because it challenges the whole consumer-driven social structure. According to Kimmel, the past decade saw mainstream white American men – drawing from middle class office workers, salesman, and lower class skilled workers – exploding in anger over the feminizing influences of consumer society. Fight Club is a sufficient conduit for much of the socio-economic frustration of the era; Tyler’s antithetical philosophy challenges not only consumer ideology, but also aptly articulates the sense of masculine dislocation caused by women’s expanding role and the end of the male breadwinner archetype. More importantly, it helps to establish the value of physicality, not as an expression of destructive aggression, but as a genuine reconstitution of masculine power and authority. Although the basement fights of Jack and Tyler’s Fight Club is eventually supplanted by acts of urban terrorism with Project Mayhem, the destructive aggression of the Project is determined to be necessary both for societal cleansing and to find enlightenment. As Tyler reminds us, “it’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”