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Even though “Fight Club” evokes somewhat mixed feelings among many viewers, a few years after the premiere, the film was recognized as one of the most outstanding pictures of our time and rallied around an army of ardent fans who preached Tyler Durden’s philosophy. ‘Fight Club’ was created based on the novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk, published three years earlier. The main roles are played by Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, and Helena Bonham Carter. Norton plays a nameless Narrator – an impersonal common man who is dissatisfied with his life in a post-industrial, white-collar consumer society. He created the underground organization “Fight Club” along with Tyler Durden, the seller of soap, played by Brad Pitt. The similarity of the social thriller, an unequivocal hint of anti-utopia – in the end, the movie turned into a stinging sarcastic portrait of modern society. Moreover, the film contains more than just criticism of capitalism and a beautiful picture. There are a lot of social and psychological (split personality) problems, that take place throughout the whole film, and one of them, the problem of becoming a man without a father in our society, will be discussed in the following essay.
To begin with, when the Narrator was 6 years old, his father left the family, married another woman, and gave birth to children, and then he repeated doing this every 6 years. Like any boy, the Narrator needed his father as an authority who could teach him how to be a man, what he should strive for in life, and how to achieve it. The question “What’s next, dad?’”, which he asked his father during their short conversations on the phone with a frequency of several years, means: “How can I find myself, who should I be?” But the narrator’s father did not know the answer himself, so he could only share with his son those templates that society once provided for him: study, find work, and get married. Maybe something from this will fascinate you, so you will forget about your questions.
It is obvious that in such conditions of upbringing, a boy cannot become a man, and even at the age of 30 he remains a sexually mature child. Due to the inability to acquire male self-identity, he has problems with women. The Narrator was raised by his single mother, and the mother could not teach her son to be a man. As a teenager, the Narrator is not psychologically separated from his mother and continues to live using a childish model of behavior. That means that he strives to remain in a comfortable state under the protection of his parents, even if not real, but at least symbolic.
His symbolic father is the boss, the firm where he works is the symbolic mother who feeds him, and the apartment is the mother’s womb. He creates comfortable women-like housing, trying to suppress the inner anxiety that has arisen from the inability to develop his personality, leading to such a lifestyle. Jack is lonely, and comfort cannot replace a person’s need for communication and intimacy. His inner anxiety accumulates its energy and appears in the form of insomnia and suicidal fantasies. So what kind of decision comes to his mind when it starts to bother him? To take something. The Narrator wants something to drink to get rid of the symptoms of his problem. Fortunately, the doctor did not indulge in this infantile desire to relieve anxiety through oral satisfaction. The Narrator finds relief in psychological support groups. Big Bob’s chest becomes another surrogate mother for him. It is alive, you can cling to it and cry, returning to the infant state. In addition, in the group, the Narrator found sincere attention to his persona, and that satisfied his need for acceptance from other people. Thus, the Narrator found a way to alleviate the symptoms of his inner problem by regressing into an infant state. He felt himself under the protection of a symbolic mother and received the necessary bodily contact with other people. But the problem itself remained unconscious and unworked. This problem is reflected by the motive of castration, which runs through the entire film.
The infant idyll reached by the Narrator was easily destroyed by the appeared Marla. Her image somehow hooked the Narrator, and he becomes obsessed with her but does not recognize the love attraction in himself. The Narrator sees Marla in the cave, which means that she has occupied the very core of his personality. Probably that is because he projected onto her the image of his mother, and we later find confirmation of this. Marla is a type of “fatal”, or, as psychoanalysts say, castrated woman. Probably, the Narrator’s mother had a similar character and held a dominant position about the child, so the main character, not having a pattern of masculine behavior before his eyes, grows up as a ductile person and subconsciously feels his inferiority. Every time during the film Marla’s appearance means the Narrator’s deprivation of something important. She seems to be pursuing him, taking from him what he finds with such difficulty. Having lost his peace because of Marla, our hero again falls into insomnia, which causes Tyler to appear.
Tyler has an important function: performs the ritual of initiating the Narrator, and performs the symbolic transition from boy to man. The boy, becoming a man, must break away from the maternal element, so Tyler blows up the Narrator’s house, forcibly removing him from the power of the symbolic mother, who is personified by everyday comfort, security, satiety, security, and the absence of the need to change anything. The task of the protagonist is to become a man without the help of his father. And carrying out this task, he goes from his resentment and pain associated with the lack of a father figure. So far, the Narrator has ousted the pain of the wound inflicted by his father, but now Tyler makes him resurgent and aware of it.
The logical continuation of this is the desire to destroy civilization, that is, revenge performed on all the fathers who built it. Just as a child who lacks love, the main character begins to behave disgracefully to attract the attention of parents. In addition, the desire to destroy the whole world indicates a persistent infantile aggression. Maliciousness directed at the whole world, not at a specific subject, suggests that the person still has an unhealed infant trauma, most likely because he felt abandoned. That is why he created the fight club.
At first, at the stage of creating a fight club, Tyler and the Narrator were partners. With the help of Tyler, the protagonist seems to have found what he wanted, and besides Tyler, he no longer needs anyone. He even ignored the manipulations of Marla, who played suicide. But suddenly it turned out that Tyler needed Marla. So, she was needed by the Narrator himself. What for? To play the script from childhood and once again feel abandoned. In the film, you might think that the Narrator is jealous of Marla, but in fact, he needs Tyler’s attention. The Narrator has recreated a situation in which Tyler begins to play the role of the father, and Marla, respectively, the role of the mother; and now it becomes clear why Marla from the very beginning hooked the Narrator so much. The hero of Norton regresses emotionally to his 6 years. It resembles the Narrator’s relations with his parents, and like these relations, it is easy to recognize the negative Oedipus complex when the child feels love for the parent of the same sex and hostility towards the parent of the opposite sex. Thus, the Narrator resumes his script: the mother takes away his father from him, and then the father leaves him. For the second time, Marla takes away the object of his love from the Narrator.
So, if at first, Tyler was a friend of the Narrator, now he has become his symbolic father. And, founding the project of Mayhem, Tyler becomes the new patriarch, Father with a capital letter, and his “children” – the participants of the project – unquestioningly obey him. Participants of the Mayhem are attached to Tyler and donate everything for his sake. And this is another indicator of the eagerness of men to be necessary to the father. To sacrifice everything for the sake of involvement in something or someone stronger. The whole project is a revolt against the father figure and a statement of itself in its place. All acts of vandalism committed by project members are typical for adolescents. In all these actions there is no wisdom because the main character has no place to take it.
The Narrator’s children’s script is played on. Tyler, in whom the Narrator saw the newfound father, is increasingly moving away from him. First, his treacherous rapprochement with Marla, then the project Mayhem, in which he did not dedicate the Narrator, all this makes the main character feel the pain of an abandoned child. His frantic desire to destroy something beautiful is anger at his father, who is leaving him again, but now in the face of Tyler. The Narrator is not free from emotional attachment, and Tyler forces him to do it. The Narrator’s self-destruction is a desire to free himself from all emotional attachments that cause his mental suffering. The desire to stop the internal pain with the help of external pain (car accident).
In the end, Tyler leaves. The child’s script was completed. And then the Narrator plays Tyler’s script. Tyler appeared in the Narrator’s life to start a “spiritual” war against his father, who preferred to communicate with his mother, rather than with his son. Then Tyler himself became a symbolic father (and began to communicate with Marla, forgetting about the Narrator). Accordingly, now the Narrator must start his war against Tyler to take his place and marry Marla.
The turning point for the Narrator is the death of Bob. That is, affection for a living person, which the Narrator has preserved, which he has not yet killed in himself, helps him to start a fight with Tyler. And here we can assume that if the Narrator repeats the already established scenario, then a similar turning point should have existed before Tyler appeared. That is, if a person’s death caused a desire to fight Tyler, then perhaps someone’s death earlier caused the Narrator’s desire to fight an imaginary father, which caused Tyler to appear. And then the Narrator takes the place of Tyler. One can hope that he has integrated the best qualities of his alter-ego and will behave with Marla not as a child with his mother, but as a full-fledged partner.
The story of the main character of “Fight Club” is an attempt to become a man without a father, an attempt to become a father in the face of a loss of continuity with the fatherly tradition. The film shows how difficult it can be for a young man without a father; how much suffering his absence causes (whether actual or emotional); to what kind of despair can attempt to cope with the emptiness in the soul that remains in the place of the father figure? And how self-destruction and masochism become a means to stifle internal pain. ‘Fight Club’ is an image of one of the many paths that men of our time have to go through to gain their courage in a crisis of an absolute patriarchal society. The image of a man, which turned out as a result, combines not only brutality and courage, not only indifference to pain and indifference to appearance, but also infantile aggression to the whole world, adolescent maximalism, and mortification in oneself of any attachments.
Bibliography:
- Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, 1996
- Alexander Pavlov, Shameful pleasure. Philosophical and socio-political interpretations of mass cinema, 2014
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