I’ve started this thread so we can collectively understand this awesome movie better.
I get bits and pieces of it, but the big picture is not clear.
For example:
Tyler and Marla are Norton’s father and mother figures.
There’s a demasculization theme, I think. In the support clinics Norton visits there are men without balls. BOB is the personification of western civlization…Once a great strong body builder, then lost his balls and grew tits.
When Norton burned his bridge to the past(i.e the apartment explosion), he thought of calling Marla, the feminine side for a second, but decided to go with Tyler, the masculine father figure for support.
Norton tells Tyler that his father started families every six years. Tyler started another ‘family’ in another city.
I liked the song that played for the closing credits. Where is my mind? It’s by the Pixies. One of my favs.
I also liked when he showed up to work a bloody mess.
Fight Club is interesting too when you bring up the idea of masculinity because fighting is very masculine and violent. Maybe, the opposite of what his life was, passive.
The movie was excellent, so excellent that one must be careful not to let it fall into the wrong eyes. The central theme of the movie was anti-consumerism, and the schizophrenia/madness resulting from consumer life-style and mentality.
However, like all media, when something with any real revolutionary propaganda is consumed by the public, its message and power becomes self-defeating. Which is to say, every punk-ass college kid and his brother, who is the next generation of consumer trash, exhalts the message as if it were for him, when in fact it represents an attempt to deconstruct and eliminate his type.
He then goes out and buys the t-shirt. He breaks a few little rules so he can pretend to be like his hero Tyler. So on and so forth. It is the same tragic irony we see with the Che image in modern society. The very type which is the problem believes himself to be the solution, and accepts the movie as if it were “speaking to him.”
“Dude, I just bought the Fight Club DVD! Let’s watch it on my big-screen TV. No, not the one on the third floor of my mansion, silly, the one downstairs beside the cherry-oak pool table in the basement.”
Of course, but it doesn’t sell as many liberal broadsheet newspapers or academic books as talking about ‘masculinity under threat’ and all that sort of tawdry bollocks.
You’re right about the rest too, so I won’t bother just repeating you…