Fight Club, starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, was directed by David Fincher and made in 1999. The two scenes analyzed in this paper will show that the male body is used as a commodity and therefore falls into a Marxist theory. At the same time, the male body becomes the object of the masculine gaze and can be analyzed using a psychoanalytic tool.
The Narrator initiates a sexual desire for his alter ego’s body, and therefore for himself. Fight Club reveals, through a Marxist-psychoanalytic reading, that the Narrator has homoerotic tendencies, is narcissistic, and unstable both mentally and physically.
The nameless narrator of Fight Club, played by Edward Norton, creates an alter ego, Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt. Throughout Fight Club, Brad Pitt’s beautiful body is shown off as a commodity concept as well as the homosexual male-to-male gaze.
The Gay and Lesbian criticism described the homoerotic gaze in Fight Club perfectly when they said, “The denial of the homoeroticism of looking at images of men constantly involves sado-masochistic themes, scenes and fantasies; hence the highly ritualized scenes of male struggle which deflect the look away from the male body to the scene of the spectacular fight” (Smelik 140).
In the scene that will be analyzed here, the Narrator feels threatened by a character named Angel Face, played by Jared Leto. Angel Face has taken Tyler’s affections away from the Narrator, leaving him out of the loop. Therefore, just as a competitive soul will try to destroy the competition, the Narrator destroys Angel Face.
The scene opens with an establishing shot of a bar at night. The mood of this shot is dark and stormy and resembles what is happening in the basement of the bar and in the Narrator’s own mind. Chuch Palahniuk, the writer of Fight Club, said that the bar was essential because “alcohol had to be a big key part of it. So many people have to have alcohol to have sex and so it seemed natural that people would have to have alcohol to fight for the first time.”
Palahniuk’s comment is particularly interesting considering the subtle undertones of homosexuality that are present in this violent scene. The first shot inside the bar’s basement is a wide shot with a shirtless Edward Norton dancing around in a fighting stance with a crowd of men behind him, one shirtless, the rest in dark clothes. The next cut shows who Norton is fighting, Angel Face. This character is the prime example of beautiful youth.
He’s got bleach blonde hair, a great body and a beautiful face. Tyler Durden, the Narrator’s alter ego, also has blonde hair, a great body and a beautiful face.
By destroying Angel Face, the Narrator is destroying several things: the beautiful male body that has become a commodity, the system he created (after this scene Fight Club is more about Project Mayhem), and, in many ways, the Narrator is destroying himself. He is using a system he created, Fight Club, to destroy something beautiful, the alter ego he has created. At this point in the movie the Narrator still has not made the connection that he and Tyler are the same person. Because of this he is unable to destroy his alter ego, and instead takes his aggression out on Angel Face.
The fight continues and the camera cuts back and forth between fighters. These cuts help show the quickness of the action. In boxing they have terms like “upper cut and left cut,” the camera’s cuts add to the energy of the scene. The Narrator suddenly stops, takes pleasure in the pain he has been dealt, and attacks Angel Face with all he has.
The nameless character pummels the beautiful face while the crowd at first yells, and then is appalled and turns away. Slowly the crowd gets closer, encircling the Narrator with their disparagement. The shots of the men in the crowd reinforce that the Narrator’s actions are wrong. They slowly turn from supportive to disgusted as they watch this immoral act of one man defacing another man’s property.
As Angel Face falls, the camera follows him down. This shows that Angel Face has the sympathy of the camera. Drastic cuts are made between the Narrator and Angel Face, the former punching with way too much aggression and the latter all bloody and destroyed. The character’s name, Angel Face, reinforces the fact that the only thing the boy had going for him was his beautiful face. The Narrator destroys this use of commodity through jealousy. Edward Norton’s character is the mind, while Brad Pitt is the body. As Powrie puts it in The Trouble With Men, “As in so many films, Pitt’s body is fetishised, offered up, commodified” (185).
Whenever Pitt’s character embraced Angel Face, the Narrator felt like the body had been taken away from him. The beautiful body had left the mind for a beautiful face. This comes into play at the end of the scene whenever Edward Norton says, “I felt like destroying something beautiful.”
Although the Narrator says a few lines of unspoken dialogue, the only spoken lines in this scene are between Tyler and the Narrator, who are essentially the same person. Tyler says, “Where’d you go, Psycho boy?” and the Narrator responds, “I felt like destroying something beautiful.” Tyler then looks at the men and says, “Get him to a f*ckin’ hospital.” Tyler than follows the Narrator out of the basement and into the street. By destroying the face of Angel Face, the Narrator has won back the affection of his alter ego. Tyler tells the other men to take care of Angel Face and then follows the Narrator out of the dark basement.
An important scene, and the next to be analyzed, is the one where the Narrator finally realizes he has made up an imaginary friend. The shot opens at an empty restaurant. The wait staff are repeating the phrase, “His name is Robert Paulson,” and stop whenever they see the Narrator looking at them. A wide shot reveals a guy behind a bar wearing a gruesome head halo. The bartender welcomes the Narrator back again, very similar to Lloyd, the creepy bartender from the Shining.
In the commentary with David Fincher and the main stars, Edward, Brad and David Fincher note that the feel here was “of Lloyd: “Good to have you back, sir.” The Narrator is taken aback by this comment and immediately asks the bartender who he thinks he is. The bartender asks if it is a test to which the nameless character immediately replies it is not. This conjures memories of the false emergency broadcast system (“This is not a test”).
After much confusion, the bartender replies he is Mr. Durden and he was in last Thursday checking on how tight security was. The Narrator is flabbergasted. Airline humor is thrown in at this point, “Please return your seatbacks to their full, upright and locked position.” The Narrator runs to the hotel room and immediately calls Marla, who could be seen as the motherly figure in this film.
He crawls back to the womb in order to regain his identity. She says, “You fuck me, then snub me; you love me, you hate me; you show me a sensitive side, then you turn into a total asshole. Is that a pretty accurate description of our relationship, Tyler?” Once again the Narrator reverts back to a phrase said on an airplane, “We have just lost cabin pressure.” The Narrator at this point makes her “say his name” which relates back to the Law of the Father and the control of language.
Soon after the Narrator discovers his identity, his alter ego shows up. He is now bald, like the Space Monkeys that were being trained earlier in the movie. His coat is large and animalistic, revealing the monster side of Tyler Durden. Tyler’s body is a commodity that is used for power throughout the movie. The Narrator looks on the body in a homoerotic way but also as a way to gain power, respect and self-confidence.
Tyler tells the Narrator that he has broken the promise. “I asked you for one thing. One simple thing.” In this manner, the Narrator has broken the trust, a key ingredient in relationships. Whenever the Narrator asks for an explanation, Tyler tells him to sit and immediately the nameless character obeys. Although he is near complete, he is learning the knowledge of his true self, he still obeys the power of the body.
The flashbacks in this scene are incredibly useful. The first flashback occurs when the Narrator is realizing he and Tyler are the same person. He thinks of the bathroom scene whenever they threatened the masculinity of a leader of the city. His first thought upon regaining his true self is of castrating an authoritative figure. Before he can even get the words “because we’re the same person” out of his mouth, he has another flashback to giving himself a chemical burn. This flashback shows his control over pain.
The next flashback contains a mixture of Tyler and the Narrator. The Narrator is saying “We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world,” yet while he is saying it the camera shakes and reveals Tyler’s face mouthing the words as well. Here the audience is able to see that these two characters are the same. Since the image has been made clear, explanations need to be made.
Tyler tells the mind, “All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me. I look like you want to look. I fuck like you want to fuck. I am smart, capable and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not” These lines reveal both the Marxist and Psychoanalytic side to Fight Club. Whenever Tyler says, “I look like you want to look,” he is referring to the body as commodity. Through the lines, “I fuck like you want to fuck,” Tyler reveals the homoerotic tendencies present in the Narrator’s mind.
“For Tyler/Pitt is shown throughout bare-chested, slightly sweaty, firmly-muscled and bronzed, in deliberate contrast to the rather pallid, unremarkable body of the Narrator/Norton. And despite the Narrator-as-Tyler’s energetic couplings with Marla, which threaten […] to destroy the ‘home’ the two men share, […] it could be argued that now the Narrator has dreamt up Tyler’s perfect body he wants to ‘have’ it, in every sense of the word” (185).
The Narrator next remembers telling Marla that ‘Tyler went away.’ As Tyler and the Narrator are discussing this insane behavior, the camera cuts to the same wide shot sans Tyler. This time the Narrator is leaning in talking to no one. As Tyler explains how the Narrator has the freedom to run with his insanity, a flashback of the Narrator beating himself up occurs. Soon after this is a shot of the Narrator handing a beer to no one and reading off the rules of Fight Club all by himself. As the Narrator is pushing these images away he has another of him leading Project Mayhem.
The last image is of the Narrator having sex with Marla. After this flashback, Tyler states that she must be disposed of. Now the body, the commodity, wants full control and does not want to share the mind with the mother. The Narrator snaps to attention at this. Marla is the line that he does not want to cross, therefore whenever the body threatens the mother, the mind fights back.
In an article entitled Historical Trauma and Male Subjectivity, Kaja Silverman states that although the woman “is on the ‘wrong’ side of the symbolic, she is on the ‘right’ side of knowledge (111). Marla, symbolically, is wrong for the Narrator. She is not male and therefore does not fit into the homoerotic gaze. However, she is on the right side of knowledge, the knowledge that will ultimately save the Narrator. Whenever the life of Marla is questioned, the Narrator finally stands up to his alter ego and finishes the commodity once and for all.
The Narrator in Fight Club is mentally unstable, for he creates a superego. He has homoerotic tendencies for this super, alter ego. Since the alter ego is just an improved version of himself and what he wished he could be, he is narcissistic. And whenever the homoerotic bond between his alter ego and himself is threatened, he becomes physically unstable and jealous. Brad Pitt’s incredibly toned body becomes commodity in this film.
Edward Norton’s character uses the body to gain self-confidence and respect. He also uses the body as the object of his gaze. He is sexually threatened by Angel Face and therefore destroys something beautiful. “Something beautiful” in this case can refer to many different things: the image of Pitt’s body and its commodity, Fight Club, or the beautiful face of someone who has threatened his place in Tyler’s life.
Whenever the Narrator finally discovers the truth, he has flashbacks that give him the memories he needs to be a whole person again: castrated authority, control of pain, the mixture of he and Tyler, his delusional relationship with Marla, the insanity he is still facing, the control he has over Fight Club and Project Mayhem, and lastly, his sexual feelings for Marla.
Each memory tracks the Narrator from the beginning of the movie to the end, catching him and the audience up on how insane this character really is. Through a Marxist-Psychoanalytic read, Fight Club becomes a movie about commodity among homoeroticism.
