fight club, or: the ruins of masculinity
some uses of transfemininity
i.
People are always asking me, ‘how do you know Tyler Durden?’
Relating to or understanding Fight Club always feels like an extremely difficult endeavour. First, because I think that it’s a movie with a tendency to tricks — like Tyler Durden flashing on screen in the opening scenes before he’s introduced — which can only be described as masturbatory, designed essentially to congratulate both itself and any viewer who happens to catch them on how clever they both are. Yet, for all its cleverness, I think it struggles to fully understand exactly what it’s trying to say. This is not necessarily a critique of the filmmakers or of the author of the original book (which I haven’t read, admittedly), and I don’t mean to suggest that the film isn’t saying anything. Fight Club tries, it seems to me, to engage with a lot of extremely difficult and occasionally mutually contradictory concepts, and because one of its themes is how desire flows and is channeled in ambivalent and unexpected directions, it is perhaps forgivable if it does not have control of its id.
For me, writing this newsletter poses some further questions beyond the above difficulties. The discourse surrounding Fight Club is notably hostile and seems frequently to be less about the movie itself than it is about the ever-torturous culture wars. Certainly Fight Club is by no means the only piece of media whose critics and fans have fashioned it into more of a battlefront than a film — it’s a fate it shares with Rick & Morty and Joker, for instance — and, like those others, it feels oddly impossible to have an opinion about it without feeling like you have to take a side. On the one hand, you have a group of alt-right fans who worship Tyler Durden (the film’s antagonist) as a kind of red pill precursor, who make fashy videos about ‘Nietzsche’ and ‘emasculation’; on the other, you have a group of feminist critics who seem to essentially share this (incorrect) reading of the movie, but condemn it. So how do I write about it? More than that, how do I write about it when I’m a trans, disabled woman — just some of the identities Fight Club and its fans are said to despise — who maintains that Fight Club is a genuinely very good film?
I fear, too, that I may not be fully objective in this. I loved Fight Club a great deal as a teenager, naive to the ways of the world and the discourse. It felt endlessly fascinating, and the unearned intelligence the movie makes you feel when you get it worked embarrassingly well on me. Watching it back now, I have a fair few more problems with the film — both political and artistic — than I did at the time, but I can’t kick the feeling of wanting to like it, of somehow hoping to redeem my adolescent obsession. I find myself feeling oddly defensive over any critiques of the film I see online, both the ones I think are unfair — which is most of them — and the ones I believe are accurate. It’s not that I don’t think there are issues with this film. It’s that I don’t want there to be.
If a theme is recurring at this early stage it’s of desires which get out of hand. The film is filled with them — its antagonist is the manifestation of one — and they seem to escape the screen and suffuse responses to it. And when I think back to the peak of my obsession, what did I want from the film, and what did it offer me, a teenage boy who would one day be a girl? Where does either version of me fit into this movie, what do we want of it? In the spirit of my perhaps unearned desire to redeem my past love, I want to suggest that there might be something transfeminine recoverable in Fight Club. But this is a transfemininity which — appropriately, perhaps — can only come through in the ruins of masculinity.
ii.
And — thank God, you know? I'm glad for her, because she deserves it.
The film opens with an almost harrowing sequence depicting a masculinity in crisis. The opening scenes are like The Waste Land if Eliot had been principally concerned with the loss of a patriarchal idyll which never really existed to the slow but inevitable collapse of an empire, which is to say that they're exactly like The Waste Land. The narrator wanders through the world with his perfect life: a job he gets to travel for and in which he never has to confront the suffering his work causes; an apartment filled with tasteful furnishings, factory-made to help him achieve his perfect self; and absolutely nothing means anything. Perfect except for his insomnia, though the film is interested in his inability to sleep not for its own sake but for its blurring of the boundaries between waking and sleeping: ‘when you have insomnia,’ the narrator tells us, ‘you’re never really asleep, and you’re never really awake.’ That is to say, the film isn’t directly concerned with sleeplessness, but in the colourless, meaningless life it creates.
The solution, eventually, is in suffering: by going to support groups for sufferers of diseases he does not have, he is suddenly able to feel and ends up crying — and sleep returns to him. The first group he attends is for those with testicular cancer, and the film takes pains to suggest that these are people who have failed at masculinity — or whom masculinity has failed. The two people in attendance with any opportunity to do so tell the narrator that they went through divorces in the aftermath of their diagnosis. This includes Robert Paulson, Bob, whose breasts mark (in the film’s transphobic idiom) his inability to adequately perform masculinity, but only developed because of masculinity’s failures. His steroid usage to succeed as a bodybuilder — the pinnacle, perhaps, of a certain conception of masculinity, although crucially a masculinity whose significatory abundance is the opposite of masculinity’s understated (self-)image — ended up causing testicular cancer, all resulting in breast growth because ‘his testosterone was too high and his body upped the estrogen’.
While the narrator ends up attending other support groups — even some with women in attendance — the testicular cancer group sets the model. While the narrator’s initially put off, he ends up fully embracing his place in the group; he seems, even, to fit in. But the film never lets us forget that he’s out of place: he’s not only not dying like the others, he unavoidably, as Marla points out, still has his balls. Yet he shares with the other participants the experience of masculinity under capitalism as unavoidably painful, impossible to adequately perform because to intentionally perform it is to fail at the performance. In a context where failures at and of masculinity are unavoidable, the narrator is able to perform masculinity without it being negated by its own performance, as when he affirms Bob’s tear-drenched plea of ‘we’re still men, right?’ with ‘yes. We’re men. Men is what we are.’ Put another way, if visible attempts at masculinity make it fail, it’s only in a space in which masculinity has already failed that it can be consciously and openly attempted. This is part of why the arrival of another faker at the groups, Marla, negates their utility for him: because he is recognised as performing illness, it risks the revelation that his masculinity has not already failed him — although of course it has, in the same way gender fails everyone under capitalism.
It’s in this context that we get Fight Club’s meditations on fathers, both biological and divine. The two are clearly linked, for example when, during the epiphanic chemical burn scene, Tyler gives a brief theological treatise:
Our fathers were our models for God. And, if our fathers bailed, what does that tell us about God? … You have to consider the possibility that God doesn't like you; He never wanted you. In all probability, He hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen… We don't need Him…
There’s a feeling of the narrator having been betrayed by the figures who ‘should’ have been his models for how to perform masculinity. They ‘should’ have been present, but were not, as the narrator’s father left when he was a child; they ‘should’ stably signify masculinity, but, like Bob’s breasts, which, according to the narrator, ‘were enormous, like the way you think of God’s as big’, do not. These failures stand in for the sense that masculinity itself has failed, has become incapable of stable signification.
iii.
Narrator: What do you do, Tyler?
Tyler: What do you want me to do?
(Fight Club script, altered in production)
It is tempting — and perhaps the most common reading of the movie — to understand Fight Club as suggesting that this is all a form of ‘emasculation’, a masculinity betrayed. Certainly this is the belief advanced throughout the film by Tyler, who seems to offer a path to a kind of self-sufficient masculinity freed from the performative impulse. His masculinity falls outside of late-capitalist significatory systems, illustrated when, talking about underwear ads, he tells the narrator that ‘self-improvement is masturbation. Self-destruction is the answer.’ Yet to read this as an expression of what the movie believes in is, I believe, to misread it entirely: its critique understands that masculinity cannot be performed outside of the systems with which it is entwined. Tyler’s quest to destroy the social self and replace it with — what? the true, essential self? pure id? — is ultimately doomed to failure. More than most films, Fight Club recognises that the undivided self is a myth.
Tyler is a projection of the narrator’s desires, and for this reason can be taken as his id personified: ‘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 you’re not’. But he is also, in some senses, a dream of the narrator’s, apparently initially passing into the waking world only when he is unconscious. The narrator even questions at one point if ‘Tyler is my bad dream, or am I Tyler’s?’. Dreams, in a Freudian interpretation, are a form of wish-fulfillment, and Tyler acts as a way to bring these wishes into being beyond the scope of normal dream processes. When Tyler first has sex with Marla, for instance, it’s clearly when the narrator desires her but rejects it; Tyler appearing to happen upon the phone with Marla at the other end is really just the narrator’s libido liberating itself — and that the narrator ‘dreams’ of Marla that night demonstrates clearly the analogy between dreaming and Tyler. But although conventional dreams are subject to censorship so as to disguise the wish they aim to fulfil, Tyler is seemingly entirely outside of the conscious or unconscious control of the narrator’s ego.
This property is exactly what makes Tyler effective — both as a character and in his extraordinary material impact on the world he exists in. He takes the things he wants and says the things he thinks, lending him an absurdly magnetic persona — one of the reasons Brad Pitt, whose talents tend more towards charisma than acting, is perfectly cast — and an ability to just reach out and change the world as he wishes. ‘Free in all the ways you are not.’ But there’s a reason why we aren’t just our ids, and why not all of our wishes can be fulfilled: Tyler is frequently reckless and destructive, and his dreams for the world are a parodically bleak version of a masculine ‘utopia’:
In the world I see, you're stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You will wear leather clothes that last you the rest of your life. You will climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. You will see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of the ruins of a superhighway.
This is a kind of anarcho-primitivism for the red-blooded American male, but it’s also identifiable as nothing but a response against the capitalist society which traps the narrator. Tyler’s political aims are occasionally laudable — I mean, look, we can all get behind erasing debt — but they’re only expressed in terms of the destruction of modern society, because their only real motivation is the narrator’s hatred of his life, their psychic context as much the death drive as it is the libido.
If Tyler is the narrator’s id projected into the living world, he is also the object of the narrator’s desires, showing how what the narrator wants and wants to be are deeply entwined. His relationship with Tyler adopts many models — notably, for instance, Tyler is frequently figured as his father — but it returns most typically to a kind of sexual desire. Let’s talk, as an example, about the fight club the pair establish. In one sense, we can identify traces of the death drive, especially when we realise that the narrator is actually just hitting himself at the beginning. Even in the original scene, though, Tyler tells the narrator that ‘I don’t wanna die without any scars’. His willingness to injure himself and his figuring of death as a potentially imminent prospect point towards a desire for death and annihilation expressed through self-destruction. If the narrator is incapable of genuinely feeling, Tyler offers him a way to hurt.
Simultaneously, however, the fights also become a space in which sexual desire is worked out. The image of two men, mandatorily topless, wrestling with one another in a basement can’t help but recall many of the spaces in which gay male sexuality has been lived. While there’s a certain mutual destructiveness, therefore, there’s clearly desire, a connection which clearly evokes sadomasochistic pleasure. This desire can lead to genuine tenderness, and there’s a clear analogy established between the club and the support groups the narrator attended, with his fight with Bob clearly recalling the early scene of him crying into Bob’s chest. In both scenes there’s an extremely important feeling of joy and tenderness. Even when the narrator most clearly feels a desire for destruction, in his fight with Angel Face, he tells Tyler that he ‘felt like destroying something beautiful’. That the voice-over during the fight expresses the narrator’s desire to ‘put a bullet between the eyes of every panda who wouldn’t screw to save its species’ draws a clear connection between the destructive and the sexual impulse here.
This desire, however, does not have a straightforwardly sexual motive. What appears to underlie it is a bid for a kind of oneness, the effacement of boundaries either between the self and others or between different aspects of the self — although, of course, the film calls into question the stability of this distinction. The simultaneity of — really, the identity between — the narrator’s desire for and to be Tyler gives the first suggestion of this. One of the essential deficits of the narrator’s life in the opening scenes of the movie is his fundamental lack of connection to anyone else: basically the only conversations he has prior to walking into the support groups is to order IKEA furniture and talk to his doctor. At no point does anything happen to suggest that he had friends before he met Tyler, and for all the other apparent benefits of the support groups he attends, you can’t help but feel that at least part of the utility both of them and of Tyler is simply that it gives him someone to talk to.
The narrator experiences capitalism and the failures of masculinity, therefore, as above all isolating, and his eventual conclusion is that his independent self is insufficient. The divisions separating him from those around him are what he takes to found his alienation, so he attempts, essentially, to destroy them. The shared emotional release of the support groups brings him closer to this feeling of connectedness; the fight club’s intimate physicality and essential anonymity helps him forget any separation (and that newcomers had to fight could be understood to forcibly initiate them into this unity); and even Tyler’s creation of Project Mayhem, in which members have no name and wear identical clothes, helps achieve this aim. It’s in this context that we can see the intimate connection between desire and destruction. While the narrator desires connection with those around him, he also wants to destroy both their status as the other and the coherence of his own identity in order to efface any distinctions. This bid for an entirely self-identical unity is the reason for the annihilative impulses with which the sexual is connected.
But this is necessarily futile. The narrator’s desire for genuine connectedness cannot be satisfied under the alienated conditions of (late) capitalism, and the effacement of all distinction or separation is obviously impossible. In order to create such a unity, the self must already be entirely coherent and self-identical even as he must also attempt to destroy what distinguishes it from others, and there’s a painful irony in the fact that the figure the narrator creates for this purpose — Tyler — necessarily forecloses the possibility of self-coherence and unity, or more precisely illustrates that it was always already impossible. Their struggle in the film’s closing scenes, essentially attempting to overcome the other and achieve mastery over their shared mind, only serves to illustrate the impossibility of ever fully achieving this unity: the narrator has to almost kill himself to be rid of Tyler, and even still the invasive force of Tyler’s shot-splicing makes it in before the credits roll.
iv.
Narrator: No, no, that’s not the same thing at all. I mean, it’s totally different with us. We’re — we’re —
Marla: ‘Us?’
Fight Club is, at its core, about knowing you do not fit into the society you find yourself part of, but lacking language to express this knowledge as anything other than a profound discomfort. It’s about the feeling (which is also a hope, and a fear, and a faith) that there’s some part of you about which you have no knowledge but which you think might be able to find that language. It’s about wanting so desperately that you become someone other than who you were, a self-changing which is at once painful and liberatory. The beginning of this newsletter asked why I loved this film so much, and what I wanted from it. The answer, I think, is that it spoke — in deeply flawed ways — to the feelings of dissatisfaction which I had no way of expressing myself. The only ways I could access these feelings were inadequate, so of course Fight Club was only ever able to do so inadequately. It nevertheless offered me a way to think through that unavoidably trans instinct: that the ways we are forced to live and perform gender within contemporary capitalism can never be sufficient to who we could be. A friend recently described transition as the act of ‘narrowing the gap between what I want and what I want to want’; how else can you characterise the ending of Fight Club?
It occurs to me that I haven’t written enough about Marla Singer, undeniably the best character in the film. Throughout, she seems to offer the narrator a different way of being, coaxing him into vulnerability and a genuine, lived connection. Now, we’re all agreed that she’s obviously trans, right? She both resents and relishes in femininity (‘It's a bridesmaid's dress. Someone loved it intensely for one day, then tossed it,’ she says), and even offers it as a possibility to the narrator (‘You can borrow it [the dress] sometime,’ she suggests). When she wears it, she looks beautiful in a way which feels unavoidably transfeminine:
Maybe the most radical decision made in the making of Fight Club is that they didn’t cast Eddie Redmayne to play her.
It’s with Marla that the narrator gets closest to genuine vulnerability with anyone outside of the support groups and his own unconscious; with Marla that he first tries to do the right thing and save her from Tyler; and with Marla that he ends the film. The final (perhaps penultimate) image, of the two holding hands amid the ruins of the old world destroyed by Tyler, might be the first instance of physical contact between two people in the film — outside fight club and the support groups. They’re connected, but it’s not the annihilative embrace of the former or the despairing communion of the latter. Perhaps they can make something new — something transfeminine.