“Wait, why did I like Fight Club?” I confusedly asked myself after I shut my laptop and the luminously clean LCD light erased itself from the white walls of my dorm room.
As a female and analytic I feel it’s my responsibility to watch movies like Lord of the Rings, The Matrix and Star Wars in attempts to better understand the male mind. With that initiative, I found myself watching the 1999 cult classic and oddly enough enjoying it.
My initial thought was that it was just going to be men fighting—a cinematic factor that’s a constant in the equation of masculine appeal. Yet despite the film’s title, it’s organized in a fashion that when it got to the fighting it all made sense. Plus a shirtless Brad Pitt with freshly frosted tips may have helped…
The film is in fact a great satire on capitalism and consumer culture and the fighting done is done so because it causes the protagonists—desensitized by the middle child syndrome of our generation—to feel something.
However after understanding this, I still ask myself is this why boys like to fight? As to peel away a physical, emotional and spiritual numbness inflicted on them by society?
I ask this only because in my current environment boys will fight each other for reasons like they are in different fraternities, which incites my reaction: “you’re an idiot, stop.”
This preconceived disposition towards fighting is what caused my initial hesitation; I don’t know why boys like to fight. But boys don’t know why either and obviously not all fights are fought for the same satirical and existential purposes portrayed in the film.
Yet despite the film’s ability to explain the metaphorical reasons for fighting, it also explains the unexplainable aspect when Tyler Durden details the eight rules of Fight Club, the first two being “You do not talk about Fight Club.” Whether this was for crowd control and secrecy reasons or not it explains perfectly the male reasoning for fighting, which is there is none.
There is no talking about Fight Club because the reason people fight is to gain an immediate and unexplainable feeling. This is could also be why girls like to gossip and have drama because they are looking for an incomprehensible feeling of satisfaction with themselves.
Despite our ability to never fully understand what we want to feel and when, Fight Club showed me that everyone shares the indefinable desire to feel self-satisfaction.
Therefore, my reaction to Fight Club makes perfect sense. I don’t know why I liked it but can leave it at that because after all it is against the rules to talk about it.