Quote:
Originally Posted by
Bartleby_Scriven 
Okay, here's an attempt to engage critically: BurnInHell, you do realize that there are maybe two women with speaking roles in the entirety of Fight Club? The Cancer Patient Woman, and Marla. The entire movie is occupied by men railing against their own self-imposed inadequacies, looking for someone to blame, and the easiest target is women. Cancer Patient Woman is actually robbed of her feminimity, withered away, but given the most human moment of the movie: she's looking for any sort of human contact, even if it's degrading sexual contact. All the men in the movie are reaching out for some connection as well, and all they can resort to is beating the shit out of eachother (and then immediately crying afterward...like women).
Marla, meanwhile, starts off as a mess but by the end of the movie is actually the voice of reason. She's Tyler/Jack's grounding element, his redemption, and the movie ends with them holding hands. This movie is just about the most pro-woman you could get. It's a treatise against men and their excuses.
I disagree. Let's talk about the phrase you used, "self-imposed inadequacies". Nothing about the way the men feel in this movie is "self-imposed" despite your assertions. If the men in Fight Club feel "inadequite" it is because women, and society in general, have been trying to reshape the role of men in the last few decades after we had been bred for thousands of years to be hunters and gatherers. Women have traditionally been nurturing because they have children while men needed to be strong, determined and ruthless to succeed, especially in some of the enviroments that people lived in and the conditions there in.
The men in Fight Club don't know their place in the world. In real life I feel we are living in a post-masculine world where it is now a liability to reveal our true nature in public for fear of being labeled knuickle dragging sexist pigs. In reality, we are not overtly emotional because that gets in the way of getting shit done and we have a basic instinctual need to fuck as much as possible. Women don't have cocks so they will never understand. Those eons of fighting against the elements and each other have also given us an innate sense of agression and hostility. Can you explain why men are driven to start wars or build great cities?
But we don't fight great wars or build great cities anymore. Don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly happy to know that neither I or my children will ever likely be called to fight in the type of Hellish warfare that happened in WW1 or WW2. But each generation before the advent of nuclear weapons knew, in the back of their minds, that someday they be called to fight. Self-reliance was also something important in previous generations. Men had to know how to fix a car, do home repairs etc...But the Fight Club generation of men, like myself, never learned how to do that stuff because we were raised by women. Even the next generation of men who did have stable families with both parents are loosing that traditional role because of the shape of things to come.
Perhaps the traditional role of men is no longer nessescary or sustainable? I have a friend who’s father is 75. He’s an electrical engineer. He’s been fixing the family cars for the last 30 years. But about ten years ago he bought a new car for his wife. A car that he can’t fix, except for basic mechanical issues, because there’s so many electronics in the fucking thing that you practically have to be a computer programmer in order to fix it. So now he has to take it to a “diagnostic center”. His sons don’t know shit about cars except for the few little things their father taught them. Now, they have kids of their own and do you think they’ll spend a Sunday afternoon teaching their own sons how to repair a car? No and it’s because they don’t know how to do it themselves. See what I mean? Men today are basically a cock attached to a wallet.
At the same time, while society is shoving traditional male models of behavior into the nearest tar pit, we have feminist propaganda 24/7/365 telling us that, what men think, and how we act is wrong, sexist and hostile all the while cheering on women for engaging in the type of behavior, that is considered abhorrent in the male species, in shows like Sex and the City. Then they all fucking do is complain that there are no “real men” around!? Well, what is their fucking definition of a real man?
Now, let me be clear, I don’t hate women, despite what you may think. I think their intellectually superior to males and I prefer their company over that of other men. I just get tired of the never ending shitstorm that men have to listen to about how we need to change. Getting back to Fight Club, the reason those men start crying after beating the shit out of each other is because they are able to finally release the sheer pent up agression that society tells them is wrong from the minute they wake up to when they go to bed.
Also, you're wrong about Martha, she's not his redemption because it was Tyler that she liked being with. Martha and the Narrator never developed enough of a relaqtionship to the point where he doesn't need Tyler to be with her anymore. You see, Tyler was the fantasy of what the Narrator thought what society demanded men to be, thus, his psyche split in order to for him to live out that fantasy of being a good looking god of fuck. Because he couldn't imagine Martha wanting to be with him because most women, society and the media was telling him that he wasn't a "real man" which is why he over compensated by gathering possessions as a way to assert his masculinity. Tyler doesn't materialize in the movie until the Narrator meats Martha, and it's the only way he can be with her. In the end, Martha has been fucking "Tyler" and we never find out how she really felt about the Narrator himself.
Finally, the Cancer Chick wasn't looking for a "human connection" i.e. emotional, she stated specifically that she wanted to get laid and no one would fuck her.
Edited by BurnInHell - 3/27/11 at 2:13am
