By Kim Wells

It was perhaps just a felicitous coincidence that I finished reading Susan Faludi’s recent omnibus-sized study Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man the day before I went to see a late night showing of David Fincher’s equally sprawling new film Fight Club. Normally I try to apply the rule of 2 to all texts: you get 200 pages or 2 hours to prove you’ve got something interesting to say, and beyond that I make no promises. Both Fight Club and Stiffed exceed the limit, but I could neither stop watching nor reading, fascinated by their eerie parallels. In essence, both take as their subject the same thing—the raw deal young men have gotten in post-World War II America. Where they go from this premise, however, demonstrates the gulf between what I will perhaps precipitously suggest are the women's perceptions of what Herb Goldberg called in 1977 "the hazards of being male") and those of men themselves.

Faludi’s book is a detailed look into late twentieth-century masculinity’s broken promises to men. In chapters set in locales ranging from a domestic violence "alternatives" group to the Long Beach Naval Shipyard to the set of a low-budget porn film to the Grand Havana Room Cigar Club in Beverly Hills (where she meets Sylvester Stallone for a final interview), Faludi meticulously documents the manifestations of her multi-part thesis. One strand of her argument holds that men have been let down by an increasingly technologized and corporate society in which their "meaningful" work contributions have been rendered obsolete; concurrently, she suggests, a general shift in our media-saturated culture from substance to image has offered men only an "ornamental" masculinity to replace their sense of worth as active men. This line of reasoning is central to her formulation of masculinity as an identity which must be reconceived as "something to do" rather than something simply to be. Faludi holds that men today cannot even begin to understand how to "be" masculine, except in the ways that they see advertised around them, since their fathers have deserted them, left them to try to make their way alone through a minefield of conflicting messages about what constitutes a "real" man, surrounded by material goods and the trappings of affluence whose acquisition becomes a substitute for social contribution. I’m simplifying dramatically a nuanced and comprehensive book.

Despite a perhaps too-romanticized view of working class labor as inherently ennobling, Faludi’s book is for the most part smart. It is also generous. Although Faludi claims that the main problem men have escaping the "box" in which they have found themselves imprisoned is that they are taught (and women concur) that the box must be of their own making, she encounters again and again incontrovertible evidence that in fact men have found someone to blame for their disempowered state, and, no big surprise, that someone is "Hillary Clinton," "my wife," "women in the industry," "the feminist movement": in short, women.

Like Stiffed, the action of Fight Club really begins in a support group specifically designed for men. Edward Norton plays a burned out insurance company functionary who attends meetings of testicular cancer survivors, despite the fact that he is himself entirely cancer-free, because there he finds himself "able to cry," a release without which he is unable to sleep at night in his oppressively middle-class, IKEA decorated high-rise condo. This scene, which is played for laughs and offers a glimmer of hope that the movie really will be the black comedy it purports to be, inaugurates the persistent trope of the (literally) emasculated man. Norton meets the free-living Brad Pitt on a plane and, realizing when his condo is mysteriously dynamited in his absence that his has been an empty consumer existence and that there must be more, moves into Pitt’s place (the ultimate frat house, it is actually a condemned building) with him. There the two bond over their common need to experience pain in order to "feel alive" and over such telling experiences as their mutual distaste for corporate anonymity, the hegemony of consumerism ("you don’t own the things--the things own you" Pitt pronounces) , and their ineffectual dads. "So I called my dad [after finishing college and getting a job] and asked him, ‘what do I do now?’" Pitt muses. "And he said, ‘get married.’" Pause. "We’re a nation of men raised by women," Pitt concludes. "And somehow I don’t think another woman is the answer." The film seems to concur, offering the viewer only a single female character to counterbalance all this testosterone. Helena Bonham Carter plays a deeply psychologically troubled young woman who both draws and repels Norton; although her aversion to personal hygiene and restless, semi-suicidal anomie make it seem like she’d be his soulmate, he immediately casts her as the enemy. When she begins sleeping, then fighting, with Pitt, forcing Norton to run interference, she becomes his Mother. And when we learn, nearly two hours in, that in fact Norton and Pitt are the two sides of Norton’s dangerously split-personalitied self, her role becomes murkier still; because Norton meets and confronts her just before he "meets" Pitt, are we to assume that she is in fact responsible for the emergence of his primal masculine side, which, all unbeknownst to him, seduces her and then plots to eliminate her? Clearly, the "enemies" who seek to rob the men of Fight Club of their manhood are Corporate America (once the club metamorphoses, under the tutelage of Norton in his Pitt persona, into its militaristic underground version, Project Mayhem, it begins to blow up "corporate art" and chain coffee shops as practice for its final target, the headquarters of all the major credit card companies in the U.S.), the lack of male role models, and the absence of acceptable outlets for manly rage, like a good war. How women are responsible for any of this is anyone’s guess. Yet Carter’s character takes it on the chin until, in the last few moments of the movie, Norton exorcises the increasingly hostile Pitt from his psyche by taking a gun to his own head. (Mortally?) wounded, he welcomes Carter back into his life, telling her that she "met him at a strange time," but suggesting that now, as corporate towers explode around them, "erasing debt" and leveling American society so that real men can take their rightful places in the hierarchy, things will be all right. Having given vent to his primitive male self and proven his masculinity, Norton is free to leave the company of men to enter into a heterosexual partnership. It remains unclear whether or not he can also now return to IKEA. In the final chapter of Stiffed, Faludi concludes that "[m]en and women are at a historically opportune moment where they hold the keys to each other’s liberation" (595, my italics). In contrast, the final lesson of Fight Club (and for a film allegedly designed to be a piss-take, it’s full of lessons) is that masculinity has to be won, in the end, by men themselves. Faludi’s book is a valuable addition to the burgeoning field of masculinity studies; it’s both readable and critically rigorous. Fight Club, however, offers a much-needed reminder to feminists’ perhaps too happily willing to embrace men oppressed by the unfortunate fact of gender construction as fellow travelers in our own long struggle: they would not do the same for us.

Usually, when I go to a film, I try to turn off that part of my brain that is the critic; if I start noticing every place where a film bugs me (for whatever reason-- from acting to plot) I'd probably never enjoy many movies. I did, however, think about Fight Club from almost the moment I left the theatre. I figured that many of my women-friends would not like it-- mostly because it did, in some ways, remind me of the arguments that the "dittoheads" and those like them are making: that men today have it tough and they should take back their power. But I also started to think about something else, a type of feminist theory that no one I'd gone to the film with me had ever read. I still have not been able to discuss this idea with someone who was familiar with both the film and the theories so I am not positive my reading is perfect, but bear with me a moment and I'll explain.

I completely understand parts of Stephanie Brown's assessment of Fight Club, on the one hand. I know I really didn't want to go to see this movie which promised to be a whiney, men-getting-shafted type of complaint that I figured the "dittoheads" of the world would love as a feminist bashing, guy affirming flick that declares their inalienable right to be macho. I left the film feeling amused but not really knowing why I liked it. The wry self-reflexive humor was one thing, but there was something else. I'll admit I'll never look at Meatloaf (who shares a starring role and who reminded me of an old Aunt) again the same way. So Stephanie's assessment, when I read it, made me question my enjoyment of the film. But I wound up settling with my first feeling: I liked this movie.

Yes, it is the ultimate "guy flick," in some ways. There are plenty of bloody, hyper full-contact fight scenes, male bonding, explosions and quasi military terrorism; this film is the complete opposite of the two-handkerchief-cry movie. The assignment that Brad Pitt's character Tyler Durbin gives his neophyte disciples early on in the days of the Club to go out and pick a fight with a complete stranger, for no real reason, (the catch is that they are supposed to lose this fight), is an adolescent's dream. There was something particularly funny (and ultimately revealing) about the fact that one of the only folks who fights back with one of those seeking to prove their masculinity by disrupting the rules of "fair fights" was a priest— provoked mostly by his opponent wetting down his presumably most prized possession— a Bible. The priest's weak punches are not something that Sly Stallone or Arnold (truly poster-icons for American masculinity) would brag about, but there is something telling in the fact that he defends something he believes in by resorting to his fists. He defends the ultimate patriarchal Christian norm from a decidedly playful water hosing: and it is institutions like the church that I really think get "hosed" in Fight Club. This priest's ineffectual punches remind us of the punches the Church can pack, in order to enforce its logo-centric might-- even the weakest priest is willing to sacrifice for the Word-- the ultimate disciple of conforming to the Law of the Father. But ultimately, in the long run, the priest's punch has lost its effect-- it's rather pathetic to see him versus the big mechanic who must "lose" this fight, because you know, given any other scenario, the mechanic would win.

Where I split with Stephanie on her review of Fight Club is here: The men who are fighting in the Fight Club are not looking to blame women for the troubles that they have, for their lack of identity. The film also does not seek out women to solve the problems for them either, which is another thing I like. The women in this film are just as screwed up as the men-- which seems appropriate because I am pretty certain many feminists would have a hard time arguing that feminism quite knows where it's going either.

The film bashes empty materialism and conformity-- which is what Tyler Durbin's dad's clueless comment about "getting married" without love, just to notch up another of the important checklist of possessions the modern male should "bag," illustrates. "Here," the list says, "is what to do next": an empty progression of goals accomplished. The film doesn't bash women, but it attempts to liberate men from the empty desire to own them as just another thing to put in your apartment with your duvets and Yin-Yang nesting tables. What Durbin's comment implies is that if you marry just to conform to what your society says you should be doing, then you are repeating the mistakes of the past and your sons, too, will end up raised by women alone, whether it's while a "dad" goes out to work a la 1950 or whether dad splits and leaves mom to work minimum wage, waiting for the weekly child support check that never comes.

Helena Bonham Carter's character, certainly no perfect woman herself, is the only starring woman— but it is her pending destruction by the hypermasculine Tyler Durbin aspect of the main character's split personality that pulls him out of his delusional state and causes him to risk arrest, death, etc, (and that despite the fact that his union with the macho Pitt character has been the most fun he's presumably had in years). He chooses an (albeit questionably) normal relationship with her as opposed to the crazy ultra male power he holds as head of the Fight Club/Project Mayhem. Now, it's not that he rescues her, a la Prince Charming— (which I know is unforgivable in feminist film critique) but the final scene where the two watch the destruction of corporate towers of glass and steel projects a union that will clearly not be the ultimate Beaver Cleaver dream life, but in which the two character's equal craziness promises to, as Faludi suggests, "hold the keys to each other's liberation"(595). The male lead will be liberated from his empty conformist acquisition of things (the IKEA apartment of perfect accessorizing and "perfect credit") to live in a world where mayhem and a playful awareness of the disorder that lies just beneath the rules and regulations that we call social order. I do admit that I'm not sure what the woman will be liberated from, unless it's her need to be attracted to the "bad boy" and to seek co-dependent self-awareness at a series of self-help meetings, but I do think that she, in replacing his "totem animal" (a penguin trapped in an ice cave), replaces empty symbolism with a living, if imperfect, woman. She's certainly no pedestalized beauty— but that's kind of what I like about her— her imperfection shines a critical light on the perfection of most women characters in Hollywood. Not all women can be smarmily perfect feminists — and not all are trapped in high heels, aprons (and/or bikinis), and the kitchen, either.

What the Fight Club actually does, in its Project Mayhem, is defy the "law of the father." Corporate America represents the ultimate patriarchal wet-dream— lots of money, power, and prestige, power ties, power lunches, AND the glass ceiling. A glass ceiling that some men are trapped by just as much as women. The destruction of corporate art expresses a "death of god" of sorts— in being destroyed by being rolled into a carbon copy coffee shop— today's God Of Conformity to the "be just like us" modern sensibility— it tells us how far even our creativity has fallen. Project Mayhem makes us realize just how integrated we are into modern Corporate life and how empty even our art is as a result.

Helene Cixous, one of the major French feminists, hypothesizes an Ecriture Feminine — an art that playfully defies patriarchal law of the father and phallogocentric order— and Cixous also suggests that not only women will and can write anti-phallic works. I think that really, this film fits more into ecriture feminine's defiance of the little "pocket signifier" than into an anti-female, chick-basher movie. In fact, in selling soap created from women's liposuction products to rich, cosmetically enhanced, youth-seeking women, (selling them back their asses, to smooth out their faces) it defies the modern mythos of the perfect superslim supermodel superwoman and shows us all, male and female alike, that in buying into material conformity, we consume our own pound of flesh daily. And fighting that is a fight worth the effort.