What is the message of the film?
The message of Fight Club gets skewed within mainstream media. It is a cult classic, Don't talk about fight club has been named 27th greatest movie line of all time by Premiere in 2007. Looking over the one liners that Brad Pitt has been gifted saying dozens of times, what is the message of Fight Club (1999) ? According to Palanuik and Fincher the concept of Fight Club is a satirical story about toxic masculinity but also shows audiences a commentary on consumerist and anti-capitalist culture (otherwise known as the feminization of American society) (Renner). Fight Club did not break even at the box office, it was not a successful movie (Kornbluh, 108). That being said the real meaning has got twisted in all the memes and think pieces. Fight Club is about showing the true anti-American dream, Palaunik calls it a reinvention of The Great Gatsby. Rebecca Renner from Lithub states that in 2007 she found Fight Club comforting, showing that a novel like The Great Gatsby was showing her a false version of reality. Fight Club was picking apart the lie of the American dream and showing how Fitz Gerarlad wanted to show the culmination of the consumer mentality (Del Gizzo, 87), which Palahniuk challenges in Fight Club.
So wait, how does it get misinterpreted?
The anti-capitalist message in Fight Club gets lost with the
"brotherhood" of project mayhem, people seem to overlook the actual reaction
to the culture the two main characters are surrounded by. This reaction ends up being the start of
project mayhem. Fight Club to many is seen as a film filled with misogyny
and unadulterated violence, which could be true if the film was given at face value.
Brad Pitt in the 90s to college-aged men is what Trent Reznor was to teenage girls in 90s.
Jude Ellison S. Doyle states that Reznor was the last man to write a love song with the release
of Nine Inch Nails "Closer", the same can be said for Pit in Fight Club, just along the basis of hypermasclinity appealing to a male demographic. Pitt is meant to be desired in the film,
sex sells, doesn't it? Fincher dresses him up in crop tops and a fur coat, the character Tyler Durden
is everything the Narrator (Jack) wants to be, Durden is quite literally a manifestation of Jack's desires.
Viewers become apparent to this within the 30-minute mark of the film. Men want to be Tyler Durden, so in this
viewers want to ignore the rest of the film because Tyler Durden, he has been described as a "hypnotic narcissist"
and dead by the end of it. The message of Fight Club's anti-capitalist nature gets lost because of the idealization
of Tyler Durden and with that comes the "boys gone wild terrorist" of project mayhem wanting to go against the nature
of men being soft.