The award winning film, Fight Club was released back in the late 90’s and addressed an entire generation. Known to be Generation X, David Fincher targets a specific audience to ask them to reflect upon their masculinity, metaphorically using Edward Norton not only as the protagonist (Jack), but as a representation of “everyman” in that society. A simple white collar worker who has become a slave to his career industry (typical of most people at that time), Jack comes across Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who leads him out of his miserable and static life through physicality: combat, destruction, and power. Fincher, also known for his academy award winning movie Seven, took hollywood to a whole other level. With his films carrying symbolic messages and gruesome scenes against humanity, Fincher always leaves his audience speechless. In his 1999 film Fight Club, Fincher uses current social issues of the time, cinematic techniques, gruesome scenes, and symbolic dialog specifically to target Generation X, making them aware
that men of this time period have become emasculated.
Generation X, also know to be Baby Busters or the Latchkey were born ranging from the early 1960’s to early 1980’s (McCollum). This generation was shaped through major events such as the Berlin Wall, The Cold War, latchkey kids and a major incline in divorces. With the birth control pill being introduced in the 60’s to legalizing abortion after Roe v. Wade in the 70’s, “[g]eneration X was born during the single most anti-child phase in American history” (McCollum). Mostly all of Generation X experienced divorce and “between 1969 and 1996, the number of working mothers in the workforce also doubled….many households were headed by working single moms” (McCollum). This deeply affect the men of generation x, with no father to lead by example, these men picked up habits from their mothers and were deeply influenced by the media.
When all the themes fall into place, it displays that the men of Generation X didn’t have a father figure to follow. Firstly, Jack and Tyler connect over the recollections of their father. They go to explain how their fathers were never in their lives and how they relied on their mothers to raise them as a man. One of the many concepts shown to the audience was the constant flaming of consumer culture. In Tyler’s philosophy he states that people are working jobs that they don’t enjoy so it can make it seem like they have so much more than they really do. But obviously when reality plays it’s part, it shows that they’re no where near happy and they just buy their problems away. For Jack to be fully satisfied he took a woman's approach and bought a catalog of china for his bachelor pad.
Another key element used to further support the theme was the violence used through the movie. “Fight Club’s vision of a male millennial identity crisis is brought to life through Fincher’s unflinchingly brutal and stylized combat sequences” (Vice) Fincher throughout the movie shows us how the characters can't feel and the only way to feel something was to beat the crap out of each other, but the violence in the movie portrayed that it wasn’t the solution to their problems instead it was to show them that they were alive. A main representation of this is the fight between Edward Norton and Jared Leto. During the fight Edward’s character takes some hard blows, but enjoys the pain and uses it as fuel to attack Jared’s character, showing no mercy Edward’s character continues to strike till Jared’s character is lying on the ground and gushing blood out of his face.
To further the analysis of this film is the emasculation throughout the entire movie. The issue of masculinity is a problem right from the beginning of Fight Club. Jack attends a support group meeting for men with testicular cancer, named “Remaining Men Together.” When he attends this meeting he listens to a man that explains that his ex-wife just had a baby with another man. Most of the people in this group represents a crisis signifying masculinity in America. In the following scene, a soft lighting is focused on the American flag hanging in the background while the men are crying interpreting that the modern man is weak and helpless. But the narrator feels emasculated because of the furnished items he buys at IKEA, the men in the support group represent the physical manifestation of emasculation. Realizing why he feels emasculated he goes on and creates a fight club to free him from the problem of emasculation. The fight club was a place where the men can actually experience being what they thought it actually was to be a man as Edward said “you weren’t alive anywhere like you were alive here.” Edward continues to demonstrate his understanding of rebirth through the fight club describing how after a fight “we all felt saved.” The setting in Fight Club mainly takes places in three different locations that are all in an unnamed city in America. The most prominent setting in the movie is the house on 5123 NE Paper Street where both the narrator and Tyler live throughout most of the movie. Another main location the movie is set at is the Parker-Morris building which is where the movie both begins and ends. The last main location would have to be where Fight Club actually happened which was underneath a bar called “Lou’s Tavern”. There were other less significant settings in the movie as well, which includes, the church where the narrator would attend his support groups, where he first lived before moving into the paper street house which was named Pearson Towers and also where the narrator works as a recall specialist for an automobile company. Throughout these location, Fincher uses the cinematic technique of a lot of top light to show there was lost hope, covering the eyes of the characters to show they were absent and had no souls.
In the movie Fight Club, David Fincher wrote offense and explicit dialogue for the script. In order to really create the harsh environment where the movie is taking place, f-bombs and offensive slang is constantly thrown around. It brings in an intense and masculine environment to the viewers. Causing some to feel uncomfortable or offended by the mood throughout the film. Showing Generation X the type of profanity men tend use, lead sort of a harsh but beneficiary example. Quotes throughout the Fight Club like “[i]f you feel like shit, everyone you hate wins” or “[t]his is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time”, is harshly said but brings great advice toward the audience.
The clothing seen on the characters were used in a way to further identify Generation X. Restless and work-orientated Jack wore khakis and boring dress shirts that coincided with the stereotype given to people of the Generation X who were once seen to be slacking and not creative in appearance. He later ditched those outfits and through his alter-ego, Tyler Durden, he wore edgy clothing like leather jackets and sunglasses no matter the time of day. Throughout the movie, Tyler can be found wearing shirts that are indeed a couple sizes smaller than what should fit his body type. The shirts are perceived to be in the crop top format which may support the idea that men in Generation X were in a society where they were raised by woman and picked up on some of their fashion to exemplify that.
In Conclusion, David Fincher succeeded in targeting Generation X and allowed everyone to see in a more evident way what was actually happening to men in the late 90’s.