Critical Approaches

Robert Bly Iron John (1992) ideology Male frustration and anger
at society
The anguish of soft men and how part of their grief rose out of
remoteness from their fathers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpc2-UWHzXw

Doppelgnger
According to Homer, man has
dualistic existence, the one in his
visible appearance, the other in
his invisible image which becomes
free only after death this, and no
other, is his soul. In animate man
there dwells as a strange guest a
more feeble Double his other
Self in the form of his Psyche
whose kingdom is the world of
dreams. When the conscious self
sleeps, the Double works and
watches1.

Fight Club is ..a provocative anticapitalist cultural artifact, one

which articulates a widely resonant
and resistant structure of feeling
(John McCullough 2004)

Generation X is characterised as:

Powerless
Purposeless
Obsessed with commodities which they hope will
give their lives definition.

All style and no substance

Unhappy
Often coming from broken, fatherless homes
They struggle to find father figures, often in the
work place a place they feel alienated from.

Coupland (1991)
I just want to show society
what people born after 1960
think about things... We're sick
of stupid labels, we're sick of
being marginalized in lousy
jobs, and we're tired of
hearing about ourselves from

For 6 months, I couldnt sleep

Fight Club:

The central character is torn

between tedium and torture
(John McCullough 2004)

Fight Club:

I had it all

He recognizes
that his freedom
is somehow
connected to the
end of
capitalism
(John McCullough
2004)

Ebbert (1999) states The whole movie is about guys afraid of

losing their cojones
Is Marla a threat to the survival of masculinity in this text?
Is Jack afraid of Marla?

the woman is the hunter and the males are the hunted (Chia &
Wei 2009)

This is
cancer
right?

Penis Envy (Sigmund Freud)

Females experience anxiety upon realising they dont have a penis

Fight Club provides numerous hints of its

anxiety about the replacement of absent
fathers with iconic images of masculinity and
its concern with the impact that this
substitution has on the development of
coherent, mature masculinities in young
men.

Millennial Masculinity:
Men in Contemporary American
Cinema
Timothy Shary (2012)

Is that what a man is supposed to look like?

Marla
The Narrators real comfort in a
world of white middle class male
alienation

were still men

Fight Club reasserts a

masculine identity threatened by
the feminization of American
culture (Suzanne Clark 2003)

discover they are exhilarated by this brute interact

Sight and Sound (Amy Taubin 1999)

Friedrich Nietzsche
bermensch (The Overman or
Superman)

Fights will go on as long as they

have to
Fight Club reasserts a
masculine identity threatened by
the feminization of American
culture (Suzanne Clark 2003)

 Diana Saco Female Gaze Tyler is

an object of Homoerotic desire.
It's macho porn -- the sex movie
Hollywood has been moving
towards for years, in which
eroticism between the sexes is
replaced by all-guy locker-room

Nihilism

Congratulations. Youre one step closer to hitting bottom.

Luddite

What the f*ck did you guys do?

The narrator becomes frustrated and aghast at the destruction
that Project Mayhem is wreaking, and he begins the exhausting
insomnia filled process of trying to track down and stop Tyler