Round One with the “Fight Club” Movie
By: Charles Mccullagh
Tags: Masculinity, Archetypes, Sexuality, Film Reviews, Psychology

I’m taking a zoom-delivered psychology class on the dark masculine that includes the movie “Fight Club.” It’s been more than twenty years since the movie shattered male jaws and restful sleep but it still resides restlessly in the unconscious of some young men. A fellow student said that he must have watched “Fight Club” fifty times in high school and college, but his latest viewing revealed to him how dark the film actually was.

When the movie came out, I was somewhere between Beijing and Barcelona, pushing wares and dares. I was aware of the movie and I thought it was simply a play on the bruising fight club version we conducted in the holds of my Navy ship, named after Mount Baker, a volcano, where we would teach lessons to the above-deck “pussies” who apparently didn’t live up to the mores of the “dark masculine.” Fancy that! But no one died or was too badly bruised. After all, there was that Uniform Code of Military Justice looking over our shoulders.

I started boxing with the boy scouts in north London when I was about twelve, continuing when I moved to the states in high school, the Navy and at college. I was a huge fan of Muhammed Ali and regularly visited his training camps in the Pennsylvania Pocono mountains. I lost my appetite for boxing when I saw the damage done to Ali’s health. I stopped watching fights years before “Fight Club” was released.

I’ve read that “Fight Club” had a satisfactory opening day, then the box office seemed to slow. The U.S. audience seemed to be put off by the sheer violence of the movie and it wasn’t until the film became a teen favorite and DVD’s helped distribution that it became something of an underground hit. More than 60% of audience were male and it became known as a genuine anti-date flick. It would take the better part of a decade for the media to recognize “Fight Club” as a cult classic of our time.

On viewing “Fight Club” my first impression was that the lead character played by Ed Norton was lost, searching for rituals, meaning and companionship. That he had really never known his father underscored his need for meaning and, as it turned out, a “rites of passage.” That the character played by Brad Pitt, a maker of soap and other chemicals, shows up, almost on schedule, suggests that this will be a naturalistic tale about men finding themselves in the dark underground of the fight club. And these details are raw and bruising. When the underground violence associated with the fight club spills over into the general community in the form of organized mayhem, the tale seems predictable and complete.

But that is not really the case. I suspect one reason this movie was not an instant hit, even beyond the violence, was that there was a psychological thread, at times a little confusing, evident in this tale from the very beginning, hinting that the Norton character was projecting many of his stories and much of his life. This character might be known in psychological language as a “puer,” an unlived, untested male who hasn’t endured the rites of passage to manhood. That Norton is referred as the “narrator” throughout the film puts the action and psychology in perspective. We are seeing everything through Norton’s eyes. He is the shaper of and filter for the action. The film depicts his restless and dangerous shadow on display. And as I learned in literature class a long time ago, one must beware the unreliable narrator. In this bromide resides an important psychological truth.

It is no accident that much of the movie, especially the fights and other violent scenes, is set in the darkness. In such scenes the characters can seem to be in the shadows and, in a way, the darkness becomes them. From what I read this was intentional on the part of the screenwriter and director. And this shadow element has important psychological ramifications, suggesting the dark, unseen or undiscovered aspects of our personality. In “Fight Club” we come to understand, through various narrative hints, that Pitt it is actually a projection of Norton that provides the dark, shadowy, unconscious elements that Norton lacks in his own psyche. This drama will remain, psychologically speaking, on the inside and repressed until the narrator has grown in consciousness and is ready to acknowledge his dark burden.

“Fight Club” is a charged sexual movie with the female character Marla also moving in and out of the shadows and apparently in and out of the arms of Pitt. By the end of the movie, in another midnight turn of events Norton begins to understand that he, not the imagined Pitt, was Marla’s lover. Now Norton is beginning to come into consciousness. He sends Marla away for her own protection. He comprehends his projection of Pitt as “he” is about to blow up the city. There is an encounter between the two. Norton “shoots” himself in the mouth and Pitt dies. Marla returns and Norton apologizes. He is coming into consciousness and is on his way to healing. The narrator has “killed” his repressed self.

Whatever the fate of the movie, the film’s narrative line and rough psychology spawned versions of fight clubs across the land. Of course, it has been well-documented over the decades by the poet Robert Bly and many others that young men increasingly have difficulty “entering” adulthood because of lack of rituals, absent fathers, and mother complexes. The culture lacks coming of age rituals. The results can be a one-sided masculinity such as dramatized in “Fight Club” and in men who find compensation at work, in sports or at their fitness club. There is often displaced aggression on women. The streets are full of it.

It is not surprising that all men in “Fight Club” seem fatherless. For the sons there is no instruction from the father figure. They have to learn their masculinity the hard way. And it is one-sided. The psychologist Carl Jung wrote about the process of ‘individuation,” a path into consciousness. The Norton character shows this in his journey through hell and almost back. He has taken one small step.

The “Fight Club” archetypes can still be found in back alleys and unheated basements. And they are increasing showing up in our political power games. The Proud Boys and similar groups occupy this archetype. The cost to young men and society is enormous.