Immediately after reading the guidelines for this blog post, my mind directly went to Fight Club. This movie is one of my favorite movies and has many themes embedded deep within that one would not notice on face value. I quickly looked through the other blog posts and saw that a few people had already written about Fight Club. The other posts focused on Consumerism and the being apart of something greater than oneself aspects. However, I am going to go in a very different direction.
Fight Club is indeed about the aforementioned themes. However, one of the more prevalent themes in my eyes is the fear/hatred of women within the movie. Edward Norton's character has two different relationships with the same woman in the movie and neither of his "personalities" can seem to connect on any level with her. He seems to be numb to the feelings and thoughts of relationships, love and everything associated with it. Norton's character believes women to be the reason why men are not as, for lack of a better word, "manly" as they once were. Both Brad Pitt and Edward Norton's characters, albeit being the same person, were given the same advice from their father. Go to school, get a job and get married. Basically, they were supposed to follow the formula that every person leads their lives by. However, along the way, something clicked within Norton's character and told him this was wrong. It becomes blatantly obvious that women are targeted by the main character when these two quotes are spoken:
"A generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is the answer we really need."
Women have softened men. That is how the two characters feel. After their "self-help" Fight Club has been started, the two men find what it means to be a man. After seeing a Calvin Klein ad, the two snicker and ask, "Is that what a man is supposed to look like?" Obviously, that is, in the perfect world, what many people would want a man to look like, especially most women. The two main characters eventually meld into one after Edward Norton realizes what he has been doing. Although he does reject a lot of what he has done, he does accept some of it. He does feel he has shaken off the "feminine" qualities of his life and personality, but he does realize that women are just as faulted as men. The two need to co-exist and let each other be themselves in order for everyone to survive.
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