NFL
By: Rick O’Donnell
What’s the first rule of Fight Club? We don’t talk about Fight Club. Great film, but unfortunately, it’s time to break that rule and dive deeper into what the movie really represents. There’s a long list of different interpretations that can be pulled from the 1999 film starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt and after 26 years it brings up a problem we need to tackle head-on.
Official synopsis
A depressed man (Edward Norton) suffering from insomnia meets a strange soap salesman named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) and soon finds himself living in his squalid house after his perfect apartment is destroyed. The two bored men form an underground club with strict rules and fight other men who are fed up with their mundane lives. Their perfect partnership frays when Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), a fellow support group crasher, attracts Tyler’s attention.
If you look around the internet, you’ll find all sorts of explanations as to what people think drives the story. The two at the forefront are consumerism and masculinity and both points are definitely at the forefront. Yet, what most people don’t catch is just how on the nose the real point of the movie is, even if it wasn’t the writer’s intention for it to come off that way.
Maybe it took me way too long to see it, maybe I just missed it as a naive teenager, or maybe it took the current social landscape for the point to really sink in. Fight Club isn’t a movie about masculinity in the way we perceive it, it’s a movie about men’s mental health and how they’re not allowed to talk about it.
Think about it. Your main character is a man battling depression, who romanticizes the entire world around him to deflect away from his struggles in life. He conjures up this person in his head who helps him create an underground fighting ring, that he’s not allowed to talk about.
Sure the memes and quotes from the movie are great, but go back to the tag line. “What’s the first rule of Fight Club? We don’t talk about Fight Club”. Ask any man who he talks to about his struggles and more often than not they’ll say no one as society has programmed them to “man up” or that feelings are too soft.
So while the movie is layered with plenty of symbolism, it feels like we skipped over the main point. A man struggling with his mental health, creates a way to become more masculine to cope with his mental health, and he’s now not allowed to talk about it. Rather than deal with his depression, he “mans up” and doesn’t notice the destructive path he’s on.
Flight Club is the perfect representation of how men are on the path to mental health solo. They’re not allowed to talk about it. They have to find ways to cope instead of facing it head-on. All the consumerism symbolized in the movie proves that everything they do or have is not enough and I think it’s time we talk about this figurative Fight Club.
