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Fight Club

Running head: PSYCHOLOGY OF FIGHT CLUB

Fight Club: Consumerism vs. Masculinism
Student Name
University NameFight Club: Consumerism vs. Masculinism
The late twentieth century was a time of great change for the American male. Many men dropped their hunting rifles for Starbucks Coffee, and designer hair styling products. It was a relatively peaceful time, and due to our economic success, people were able to buy things they wanted instead of only the things they needed. These elements fused to produce an average male that was perhaps less masculine, and less dominant than the traditional male of years past. The term “metrosexual” has now entered our society’s vocabulary. One of the most popular television shows is currently “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” which uses homosexual stereotypes to turn gruff men into fashion savvy sophisticates. Marketers observing this movement tried “to convince men that they needed to cram their cabinets with as many expensive balms, masks and scrubs as women stockpile” (Barker, 2004). In Fight Club (Fincher, Linson, Chaffin, & Bell, 1999), an everyday office worker named Jack creates an alter-ego who masterminds Project Mayhem, a plan to destroy American consumerism (attachment to materialistic values or possessions) in hopes of advancing masculinism (embracing the characteristics that make men different from women). The conflict between his two personalities is representative of the internal conflict inside many males today, that of conforming to the new wave of consumerism versus retaining aspects of the traditional male. This paper will examine how Jack was psychologically damaged by males losing their traditional roles in society.
Social Roles Theory
Fight Club poses that men are entering depressed states because they have become part of the American commercial machine which is changing the roles of men. These changing roles are called norms because they are expectations put on a male in the dynamics of a...