Primal Instinct and Violence in Search of Masculine Identity in Fight Club

Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk, represents the rebellion against order facilitated by the threat to masculinity among a specific class of American men. Promoted by violence and the desire to revert back to primal instincts, its members partake in a cultural and primitive form of play theorized by Johan Huizinga. The narrator in Fight Club, unnamed in the book but who the movie refers to as Jack, is a single middle-class white man who, in the absence of a father figure, never pursues the path of traditional manhood. He is an unmarried “30 year old boy,” and in his adult years, fails to find self-fulfillment with superficial material possessions. He becomes “a slave to the IKEA nest egg instinct.” In an attempt to relieve his chronic insomnia, Jack attends various support group meetings. However, the emotional release he discovers by visiting these support groups does not resonate with the primal and traditional views of masculinity. As a result he develops a split personality, Tyler Durden, a hyper-masculine superego bent on replacing the disempowered “generation of men raised by women.” The direction of masculinity in Fight Club towards violence becomes a crucial function to reaffirm the traditional characterization of men in modern society.

Since the earliest human societies, man’s primal impulse to reproduce is one of the most basic instincts for survival. Man evolved assets designed to attract at mate. For instance, large muscles may have signaled a man’s proficiency as a hunter and defender. However, men could not rely on strength alone. To be successful, men also had to show that they were creative and dependable providers, cleaver enough to find food and shelter for their families in hostile environments. Although these physical attributes have little meaning in modern societies, where most people work in offices and buy food at the local grocery store, they still hold a powerful sex appeal, an image that is constantly advertised to consumers to fuel their consumption.

Jack’s emotional emasculation results from the cultural consumerist consumption, as Tyler simply says, “The thing you own end up owning you.” Jack becomes addicted to the social groups as his only means of an intimate emotional release from the pains of feminization. Fight Club stages the fight against corporate consumption as a fight against all that is feminine, in which the idea of individualism is a marketing ploy designed to convince people to buy things like “the clever Njurunda coffee tables in the shape of a lime green yin and an orange yang” in order to express themselves (43). This is the domestication of masculine identity Jack is absorbed in, and the only release of his dissatisfaction is to pretend he is dying at various support groups. The support group for men with testicular cancer, “Remaining Men Together,” allows men to freely confide in each other their fears and humiliation as a result of their testicular cancer. One of the members, Bob, a former body builder who juiced up on steroids, lost his testicles to cancer and developed “bitch-tits” as a result of hormone replacement therapy. After the requisite sharing of stories, it is time to hug; it is a process that is clearly mocked as a feminized approach in therapy for men. Yet the therapy they seek involves the reconciliation of their loss by saying “we’re still men.” Fight Club contains numerous references to castration as the epitome of loss of masculine identity. For example, after Jack’s condo is blown up, Tyler tells him that it could be worse: “A women could cut off your penis while you’re sleeping and throw it out the window of a moving car.” Also, castration is used as a threat to various enemies of Project Mayhem. These men have lost not only their manliness, but also their capacity to reproduce future generations. They have lost a major part of their primal instinct for survival. While Tyler is emotionally emasculate, Bob represents the physical manifestation of emasculation by having his testicles removed. But even Bob with his “bitch-tits” is able to reaffirm his masculinity through the violence of fight club.

Violence is portrayed as a sport in Fight Club. Fight club provides the basic structure for men to vent their aggression with the contempt they find in society around them. In primitive man (as well as other carnivorous animals), it would seem that the primal emotion inciting combat with other fellow humans was the instinct to survive. Generally speaking, since they must eat to live and kill to eat, when they were driven by hunger they had two options: to hunt other animals less mighty then themselves, or combat their own kind by either stealing from them, or in the stress of famine, devouring them for food. While the men in fight club are not fighting to satisfy their desire for food, the warrior mentality of the individuals who participate in the ritual of fight club are engaging in a form of play theorized by Huizinga. Like animals, men participate in play, an action that “is more than a mere physiological phenomenon or a psychological reflex” (Huizinga 1). This basic instinct for survival is fundamental to the simplest forms of play; possibly to satisfy some primal necessity to prove one’s dominance. Huizinga summed up the formal characteristic of play to a “free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious’, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly” (Huizinga 8). Each man is allowed the chance to fight an opponent in a testosterone-fueled bare-knuckled brawl until one becomes limp or yells “Stop!” War in Fight Club is seen as a cultural function. The one-on-one battles are “waged within a sphere whose members regard each other as equals or antagonist[s] with equal rights” (Huizinga 89). This camaraderie allows the members to fight each other so fiercely and remain loyal friends after. The participants are “convinced that the action actualizes and effects a definite beatification, brings about an order of things higher than that in which they customary live” (Huizinga 14). Each fight becomes an endurance of pain, a test of who can last the longest and achieve a heightened state of what it means to be alive. The glorification that comes from this blend of combat and play intertwined to form war as “the most intense, the most energetic form of play and at the same time the most palpable and primitive” (Huizinga 89).

War as a game resonates in fight club the same way that Huizinga proposed: “all fighting is bound by rules of play” (Huizinga 89). The rules of Fight Club adhere to this formal characterization of play, allowing the men to engage in physical contact “within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner” (Huizinga 89). The setting of fight club allows for this form of play to exist. The first two rules of fight club, “You do not talk about fight club,” are designed to encourage all men to follow in the newly established counterculture. Under the illusion of secrecy, fight club existed “only when fight club started and fight club ended.” The basement arena of fight club provides a space, “a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally,” where each man has the opportunity to transcend reality and rise above the lifestyle that corporations have cast upon them, essentially saving their masculinity (Huizinga 10). Violence, as play in this setting, “promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world” (Huizinga 46). We can clearly see the regression of masculinity in the all male members of fight club towards violence in a gruesome spectacle of bare-knuckled brutality and stylistic gore, in which fighting becomes more than a ritual, it is the source of their release of inhibitions.

Fight Club becomes a self-destructive method of self-discovery that frees men from emasculation. Each male in fight club turns to violence in an attempt to reawaken the senses. Fight Club turns violence into a traditional notion of masculinity, and enables men to engage in a heterosexual style of brutality and male bonding. It becomes a place where men can experience a true admiration of the now, a sense of being in the present. They are searching for a type of freedom that doesn’t come until one has nothing to lose. “You weren't alive anywhere like you were alive here,” Jack says, because, “who guys are in fight club is not who they are in the real world” (51, 49). Fight club “isn’t about winning or losing fights” or “about looking good” (51). Unlike the commercial image of men, to which Tyler remarks “self-improvement is masturbation”, Jack understands fight club to be a rebirth through violence. He remarks that after fight club “when you wake up Sunday afternoon you felt saved” (51). For the members of fight club “self –improvement isn’t the answer…self-destruction is the answer” (49).

In fact, Jacks manifestation of an alter ego is primarily the result of his desire to escape. Tyler is composed of all the traits he wished he had, “I look like you want to look, I fuck like you want to fuck. I’m smart, capable and most importantly I am free in all the ways you are not.” Tyler often questions Jack’s motives towards a feminized sense of consumerism by asking if it is “essential to our survival in the hunter-gatherer sense of the world.” Tyler wants to revert back to minimalism, which brings up the issue of primal necessities. Unlike Jack who is concerned with material goods and the status they would bring him, Tyler lives on mere necessities. The house he lives in is a basic shelter, and a leaky one at that. He stops watching television and rarely showers. Tyler’s aspiration towards primalism is clearly evident when he describes his vision of the world around him. “In the world I see,” he says, “You are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.” Tyler’s persuasion for an instinctive primal direction leads to the creation of fight club and eventually Project Mayhem.

Violence in Project Mayhem is used as a tool to attack corporations which hinder grey-collar masculine identity. Through fight club, the practice of minimalism, and the destruction of various aspects of white-collar society, the members of Project Mayhem construct a new identity where they abandon commercialized individuality in favor of their own counterculture. The members of Project Mayhem are told: “You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake.” Rather, “You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.” This theme is constantly repeated in order to escape capitalist society, where image is everything. Tyler instructs that "You are not your bank account. You are not the clothes you wear. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your bowel cancer. You are not your Grande Latte. You are not the car you drive. You are not your fucking khakis.” In addition, Tyler sends each member various homework assignment. For example, one of the assignments was to pick a fight with a stranger, but to lose. The homework assignments Tyler hands out exemplify the crisis portrayed in America and the need for violence as radical change. Jack says that “most people, normal people, do just about anything to avoid a fight.” By using violence against total strangers, the members of Project Mayhem are reaching out and expanding the thrill of violence as a means of redefining masculine identity. Jack also uses self-inflicted violence to blackmail his boss. Ironically the “corporate sponsorship” he received is used to wreak havoc on the rest of corporate society.

The overwhelming spectacle of violence in Fight Club plays a key role in providing the audience with a primal understanding of masculinity. Violence in Fight Club progresses out of Jack’s dissatisfaction with corporate consumption into a massive counterculture army bent on demolition as a means to freedom. It is this physical aggression that serves as the crucial element of male bonding. In terms of Huizinga, fight club as play involves each participant into a state of higher being. Just as each step, from therapy support groups, to the creation of fight club, to the widespread destruction in Project Mayhem, is packaged as an attempt to reestablish masculine identity.