In Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, the perception of common and rare gender aspects is carefully manipulated with in an ironical gambit in order to bring to light significant gender misconceptions placed by society. Masculinity is especially a critical aspect in the development of multiple characters, including the main characters. These gender roles serve as not only a way of character development, but also on a deeper root, a root that travels back to the author’s intuition and mindset. I believe that Palahniuk utilizes gender roles in order to impugn what society has labeled as the standard set of femininity and masculinity; to reveal that it is still genuinely acceptable acting in way that is deviated from what society calls normal and still live a happy life. The objective of this paper is to examine how and why Palahniuk might direct his novel in …show more content…
Masculinity thus becomes a product, a tangible form that serves as a medium for another man’s use. Throughout the chapters that were assigned to be read, chapter two certainly is where Palahniuk sets this tone. He first uses Bob’s physical appearance which contradicts his emotional and mental state masculinity wise. The narrator first describes Bob as having “broad shoulders and a body builder statue” only to be sobbing on the narrator’s shoulders (16). Masculinity in today’s day and age, revolves around acting and looking “tough”, which is short for not expressing deep emotions. "Being a man" then becomes owning the right watch or car instead of knowing who you are and what your values really are. Bob’s emotional clarity is Phalakniuk’s suggestion of what true masculinity means. Showing true emotions, despite not being common is true
The concept of masculinity is considered as the qualities and characteristics of a man, typical what is appropriate to a man. In this article, A Community Psychology of Men and Masculinity: Historical and Conceptual Review, The author Eric S. Mankowski and Kenneth I. Maton, analyze four main themes: "Men as gendered beings, the privilege and damage of being a masculine man, men as a privileged group, and men’s power and subjective powerlessness. The second and fourth themes are described as
Over time, the United States has experienced dramatic social and cultural changes. As the culture of the United States has transformed, so have the members of the American society. Film, as with all other forms of cultural expression, oftentimes reflects and provides commentary on the society in which it is produced. David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club examines the effects of postmodernity on masculinity. To examine and explicate these effects, the film presents an unnamed narrator, an everyman, whose alter-ego—in the dissociative sense—is Tyler Durden.
In Kimmel’s essay “’Bros Before Hos’: The Guy Code” he argues that the influence of society on masculinity is equal to or greater than biological influences on masculinity. In the essay, Kimmel uses various surveys and interviews to validate his argument. He points to peers, coaches, and family members as the people most likely to influence the development of a man’s masculinity. When a man has his manliness questioned, he immediately makes the decision never to say or do whatever caused him to be called a wimp, or unmanly. Kimmel’s argument is somewhat effective because the readers get firsthand accounts from the interviewees but the author does not provide any statistics to support his argument.
“I had to know what Tyler was doing while I was asleep. If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?” (Palahniuk 32). When Tyler is in action, narrator is not contemporaneous in a sense that he is Tyler now. Tyler is someone who doesn’t give any importance to money-oriented world but he indeed believes in the willpower of constructing a classless society. The narrator is insomniac, depressed, and stuck with unexciting job. Chuck’s prominent, pessimistic, radical work, Fight Club, investigates inner self deeper and deeper into personality, identity, and temperament as a chapter goes by. Through his writing, Chuck Palahniuk comments on the inner conflicts, the psychoanalysis of narrator and Tyler Durden, and the Marxist impression of classicism. By not giving any name to a narrator, author wants readers to engage in the novel and associate oneself with the storyline of narrator. The primary subject and focus of the novel, Fight Club, is to comment socially on the seizing of manhood in the simultaneous world. This novel is, collectively, a male representation where only a single woman, Marla Singer, is exemplified. “Tyler said, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can” (46). This phrase is a mere representation of how to start a manly fight club. However, in the novel this scene is written as if two people are physically fighting and splashing blood all over the parking lot, in reality it’s just an initiation of fight club which resides in narrator’s inner self. The concept of this club is that the more one fights, the more one gets sturdier and tougher. It is also a place where one gets to confront his weaknesses and inner deterioration.
In the 1990s the male protagonist of Hollywood received a major face lift in many ways. The 1980s focused on hyper masculinized and violent male figures using their brawn and fighting skills to achieve their desires. Characters like Rocky Balboa and the Terminator were quite popular during that era, which made the shift to softer family-man protagonist in the 90s a rather bizarre change. In this paper, I will look through a Dramaturgical perspective at the violent male of the 80s giving way to the more family focused man of the 90s, using a rather comic but highly successful film, Mrs. Doubtfire. It was a popular movie of the time and through its cross dressing main character, it gives a much more interesting insight on the 90s male thought process and how he fit in with the changing family structure of the era. The film showed a new type of man who could achieve his goals through reflection, literal and emotional self-transformation without the use of violence. Through that as well, I will discuss the ever evolving matter of cross dressing as it applies to the film and how it is still used as a tool of storytelling and character development through both theatre and cinematic history.
Tuss, Alex (Winter 2004). "Masculine Identity and Success: A Critical Analysis of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club". The Journal of Men's Studies 12 (2): 93–102.
The topics that Joe Ehrmann uses as framework for his Building Men for Others program are quite intriguing and make you really question masculinity. The first topic, rejecting false masculinity, can be interpreted a few different ways. In the book, it states: “As young boys, we’re told to be men, or to act like men” soon followed with “we’ve got all these parents say ‘be a man’ to boys that have no concept of what that means. I completely agree with the statement of Joe Ehrmann and often question the definition of ‘being a man’. Many boys and men will reject the idea of a man being anything other than being big and strong or having power.
Friday, Krister. ""A Generation of Men Without History": Fight Club, Masculinity, and the Historical Symptom." Project MUSE. 2003.
Chuck Palahniuk, born 1962 into a seemingly functional lifestyle, has made a name in the literary world over the last decade by magnifying the many facets of the human habits of dysfunction. After his first published novel, Fight Club, made waves in 1999, Palahniuk went on to take the fiction world by storm with novels such as Diary, Lullaby, Invisible Monsters, and several others, solidifying a reputation “as a skilled writer who continues to keep his readers uncomfortable” (“Chuck Palahniuk”). The author has also published two nonfiction works, but it is his fiction’s raw cynicism and his inability to be assigned to a genre that has made Palahniuk the success he is today. By many accounts, he struggled to find a path throughout his young life, holding jobs as everything from a dish washer to a movie projectionist, before finding success and sanity in the process of writing professionally (“Chuck Palahniuk”). Palahniuk’s ability to combine the intellectual and political with the disgusting, graphic, and degrading is what sets his writing apart from other satirists of the current literary scene. For example, in Haunted he uses a reality show gone wrong to create a picture of the shallow human condition. Similarly, in Invisible Monsters the reader follows the story of a former model, Shannon McFarland, who is missing the lower half of her face and a beautiful male-to-female transvestite, Brandy Alexander, as they make their way across the country to confront Shannon’s former best friend. Invisible Monsters was Palahniuk’s fictional depiction of the nonfiction world of the fashion industry and the impact it has on self image (“Chuck Palahniuk”). In this essay, I will be discussing Palahniuk’s least satirical fiction work, Lull...
In today’s world, becoming a man is a right of passage to most people. A lot of times, however, a man’s sense of self gets denied because of the views from this generation. They shy away from their real personalities and fail to achieve the things they love because they are afraid of being struck down by the world’s view. Boys try to meet up to fake expectations of masculinity, they mask their real self in order to seem superior, and they hide their emotions so that they can meet up to these fake views that are quite prominent in our society.
Jackass is a group of people that specializes in very violent, dangerous, and crazy stunts that have been recorded and made into movies and a television series for people’s enjoyment. Their latest piece is a movie called Bad Grandpa which is another spin off of ridiculous stunts that demonstrate violence. The main character Johnny Knoxville, who plays 86-year-old Irving Zisman, is an old man whose grandson follows him around the country performing dangerous stunts just to make jokes and to live on the edge. Although it may seem very comical and for peoples enjoyment, the series of Jackass and especially the newest piece of Bad Grandpa has addressed the serious topic of sexism. Sexism is a system of advantages that serves to privilege men, subordinate women, denigrate woman-identified values and practices, enforce male dominance and control, and reinforce norms of masculinity that are dehumanizing and damaging to men (Botkin 320). It is important to acknowledge the fact that the movie Bad Grandpa is promoting sexism through the ways women are being portrayed in certain scenes of the movie. This is supported by the theoretical framework of Hackman’s four characteristics of gender roles.
Ruddell, Caroline. "Virility and vulnerability, splitting and masculinity in Fight Club: a tale of contemporary male identity issues." Extrapolation 48.3 (2007): 493+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 Dec. 2013.
We’re all familiar with the stereotypes and myths about what it means to “be a man.” The victorious leader gets what he wants using aggression and does not accept failure; he is smooth with the ladies, and he is often good with a gun. He is usually rich and in control, especially in control of women, like a father who loves his daughter dearly but will be damned if she’s going to go out dressed like that. The list could go on and on with the stereotypes. But the Coen Brothers’ cult-classic film, The Big Lebowsk (1998), with its hero “The Dude,” contradicts these notions of masculinity. The Coen brothers offer several familiar stereotypes of masculinity (the Vietnam vet, the successful capitalist, an oversexed bowler, some aggressive German nihilists), yet it is these characters that throughout the film are shown to be absurd, insecure, and even impotent. It is these stereotype men that the Coen brothers criticize. “Sometimes there’s a man,” says the narrator over and over again, pointing out the Dude’s non-stereotypical masculinity as the true representation of what it means to be a man. The brothers then illustrate that the men who give no thought to their identity, who ignore the pressure to conform to cultural expectations, are to be regarded as “real men.”
With its phallic musical dream sequences, belligerent characters, and Gulf War backdrop, The Big Lebowski is saturated with masculinity overtones. In stark contrast to this theme of masculinity, the Dude is one of the least manly characters in the film. His aversion to violence, partiality for feminine cocktails, and lack of job and ambitions all go against what most of us would consider characteristic of a man. Despite all of his failures at traditional manhood, the Stranger, the iconic man of western film, asserts that the Dude is “the man for his time and place.” In “Logjammin’ and Gutterballs: Masculinities in The Big Lebowski,” Dennis Allen interprets the Stranger’s assertion and the entire theme of masculinity in the film as a critique of “a variety of more or less culturally acceptable definitions of the masculine” (388). Although Allen’s analysis of the masculine theme in The Big Lebowski is correct, he misinterprets the role of the Dude within this theme. Allen believes the Dude, like the other characters of the film, represents a slacker masculinity that has become popular in today’s culture. While there is evidence to support Allen’s claim, this interpretation of the Dude does not address the flawed masculinity presented through the other characters of the film. I contend that the Dude is “the man for his time n’ place”
Masculinity only exists in coherence with femininity. If a culture does not treat men and women as carrier of polarized character types, at least in principal, is not able to have a conception of masculinity, like it is found in contemporary European/American culture. Attention has to be brought to “historical specificity and historical change,” because it “illustrates the social construction of masculinity, the multiplicity of ways in which masculinities can be enacted or lived and the existence and potential of change” (42). A good basis to start discussing what masculinity and femininity constitute out of, is by investigating what men and women do (or how they behave). If gender is cultural, then men and women are able to step into and inhabit masculinity as well as femininity “as a ‘cultural space’, one with its own sets of behaviors” (43). These behaviors include a number of culturally defined characteristics. Male competiveness, aggression, and emotional inarticulateness are said to have their own place in the economic system and stand for masculinity. Still widely accepted is the view that men and women differ fundamentally and that men as well as women have a distinct set of fixed traits that characterizes one as male or