Fight Club & Nietzsche: Overcoming Emasculation

The text of Bob Doyle's great commentary

[Many people have trouble with following spoken english and I wanted to have the text of this great piece for myself, too. So I extracted the subtitles auto generated by youtube, corrected them and added some layout. I posted a german translation, too.]

[Note: the original video vanished, thanks to Pat90 for finding this]

Fight Club is the most important film about the state of western masculinity in recent memory. The 1999 classic painfully highlights the greatest disease of our civilization, namely the emasculation of the western man.

Castrate: "We're still men"

Narrator: "Yes, we're men, men is what we are."

Over the course of its narrative, the film offers the viewer a radical antidote to this disease. It presents the philosophical concept of the Nietzschean ubermensch. The nameless protagonist of Fight Club, simply described as "the narrator", embodies a typical late 20th century american consumer. His life is dedicated solely to the acquisition of wealth, which he invests in the products of international mega-corporations.

N: "I'd flip through catalogs and wonder what kind of dining set defines me as a person"

He has been thoroughly emasculated by the egalitarian conformity of postmodern society, which has left him fearful, lazy and entirely mediocre. Nihilism has corrupted his soul to a point where he cannot identify a clear purpose for his existence. His lived experience is an endlessly repeating loop of insignificant events, split between the offices of his employer, business trips and the suffocating comfort of his ikea furnished apartment.

N: "Everything's a copy of a copy of a copy"

This vicious cycle of meaninglessness turns the narrator into a chronic insomniac. He seeks comfort in a self-help group for survivors of testicular cancer. Here he meets a group of disillusioned men, who suffered through actual emasculation as a result of their disease. This male safe space becomes a form of escapism for the narrator, where he can feel good about himself by feeding off the misery of others.

This proves to be a temporal arrangement though. The distortion of reality evaporates immediately, when a girl named Marla Singer joins their group. This reminds the protagonist subconsciously of his own emasculation. Secretly he is attracted to her, but remains in denial about this fact to avoid facing his own impotence. His insomnia resurfaces, which results in dissociative identity disorder.

N: "If you wake up at a different time in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?"

This is where the plot introduces Tyler Durden, who is - unbeknownst to the narrator - a projection of his deranged mind. Tyler represents his innate desire to overcome emasculation and nihilism. This becomes the main conflict of the narrator's character arc. His old impotent self struggles against his new hyper-masculine identity for dominance.

Ultimately the story is about becoming who one really is. Tyler's strategy to guide his other half towards enlightenment is preaching a contemporary interpretation of Nietzschean philosophy.

The film itself functions as an allegory for the philosopher's 19th century magnum opus, the book "Thus spoke Zarathustra". The central story here revolves around the character Zarathustra, who preaches to the great unwashed masses, that god is dead and therefore man has to evolve or be annihilated. In it, Nietzsche also offers a harsh critique of western christianity. According to him, it's most emphasized value was humanity's search for truth, which it offered in form of its own dogma.

This caused civilization to perpetually seek truth, which culminated in the discovery of the scientific method and the emergence of the age of enlightenment in the 18th century. This in turn resulted in the decline of christianity in the west. The implication of this was a dark one, however, because the refutation of this highest of all beliefs created cynicism towards all other supposed meta truths and values.

Existential nihilism, the believe that there is no objective meaning to existence, has become the dominant quasi-religion of western civilization ever since. Zarathustra warns the masses about the dangers of nihilism, as the disability of values leads to the era of the so-called last man, a period in which man stagnates because of his lack of purpose. He therefore turns away from creation towards endless consumption and apathy.

At this point we return to Fight Club and to the narrator, who represents the contemptible last man. His attitude is cynical and pessimistic, despite the supposed fulfillment he finds in mindless consumption. Deep down, however, he's aware that his time is slowly running out and he's achieving nothing in the process.

N: "This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time."

His namelessness or in other words interchangeability echoes the masses of "thus spoke Zarathustra". They are also aware, that they are numbing the chronic meaninglessness of their lives with hedonistic consumption.

Greater men, such as Zarathustra himself or those who take action and create, are secretly envied, but publicly ridiculed. People end up conforming to the mediocrity of their neighbors, either because they fear the public shaming or are just outright lazy, which applies to most men. This exemplifies Nietzsche's idea of slave morality, which entails a mindset of obedience, patience and humility. The result is postmodern society as we know it, which preaches weakness and pacifism as virtues and elevates victimhood to sainthood. The weak despise the strong and therefore start to attack their achievements with vitriolic slander. The masses eradicate individualism from within and turn western civilization into an egalitarian and declining nightmare.

Tyler Durden takes on the role of Zarathustra in the internal dialogue of the narrator and preaches to himself about the decline of civilization.

TD: "Murder, crime, poverty these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear, rogaine, viagra, olestra"

N: "Martha Stewart"

TD: "Fuck Martha Stewart, Martha's polishing the brass on the Titanic, it's all going down, man!"

He rejects the notion that the accumulation of property by mindless labor can be an inherently meaningful task, as it rather takes away from our ability to focus on pursuits that really matter.

TD: "Things you own end up owning you"

In a cataclysmic event, the apartment of the narrator is destroyed by an explosion, which accelerates his personal transformation. This readjusts his focus onto self-actualization, a process which he visualizes in his interactions with Tyler. A key aspect of Tyler's approach is the theme of self-destruction, or as he puts it

TD: "Self-improvement is masturbation. Now, self-destruction...."

He encourages the narrator to punch him after their first meeting in Loose Tavern. This escalates into a full contact fight. This kind of rough play breaks up the inner wiring of the last man type narrator.

According to Nietzsche, the emergence of existential nihilism coincides with the return of death anxiety. Western man has lost his faith in the afterlife as a positive outlook. The suffering experienced throughout a lifetime is therefore amplified, because there is no heavenly salvation to comfort the pain. Postmodern civilization is mostly concerned with numbing this exact pain. It denies suffering as a critical element of the human experience, demonizes any form of violence and promotes hedonistic escapism.

The desire to build a society that denies the value of pain and suffering is a deeply utopian one, which leads to the constant expansion of the state. It offers to protect its citizens from death while simultaneously providing pleasure and comfort. Nietzsche is disgusted by this idea, as he believes that the state turns human beings into mere herd animals, that live ignorant of their own mortality and without purpose. Instead he proposes to face ones own mortality head-on, which is necessary to overcome death anxiety. He rejects the other worldliness, that both christianity and the secular state offer to mankind.

The fight with Tyler introduces the narrator to the idea of embracing pain and suffering as something that is as much part of the human experience as pleasure and comfort. Self-help groups only served him to deny the inevitable physical destruction of his human body. Fights, on the other hand, allow him to confront his own impermanence.

[After a fight the narrator pulls a tooth out]

TD: "Hey, [unintelligible] fall apart"

This sort of rewiring becomes very appealing to other last man types that witness the narrator fighting himself. They, too, are castrated by the life-denying comfort seeking and escapist culture of corporate america.

Within a few weeks, a Fight Club is founded where men meet to fight on a weekly basis. In the basement of Loose Tavern the disaffected men find spiritual salvation and violence, for they rediscover the purpose of masculinity. The evolution of testosterone was not an accident. A man's natural traits are increased strength and aggression. This was essential to protect and provide for one's offspring, a role without which civilization would have never been possible.

Contemporary society supplants the traditional role of the individual man with the state monopoly on violence. Consequently, it feminizes men by suppressing their biological tendencies. Some men, however, will never be pacified. The truth of the matter is, that men were created to suffer, men were born to fight and therefore men were born to create. Creation, however, is not a passive process as it requires the input of force. Nietzsche once formulated [that] every creation requires some form of destruction.

The ubermensch is aware that his life will end in annihilation. So he overcomes the plain will to live and rather embraces the will to power. He shapes his environment through force to create something that will outlast his short existence. But in order to do that, he has to accept enduring pain, suffering and destruction as part of the process.

The frustrated last men discover two truths in Fight Club. The first is that they have to confront hardship to truly accept the inevitability of death. The second is, that they have to destroy their postmodern self-conception before overcoming their emasculation to create something new. It is revealed, that Tyler set the narrator onto this path by destroying his old condo. This forcibly detaches the protagonist from his materialistic obsession and is the first step towards destroying his postmodern self-conception.

Tyler, however, understands that rejecting materialism and joining a Fight Club is not quite enough to fundamentally repolarize the narrator.

TD: "I say this about Marla: she's trying to hit bottom"

N: "Oh what, and i'm not?!"

TD "Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken"

A part of the narrator is still clinging on to his former self, because in his core he is still fearful, which prevents him from taking any meaningful action.

N: "What are we doing tonight?"

TD: "Tonight we make soap."

Tyler emphasizes the act of human sacrifice as the ultimate expression of heroism in the face of certain annihilation. Enduring and accepting the value of pain is a trait of higher men. The narrator however is initially incapable of that, despite him claiming to be enlightened.

N: "What is this?

TD: "This is a chemical burden."

[Fixes the narrator hand to the table and puts strong acid on it. The narrator screams in pain]

TD: "The first soap was made from the ashes of heroes, like the first monkey shot into space. Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing!"

What Tyler achieves in this scene is highlighting the dilemma of existential nihilism. If god has abandoned us, we are faced with two options. We can either escape from reality or we can face the fact that nobody but ourselves will save us from our mortal suffering. To choose the latter, one has to be clear-minded and brave. Fear, on the other hand, would only lead back to the former.

TD: "I have to consider the possibility that god does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you. You have to know, not fear, know that someday you're gonna die."

N: "You don't how this feels! [meaning the acid on his hand, but Tyler shows him his own scar of acid burn]

TD: "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything."

Nietzsche himself believed, that the highest must come to its height out of the deepest depth, meaning that man has to hit bottom to truly grasp the finiteness of his own existence. Only then can he positively embrace his short life and evolve into the ubermensch who creates his own purpose and takes action to fulfill it.

TD: "Congratulations, you're one step closer to hit bottom."

Tyler continues to introduce the other men of Fight Club to the idea that they belong to a generation of last men who have been turned into a homogenous herd of western consumers misguided by a set of false expectations.

TD: "Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose, no place, we have no great war, no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives."

He attributes great unfulfilled potential to the members of Fight Club, which mirrors Nietzsche's idea of the higher man. The philosopher accurately concludes, that the decline of christianity inevitably led to the emergence of egalitarian mass movements throughout the western world. They all share direct lineage to their religious ancestor. However, because christian morality originally popularized the concept of the blank slate, man was created in the image of god and therefore contains an element of divinity within a soul. Nietzsche sees this dogma of fundamental equality as a poison for mankind, because it is used by the mediocre mass to enforce slave morality.

He despises both socialism and liberal democracy as unnatural ideologies that will lead to the dominance of the nihilistic herd of the western world until the end of the 21st century. In Nietzsche's book the prophet Zarathustra ultimately comes to the conclusion that the masses are unwilling to accept the significance of the ubermensch as the antithesis to the degenerate last man for the sake of civilizational survival. Instead, he assembles a group of higher men in whom he sees the potential for greatness and a willingness to transcend the egalitarian grip of the herd.

Tyler mimics this approach by building a group of dedicated followers who seek to overcome the emasculating nature of contemporary western society. Fight Club transitions to Project Mayhem, where recruits have to prove their perseverance before discarding the fake individualism that consumer and advertising culture has sold to them.

TD [to the recruits]: "You're not your job. you're not how much money you have in the bank, not the car you drive, you're not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world"

What unites these men is, that their life is without purpose or meaning and so they decide to sacrifice themselves for a greater idea.

TD: "Like a monkey ready to be shot into space, a space monkey ready to sacrifice himself for the greater good"

Tyler prepares them for a spiritual war to overthrow the unnatural order of postmodern society:

TD: "You're not special. You're not a beautiful or unique snow flake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else."

N: "Tyler built himself an army."

His ultimate goal is the destruction of the last man mentality that has created a civilization of mediocrity and decline. The group initially vandalizes various inanimate objects, targeted specifically because they symbolize the corporate mentality of western consumer culture.

The narrator grows increasingly uncomfortable with this situation as he fears the ever expanding scope of Tyler's movement. This reveals his remaining attachment to the established order, mostly because he fears the consequences of overthrowing it. In his mind, Fight Club was intended to be a high level self-help group and should have never evolved into anything greater. This, however, would have meant, that the weekly basement fights would have been nothing more than a way for these men to escape the emasculating nature of their everyday experience, escaping into an imaginary ice cave during a self-help seminar or escaping into the basement of a local bar.

Neither would have been fundamentally different. Tyler understands, that Fight Club could only ever serve as an introduction to a dissident mindset but the logical endgame would have to be the establishment of a new civilizational order. Project Mayhem is the practical implementation of this ambition. It's primary purpose is to destroy centralized financial institutions to accelerate the inevitable collapse of the current system. It's secondary purpose is to create a decentralized network of spiritual warrior types who will form the aristocratic backbone of the new order, that will arise from the resulting state of chaos.

The ubermensch will be born out of the dark cloud that is mankind and will implement this process by what Nietzsche describes as "the re-evaluation of all values". This will challenge conventional slave morality and ultimately aims to fill the nihilistic void that was left by the metaphorical death of god with a new set of values that emphasizes self-mastery over the human mind. The values of materialism and egalitarianism will be rejected for the emasculating and inauthentic nature.

TD: "In the world i see, you're stalking out through the damn canyon forest around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the rist that cuts off vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison in the empty carpool lane of some abandoned super highway."

The narrator lives through a so-called near-life experience in form of a car crash after which his psychological alter ego and quasi father figure Tyler abandons him. This allows the narrator to witness the progression of his own movement which immediately frightens him, especially once he realizes, that people are actually sacrificing themselves for this greater cause.

Man: "In death a member of Project Mayhem has a name. His name is Robert Paulson, his name is Robert Paulson, his name is Robert Paulson his name is Robert Paulson...."

N: "come on guys, this...stop it!"

All other men: "...his name is Robert Paulson, his name is Robert Paulson."

Upon further investigation, he learns that Fight Club chapters have sprung up across the country, which leads him to the discovery of Tyler's true nature as part of his imagination.

N to Marla: "Say my name!"

Marla: "Tyler Durden, Tyler Durden, you fucking freak, what's going on?"

N to TD: "Tyler, i don't understand this!"

TD: "You were looking for a way to change your life. You could not do this on your own. All the ways you wish you could be, that's me. I look like you wanna look, i fuck like you wanna fuck, i am smart, capable and most importantly i'm free in all the ways that you are not. [...] little by little you're just letting yourself become...Tyler Durden."

N: "No, you have a house..."

TD: "rented in your name"

N: "... you have jobs you have a whole life...""

TD: "You have night jobs because you can't sleep where you step and make soap"

N: "Marla, you're fucking Marla, Tyler"

TD: "technically, you're fucking Marla, but it's all the same to her"

N: "Oh, my god..."

This represents the process of becoming oneself as described by Nietzsche. By rejecting the vision of how a western man ought to behave as defined by the system itself and embracing a lifestyle that embodies the nature of what a human man actually is, the narrator slowly, but surely, becomes an individual among a herd of nameless last men. The struggle to accept Tyler Durden as the authentic identity of the narrator is the ultimate purpose of the film Fight Club. This can only be achieved by destroying the inauthentic aspect of his identity, a process that naturally leads to resistance by the former self in a desperate bid to survive. The narrator hands himself to the local police department and informs them about Project Mayhem, in an attempt to sabotage the planned attack on the before mentioned financial institutions. The PD, however, has been infiltrated by members of Project Mayhem, who then attempt to physically castrate the narrator. He successfully defends himself against his own men, however, and manages to escape.

N: "I ran until my muscles burned and my veins pumped battery acid. Then i ran some more"

Sabotaging the movement that lifted the narrator out of a state of apathy and nihilism to protect the status quo proves that he is still emasculated by the system.

TD: "Greatest thing you've ever done"

N: "Nah, i can't let this happen"

TD: "You know there are ten other bombs in ten other buildings"

N: "God damn it, since when is Project Mayhem about murder?"

TD: "The buildings are empty. Security, maintenance, all our people. We're not killing anyone, man, we're setting them free!"

N: "God was dead, they shot him in the head."

TD: "When you want to make an omelet, you got to break some eggs."

In a penultimate scene, the inner conflict between the narrator and Tyler is visualized, wherein the former is eviscerated by the latter. Finally the protagonist throws himself off a staircase, hitting rock bottom in a metaphorically Nitzschean sense. The narrator now finds himself engaged in the last imaginary conversation with Tyler.

N: "This is too much. I don't want this!"

TD: "What do you want? Wanna go back to the shit job, fucking condo world, watching sitcoms? Fuck me, i won't do it!"

At this point he has endured a maximum of pain and suffering. He cannot stop the following events but for the first time he takes action on his own initiative.

[The narrator has a gun]

TD: "Hey, good for you, doesn't change a thing."

N: "Tyler, i want you to really listen to me. My eyes are open." [He shoots himself into his head]

This act symbolizes his transformation from a disillusioned nameless consumer to the individual Tyler Durden, who embodies the qualities of Zarathustra's ubermensch. He accepts suffering and death as part of the human experience and does so without fear in a clear state of mind. By pulling the trigger, he willingly removes all attachments to his previous life and the expectations of postmodern society, while fully embracing the possibility of immediate annihilation. It is in this moment, that his former self is destroyed as he regains his masculinity by taking action and sacrificing himself for a higher purpose.

He gives up all illusions of hope or control, because they've been pacifying him his entire life. Tyler regains the freedom to give his life meaning, because all distractions evaporate the second he faces this mortality head-on. The bullet passes through his cheek but metaphorically kills the projection of Tyler, because it has become superfluous now. By killing his imaginary father figure, Tyler becomes his own man. Independent and free to make his own decisions, this reflects the essence of Zarathustra's teachings, in which god is the father and upon his death mankind has to overcome its own mediocrity to reach a higher state of being and fill the void of nihilism with meaning.

Consequently Tyler accepts not only his new self but also his final break with postmodern society, symbolized by the climactic explosion and most importantly his desire for Marla Singer. She was the reason why his impotence escalated into the creation of his imaginary hyper-masculine alter-ego. His character transformation now allows him to finally overcome emasculation by engaging in an honest romantic relationship.

This is punctuated by a single vulgar frame, that flashes across the screen during the last shot of the film:

TD: "Nice, big cock!"

All in all, Fight Club is not a simple story, but it is relatable to many men of our generation. It reflects Nietzsche's belief that western civilization has been descending into mediocrity ever since the self-destruction of traditional christian values. Western men are suffering from a disease, that can only be described as emasculation, resulting from existential nihilism and death anxiety.

Instead of heroically facing the inevitability of their physical annihilation, they seek refuge in meaningless activities such as hedonism, consumerism and self-improvement. The resulting postmodern society is one, that is defined by lazy fearful and impotent last man types that drag each other down under the pretense of equality. Fight Club depicts the spiritual path of one such man to step over his metaphysical impotence and ultimately the system itself by embracing pain and suffering courageously. Only once he has sacrificed his form-up psychological self-conception can he regain his masculinity and with the freedom to create a meaningful existence.