The Gay Shit
The easiest talking point when discussing Fight Club for me personally is always going to be the homosexual nature of the relationship between our pathetic protagonist and Tyler Durden, his more successful roommate. When reading the book we are told almost immediately in plain terms that our narrator is in unrequited love with Tyler. "I want Tyler. Tyler wants Marla. Marla wants me." Given the fact that the duo and Marla go on to have a sexual and romantic courtship, this places the duo's relationship on the same level. The Narrator desires Tyler just as much as Tyler desires Marla. This cyclical chase is the force that propels our narrator forward through the plot. He is driven by this desire he can not fulfil and ultimately never does. It is more about making peace with the fact that he can't have Tyler than anything else.
The bond between men being held as something special and sacred is a very strong current within the hyper masculine world of the actual fighting club, a semi-public space where men can meet up to safely engage in anonymous rough physical contact with other men, under the agreement that it will remain private. Easily a thinly veiled metaphor for cruising, where closeted gay men would meet up anonymously for sex in semi-public spaces.
I'm not just making that up, it seems to be the real life parallel Chuck was trying to make, consciously or not. Even the rules of Fight Club are similar to the perceived rules of sex, don't talk about it in public, if someone yells stop or goes limp the fight is over, no shirts no shoes, and the fight lasts as long as it needs to. The fights are used as an all at once cathartic and communal, yet self-destructive experience. Our characters use the fights to feel better about their bodies in a similar way that being good at sex can give someone a confidence boost. They also use fights to punish themselves, seen when our narrator is at his lowest moment, mirroring the way sex can also be used as an escapist self-harming tactic.
Within the novel the language surrounding the fights is very erotic while holding that violent nature, describing them as sweaty and intimate experiences where sometimes all you can hear is the flat packing sound of flesh on flesh. Within the movie David Fincher adapted that into making them visually erotic as well. An iconic shot being the slow motion image of Brad Pitt on top of another man pounding him in the genitalia while a brutal and violent scene, the main highlight is Brad Pitt's physique as we watch his dominance of another man via his sex.
This duality of sex and violence, using violence as a proxy to sex or using violence to express frustrations with sex one can't have is something explored extensively within the character's actions. At a turning point in the novel our protagonist proposes an unnamed new comer to a fight, within the novel he is described as "having the face of an angel", a beauty that brings about anger and resentment within our narrator. Naturally our protagonist then proceeds to brutalize Angel Face in an ultimate act of destruction that he describes apocalyptically. Monologuing about wanting to kill every animal that wouldn't fuck to save its species. He places Angel in a sleeper-hold
in the crook of his arm like a baby
and beats it in until he is forcefully removed from the fight by the audience for breaking the third rule. It is in this scene, through the rage and destruction, we get the genesis of project mayhem which will carry the plot for the rest of the storyline.
Within the movie adaptation this scene is shuffled around and formatted in a way that brings new context and shines a light on Tyler and the Narrator's relationship that the movie was otherwise hiding. Our Angel Face, who is played by a bleach blond Jared Leto in one of his first steps into the world of acting, is already a born-again space monkey in the ranks of mischief mayhem. The incident that sets our protagonist off is not his apocalyptic angst but rather his jealous rage when he sees a moment between Tyler and Angel where Tyler cups his face in his hands and praises him for his mischief. The next scene is Angel and our narrator circling each other in the ring, where Angel is knocked to the ground then straddled while his face is pounded in a very gruesome and hard to watch moment in the film. However even with the gore, the imagery of Edward Norton sitting atop Jared Leto is a staging that feels very intentional, David Fincher chose to change the scene from a chokehold to a straddle. The reality of our protagonist’s sexual struggles is a core facet of the problems he faces and the journey that he goes on.
Men consenting to anonymous rough contact with exclusively other men had such mass appeal it engendered real life fight clubs across the world. Something Chuck addressed in the after word of Fight Club the novel. The cultural impact of Fight Club was strong, almost immediate and in the exact opposite direction that Chuck intended. Instead of parodying and mocking hyper masculinity and patriarchy, the world seemed to take Tyler's message entirely seriously. So how does what feels like such a core part of the story and messaging within Fight Club get overlooked so often by such a large portion of its audience? How can you divorce what the story is trying to convey from the clear homosexuality buried within its text? I really wish I had an answer.