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Examples Of Masculinity In Fight Club

Decent Essays

Fight Club

During the years of what has roughly been numbered from years 1961 to 1980, generation x was born into the world. Generation X, is the generation that was born after the Western Post - World War II baby boom. This generation is much overlooked and as when compared to other generations, Gen X is a generation defined by turmoil, uncertainty, and is poorly defined. 16 years later, the movie “Fight Club” is more important than ever. Today this movie speaks more to us than it did in 1999 when it was first released. Fight Club is a reflection of the suffering experienced by the Generation X male who feels trapped in a world of the grey-collar working-class, a world filled with materialism and distractions, a group of men raised in single-parent …show more content…

The irony of it is seen from the start, as the name of the film is Fight Club yet its disassociated with male independence. The narrator attends a support group meeting for men with testicular cancer, named "Remaining Men Together." It is here that he listens to a man lament the fact that his ex-wife just had a baby with her new husband. The population of this support group illustrates and signifies the crisis of masculinity in America. The men that he meets in this support group, more or less very much represent the cultural loss of masculinity. In Fight Club the "group hug" mentality of the early 1990's men's movement is replaced by raw and uncensored violence. Fight club is a place where men can experience a true sense of "being." "You weren't alive anywhere like you were alive here," the narrator tells us because, "who you were in fight club is not who you were in the rest of the world." In “Fight Club”, Endurance and the ability to withstand pain becomes a means by which the individual and his masculinity can be saved. The creation of “Fight Club” creates a role in not only helping the narrator with his identity crisis, but with his crisis of masculinity

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