it reinscribes white heterosexuality within a dominant logic of stylized brutality and male bonding that appears to denigrate, and to wage war against, all that is feminine. In this instance, the crisis of capitalism is reduced to the crisis of masculinity, and the nature of the crisis lies less in the economical, political, and social conditions of capitalism itself than in the rise of a culture of consumption in which men are allegedly domesticated, rendered passive, soft, and emasculated. (p. 5)

As Tyler puts it, “We are a generation of men raised by women. I am wondering if another woman is the answer we need.” Giroux (2001) accuses Fight Club of functioning as a dangerous “public pedagogy,” which reflects and reinforce “deeply conventional views of violence, gender relations, and masculinity” (p. 6).

In a response to Giroux’s article, Clark (2001) suggests that Giroux probably missed the specific tone of the movie, and in particular “it possible to argue that Fight Club’s satirical edge helps make associations of masculinity and violence more visible and even to critique them” (p. 416). Crowdus (2000) also takes position against the critics, who labeled the movie as “ugly,” “stomach churning,” “morally repulsive,” “dangerous,” and “macho porn.” These critics usually condemn the numerous violent scenes that function as “a mindless glamorization of brutality, a morally irresponsible portrayal, which they feared might encourage impressionable young male viewers to set up their own real-life fight clubs in order to beat each other senseless” (par. 13). According to Crowdus (2000),

glamorization was definitely not what they had in mind, however, since they consciously chose to avoid the conventionally stylized and physically sanitized barroom fist fights, choreographed like raucous dance routines, so familiar from classic Hollywood Westerns or the martial-arts displays in the contemporary films of Jackie Chan, Steven Segal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, or their innumerable brethren. The far more realistic melees in Fight Club are instead characterized by a lot of awkward grappling, wild roundhouse swings, head butting, kneeing, headlocks, low blows, and other amateurish wrestling maneuvers--the way guys who are not used to fighting would fight. (par. 14)

The cuts and bruises don’t disappear from one day to another from the faces of the protagonists: for instance, Jack is reproached several times by his boss for his indecorous appearance at work. The fights don’t end with a winner and a loser who must prove his submission, but instead with an intimate, homoerotic hug, where it is impossible to distinguish winners from losers. Even Jack, leader of the fight clubs without been aware of it, goofily loses a fight with Bob, his friend with huge, sweaty “bitch boobs.” Using Jack’s words, “Fight club was not about winning or losing. When the fight was over, nothing was solved, but nothing mattered.”

According to Crowdus (2000), these scenes are far from being senseless, since “the filmmakers provided a comic or dramatic context for every fight, with each bout functioning in terms of character development or to signal a key turning point in the plot” (par. 15). Two scenes are important from this functional perspective.

In the first one, the godfather-like bossy owner of the bar where the first fight club has been formed bursts in during a fight and orders everybody to leave the place. In a classic “macho” movie, the audience would expect to see the hero taking the control of the situation and beating the enemy with elegant and destructive moves. Instead, Tyler lets the boss beat him and transform his face in a mask of blood without moving a finger. Eventually, the boss runs away scared to death by Tyler’s behavior. After the fight, Tyler delivers a significant political speech (the first sentences are “What are we? I don’t know . . . consumers? Right! We are consumers. We are byproducts of lifestyle obsession”). With this scene, the members of the fight club are moved to another level of action and involvement. From that moment on, the fight club transforms itself from a private to the public phenomenon: a first step to “Project Mayhem.”

In the second scene, Jack decides to seek vengeance against a new fight club member, because he is jealous of his close relation with Tyler. During their fight, Jack breaks Fight Club Rule #3 (“When someone says ‘stop,’ or goes limp, the fight is over”) and disfigures his rival. The crowd observes shocked and horrified the scene. Tyler looks down at “psycho boy” Jack in disapproval and makes sure that the victim is taken to the hospital, while Jack confesses: “I felt like destroying something beautiful.” This scene, which arouses more repulsion to violence than glamour, shows the increasing, repressed attraction that Jack was developing for his second personality Tyler.

In Fight Club, huge doses of irony surround what Giroux (2001) considers an exaltation of male virility. At the beginning of the movie, the protagonist tries to overcome his insomnia in a club for men who had testicular cancer and had their organs removed. He finally finds rest in the abnormal breast of one of them, Bob. During the course of the movie, he shows in several occasions his affection for Bob, who will become actively involved in “Project Mayhem.” Jack is portrayed as an asexual, almost impotent person, and in one occasion he complains to be “neutral” in Marla’s eyes. The narrator also develops a homosexual attraction to Tyler. He is particularly jealous of Marla, who has sexual encounters with Tyler in parody of hypersexual machismo. Clark (2001) also observes that “the gun in the mouth of the anti-hero [Jack] . . . at the beginning and at the end of the movie seems more than anything portray a sexual act” (p. 417).

During the movie, as Clark (2001) and Crowdus (2000) pointed out, Jack also expresses several times his criticisms to the terrorist activities promoted by Tyler. He nicknames the members of the “Project Mayhem” group as “space monkeys,” because they are always busy in mindlessly parroting slogans like “In Tyler we trust” or zen-ish quotes like “You are not beautiful and unique as a snowflake.” According to Crowdus (2000), “as Tyler proselytizes to his troops through a bullhorn, it is clear that they have become as manipulated and dehumanized by their leader as they ever were by the corporate civilization from which he is trying to rescue them” (par. 18).

The Image of the “Falling Towers:” Two Political Viewpoints

The previous comparative analysis supports the idea that the two movies manifest in their subtexts not just mere superficial differences, but two radically opposite sets of assumptions about reality (Bertens, 1991). With this philosophical aspect, we also receive two strong political standpoints. In fact, postmodern cinema departs from the modernist model and target its ideological themes such as “the idea of historical progress, sense of national purpose, work ethic, individual heroism and redemption, the essential goodness and stability of American social, the moral validity of U.S. foreign and military policies” (Boggs 2001, p. 355).