Essay on Fight Club the Movie

Fight Club tells the story of an everyday man who wanders from the safety of his nine-to-five life into a no-man's-land of violence and social destruction. The protagonist, played by Edward Norton, is a white-collared American nobody who joins an underground boxing society and engages in bare fisted fighting in an attempt to recover his sense of manhood. How did he lose it you ask? By trying to achieve the American Dream--the right job, home, and all the other things we are taught to get--caused him to lose any sense of himself as a strong, powerful man with a purpose, who is in control of his own destiny. The fight club becomes the means to prove their masculinity to themselves and each other.
As directed by David Fincher, Fight Club is a movie about both the dehumanizing effects of the consumer culture that forms the backbone of America, and the excesses of the men's movement. The narrator is a slave to the American dream, whose voiceover discloses a sarcastic, nonconforming, but frail interior life.…