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Virility and vulnerability, splitting and masculinity in Fight Club: a tale of contemporary male identity issues.

Article Excerpt
Fantasy-based film and television texts seem currently saturated with images of split psyches, doubles, and characters that often must face a different, or darker, side of themselves. Many films often deploy character splitting or body swapping, something also apparent in television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series, US, 1997-2003). Characters in these texts are often rendered out of control of their own bodies by becoming either literally split in two or metaphorically (such as with the use of mirrors). Does the frequency with which these character types appear lend them mythic status? A myth is usually a story, containing morals and/or beliefs about certain times, surely then a contemporary myth will mediate issues relating to current times. Importantly, the term myth also has the connotation of something imaginary or fantastical. Perhaps it is possible to view our preoccupation with identity and issues surrounding the unified body as having mythic qualities, particularly when such issues are often mediated through fantasy and/or psychological genres. In addition, these images of splitting perhaps suggest that we are in need of allegories that articulate a crisis in the sovereignty of the ego. Such an attack on the ego through the splitting of both the psyche and the body in contemporary psychological-based texts taps into contemporary issues surrounding identity, gender and the body, particularly when splits follow conventionalized oppositional binary positions such as active/passive, masculine/feminine.

Steven Shaviro suggests that "virility continually runs the risk of being seduced into vulnerability" (190). Shaviro is discussing the "use" of male bodies in Querelle (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany/France, 1982), and in particular the representation of homosexual male bodies, and he suggests that the body is created as spectacle where vulnerability and virility are not necessarily polarized. Importantly, the use of male bodies and masculinity has been the subject of much discussion in film and television theory for many years, perhaps due to its changing shape over recent times and concomitant shifts in meanings. By changing shape I mean literally: that the muscle-bound male body has been made spectacle in the action film as Yvonne Tasker argues. Alternatively, it can be viewed as being feminized in some horror films, such as the penetration and intrusion of the body in David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983, Canada). Recent psychological horror-based texts have also been preoccupied with the male body, however in some of these films, the body is created as a site of splitting and subsequent loss of autonomy. David Lynch, for example, often confuses the identity of male characters by morphing their bodies into other characters, thus suggesting that the body is not stable and also creating the body as a site for shifting meanings in identity. In this article it shall be argued that the male body, and its relation to shifting gender roles, has become increasingly used as a tool for dramatic tension through splitting and loss of autonomy in recent psychological horror and fantasy-based texts. Drama and narrative based on split identity has an important resonance for cultural anxieties surrounding identity, masculinity, the body and gender; the film Fight Club (David Fincher, US, 1999) is one example of a film that intertwines a story about fragile identity with issues of gender.

Fight Club is a film about the "Narrator" (Edward Norton), importantly he has no name; he is never called by his name and the credits either refer to him as Narrator or "Jack," a false name that springs out of a scene in the film. The Narrator is introduced to us at the beginning of the film as a rather wretched character; as an incessant insomniac he is constantly unable to sleep and therefore cannot function on any other level than that of a rather "mechanical" mode. He describes his waking life as "a copy of a copy of a copy," thus suggesting he feels constantly at a distance from his own life. This state of mind has led the Narrator to live his life by going through the motions, and eventually he seeks medical guidance to help him sleep. The doctor is not sympathetic, however, and suggests that the Narrator consider other illnesses that are far more severe than his own, such as men with testicular cancer. The Narrator takes the doctor's advice and begins attending support groups for patients with testicular cancer, during which he finds that he can cry, and...

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