Becoming a Man:

CHUCK PALAHNIUK IS AN EXTREMELY intuitive writer. The Afterward of a recent edition of Fight Club (Palahniuk 2005) describes how the book grew out of a short story that eventually became Chapter 6 of the book, a story that was an “experiment” in undermining continuity – trying to “cut, cut, cut” – jumping “from scene to scene,” with no unifying character or point to provide narrative coherence (p. 213). It is to the credit of the filmmakers who turned the book into a movie that they preserve this intuitive aspect of the original. But even though neither Palahniuk’s work nor the film relies on any large-scale cerebral framework, the intuitions in the film capture some profoundly thought-provoking problems in our contemporary world. Fight Club seems to speak to something deep and strange within us, and especially within the young men who are the primary audience of the movie. The film stirs up a fascination with violence that many of us may feel, an attraction to inflicting pain and experiencing pain ourselves. ¹ This dark and unsettling feeling is manifest in violent computer games, popular music, and such extreme sports as cage fighting. In bringing to light the felt need for violence and pain, the film poses an interesting question: what is the source of this seductive appeal of violence that leads people (and especially young men) to find this film so meaningful?