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And if . . . a little sensual pleasure falls to my share, I feel justified in accepting it as some slight compensation for the inordinate measure of suffering . . . that has been mine for so many past years.
- Freud's Dr. Schreber in Three Case Studies
[Fight Club] examines violence and the roots of frustration that are causing people to reach out for such radical solutions ... . Because a culture that doesn't examine its violence is a culture in denial, which is much more dangerous.
- Edward Norton (qtd. in Svetky)
"First rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club. Second rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club." For a movie that advocates its own silence, the critical reception of 1999's Fight Club has exploded into an array of polarized discourse surrounding the film's critical yet problematic portrayal of late capitalism's obsessive push for profits and excessive consumerism, and, more importantly, the latter's damaging effects on an American masculinity gone soft. Edward Norton plays "Jack," a nameless insomniac and unfulfilled cog in the wheel of bureaucratized America who cannot seem to escape the (feminized) trappings of corporate oppression and Swedish home furnishings. In his attempt to heal himself of his malaise, Jack encounters Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt, who seduces Jack into co-founding Fight Club, an underground world of rebellion and hyper-masculinity where men can reclaim their lost manhood by stripping down and pummeling each other pulpy. The club, however, quickly turns into a highly organized paramilitary group that rebels against a seemingly impersonal and feminized dominant culture by blowing up that very world. The film continues to unravel as an adrenaline-induced joyride that ultimately leaves even Jack astounded when, in the end, corporate buildings come tumbling down. The twist at the end of the film is that Jack and Tyler are the same person, two identities inhabiting the same body; Jack is revealed as an individual who suffers from the actual medical disability, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). In locating the recovery of a socially disempowered manhood in a divided subject that seeks release in brute, regressive masculinity, the film suggests that violence is not only symptomatic, but also constitutive, of this condition...