Genre themes and ideas to write about in 'Fight Club'

• Masculinity, emasculation and homo-eroticism (fetishization of the male body)
• Loneliness and frustration with your life
• Identity 
• The lost 'everyman'
• Coming of age 
• Relationships and communication issues
• Nihilism
• The sexuality of destructiveness (Crash 1996 and Nightcrawler 2014 also fetishize death and destruction)
• Material possessions
• Parenting and abandonment
• The Hollywood love story subverted
• Satire - e.g. consumerism, the workplace, desire, sexual issues, relationships, support groups

Formula for success:

1. State your film: Fight Club (Fincher 1999)
2. Introduce your critical framework (genre) and explain how you are going to use it - you can use the quotations about genre from Neale or Tudor here and explain how you are going to view Fight Club; as a satirical comedy, or a 'coming of age' film, or both
3. Introduce one of the above themes (e.g. masculinity) in a new paragraph as a point for discussion.
4. Use an example(s) of how this theme is represented in Fight Club.
5. Support your example with a quotation(s) from the dialogue in Fight Club this shows that you know the film well).
6. Support your example with a point about the same theme from a critical writer (you can start your paragraph with the point from the critical writer if you wish).  You should name the critical writer and the essay, article or book in which they made the point.  A direct quotation from the critical writer is far more impressive (and accurate) than you paraphrasing what they wrote.
7. Relate your theme to genre by referring to similar themes and incidents in your other films -The Graduate (Nichols 1967), American Beauty (Mendes 1999) and Rebel Without a Cause (Ray 1955).  You can also reference Crash (Cronenberg 1996) and Nightcrawler (Gilroy 2014).

Repeat this formula (points 3-7) for your other themes.


Critical writers to use

• David Fincher, Edward Norton and Brad Pitt provide a critical commentary on the two disc edition (2004) of the film
• Matthew Hall - 'Teaching Men and Film' (2005)
• Brian Baker - 'Masculinity in Fiction and Film' (2008), especially the chapter 'The Psycho in the Grey Flannel Suit'
• Mark Ramey - 'Studying Fight Club' (2012)
• Robert Bly - 'Iron John: A Book about Men' (1990)
• Gavin Smith interviewing David Fincher in 'Film Comment' magazine (September/October 1999)
• Arthur Chu - 'Complaining like it's 1999: Fight club, American Beauty and the revolt of the cubicle drone' on the 'Daily Beast' (2014)
• Stephen Schaefer interviewing Edward Norton for 'Mrshowbiz.com'
• Philip French - 'You looking at me?' (The Guardian Nov 1999)
• Roger Ebert - review of Fight Club on rogerebert.com
• Jim Emerson - Fight Club: Punching in the dark (1999) on rogerebert.com
• Janet Maslin - 'Such a very long way from duvets to danger', review in the New York Times (Oct 1999)
• Kim Newman - Fight Club review in 'Empire' magazine (Jan 2000)
• Alexander Walker - review in the Evening Standard (1999)
• David Rooney - review in Variety magazine (Sept 1999)
• Peter Bradshaw - review in The Guardian (Nov 1999)