Fight Club

One of my favorite films if not my favorite. Fight Club is wild David Fincher ride, busting at the seems with testosterone and castration.In its purest form, it shows the fetishistic tendencies of men in their prime, dissatisfied with the commercialism that has essentially become their masculinity. They are the shadows of primordial alpha males. In order to regain what has been lost because of the media and commercialism, Tyler Durden and the gang make a Fight Club as a deconstructive way to start from the foundation of man and build back up to their ancestral perfection. 

The path to deconstruction leads to a masochistic restructuring of one's projection of sexual desire on to material wealth. Instead, pain becomes a way to forget about the sexual dullness in the unfulfilled desires brought on by commercialism. Three major instances occur:

1) Tyler asks Jack to hit him as hard as he can.

2) The chemical burn scene.

3) The final scene (I won't go into detail here for fear of spoilers).

These instances are in a way fetishistic, in that the sexual desire to become full, or fulfilled, to find meaning for desire, etc. are very stimulating scenes in the movie visually (flashing montage), musically (Dust Brothers kicks in after silence), or through Fincher's masterful use of CGI.

When I say unfulfilled desire, I'm talking about the lack of actual sexual intercourse that isn't found in the sexual arousal caused by fetishes. The ideology of commercialism here is flipped on its head. Tyler in a way embodies it, and embraces it instead of striving for it. He wears fine clothes, sunglasses, and has the body of a model. Yet his ideology is the opposite of commercialism. He says never be satisfied, never be complete and let the chips fall where they may. Tyler doesn't attempt to fulfill that desire because he knows what a fruitless endeavor it is. Instead, Tyler takes the scraps from the materialistic society (like fat from liposuction clinics) and makes soap out of it to sell it back to the perfect, models of perfection in department stores. He is working through the underground to play with the idea of unfulfilled desire perepetuated by the commercial system.