My Goodness

Is the movie misogynistic? Not at all. In fact, like Chuck Palahniuk's "Invisible Monsters", the story dissects what it is that makes us men and women. Marla is an extremely sympathetic character caught up in the life of someone who doesn't understand what she means to him. The entire movie is clouded by his misperceptions and she seems unstable. Of course, we come to realize that she's not the one that's unstable. The narrator rejects her ("I don't think another woman is what we really need.") because he is exploring what he thinks his male needs are. Tyler represents his male ideal and he is in love with that. There is a reason why the domestic scenes with Tyler and the narrator have such strong homoerotic overtones. The narrator is not able to process the masculine and feminine sides of his soul and mind and has split in two. At the beginning he is, while not happy, maintaining in his consumerist, wage-slave, "feminine" (not female, but feminine) life, accepting that that is right. It is not right and Tyler shows him a much more aggressive masculine side and at first that seems right. That is why fight club initially seems so cool and sexy. The movie shows it to you through his eyes. That is not enough and Tyler creates Project Mayhem. Eventually, as the character changes, fight club does not seem so right anymore. The intense beating he gives the blonde angel is a turning point in fight club. Project Mayhem now seems to be the answer. With the silly music, the homework assignments, and the perfect targets like Starbucks it's hard to argue with the goals of Project Mayhem. That, of course, is eventually shown to be wrong too. It is not liberating, although it initially seems like it is. It is just more fascist BS. The narrator is disillusioned with that and with Tyler. Then the truth about Tyler is revealed and the narrator realizes how he has wronged Marla. He tries to undo some of the damage that he now realizes that he has done. Marla has accused him of being sensitive one minute and a jerk the next. He didn't realize that he had been any of those things, but the two sides now make sense and he feels the need to balance them. When he "kills" Tyler he is not banishing his masculine traits, but rather reabsorbing them and finding the balance that he needs. The movie ends with the linking of the man and the woman

...