Fight Club

Fight Club is a sexist portrayal of workplace dissatisfaction. I don't care to hear arguments about why women are inessential to the Fight Club plot because I don't care. I understand that it's just a story and it's completely fantastical but I still have a lot of issues with this movie and a lot of it has to do with the lack of women in this movie as well as its representation of the only female character.

I can't even praise this movie for the twist ending because I knew the ending before I watched it, which I guess would have been a pretty ace reveal, except I was too jaded by the misogyny to really care. I know so many people who praise this movie as the pinnacle. The best of the best. This is the "top tier" movie I've been hearing about that has no people of color at all in it and where women are assumed to apparently be nonexistent in the workforce. I wish I had seen this movie sooner solely so that I could explain to every white, hipster cis male I've met in the past 5 years who says this is their favorite movie what a piece of garbage it truly is.

The biggest issue with this movie is that the whole plot relies on the assumption that women hold absolutely no positions of power and that they make up a minuscule, irrelevant part of the workforce (if any). The only woman in this whole movie is an unstable, manipulative, suicidal, unemployed person who sleeps, steals, and cheats her way through life. In contrast to our main characters she seems pretty fucked up and there are no other women to counter her instability. This is our one female in this whole movie that takes place in this raging metropolis.
I was on board with this movie until it turned into this anarchist cult bent on dismantling whatever the hell. Yeah-- stick it to the man-- but please, don't act like sticking it to the man doesn't require the help of the non-cis male genders. Because the brute force of angry white men is not going to be enough to dismantle the establishment that forceful angry white men put in place. It would be funny how ironic it is that these cis white men are bent on destroying the institutions that cis white men made and benefit off of if it wasn't so problematic. And this movie was very small scale before it went into the deep dark zone of overthrowing everything.
I didn't have a problem with dudes beating up dudes because, even though it is a very simple exaggeration of men's masculinity complex's, there is some truth to it-- it is totally believable that something like this would happen. Where my issues with this movie come in is when dudes beating up dudes turns into this nationwide phenomenon where somehow they can systematically destroy the American machine with only cis white men. I have so much anger towards this movie because no matter what you say about it, this movie only works by taking women out of the picture and acting as if they are nonessential, unimportant factors in the workplace. And the only example of a developed female character only adds to this idea that women are over there gallivanting around doing whatever-the-hell they want to do while the manly men are breaking their backs and being "put down" by "the man".

You could tell me all the great things about this movie and I would say that it's blatantly sexist. That trumps anything else remotely redeeming about this movie and I will never like it. So maybe consider even for a second how your favorite movie portrays everyone else besides straight, cis, white men. I attend what one may call a "hippie" college and I know too many guys whose favorite movie is Fight Club. I can only imagine the chaos that would ensue if I told any of my proudly progressive, feminist, movie-buff male friends that the core of their favorite movie is built upon sexist notions of women.