The Obsolescence of Masculnity (Part III)

Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men
who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering.
Goddamn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables;
slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing
cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy
shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history,
man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No
Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war...
our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been
raised on television to believe that one day we'd
all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But
we won't, and we're slowly learning that fact. And
we're very, very pissed off.

- Fight Club

Modern culture has lost its need for men to be men. Technology and societal infrastructures have shifted the requirements and leveled the playing field; the qualities of manliness that once made a man respected are no longer needed to live a comfortable life.

Even so, while society has eliminated the need for men to be men, the need for men to be respected as men is as strong as ever. It’s not good enough for a man to be “successful” or a “team player” or any of the other things that earn respect in society as a whole. Men need to be respected by other men as men; as tough, independent, and all of the other traits we’ve already discussed. This gets progressively more difficult as men become more and more entrenched in the corporate and modern family lifestyles, often leading to the “midlife crisis” problem so many modern Americans face.

Today’s men are fundamentally unsatisfied in a society that no longer needs them. The feeling that something is missing comes out in our daydreams; our art, our music, and our movies. We fantasize about the destruction of that which makes us obsolete with movies like Fight Club and Falling Down; what (we think) if we could simply break out of the routine and bring it all crashing down?

In Fight Club, infrastructure and consumerism are implicitly linked with emasculation; the main character starts a “fight club” that grows into a violent response to that as part of an attempt to return to masculinity through the collapse of civilization. “In the world I see,” Tyler Durden says, “you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.”

Falling Down’s premise is even more simple; a white-collar government worker going postal in a violent rebellion against white-collar society. Though the movie treats Michael Douglas’ character as a criminal, there is still a strong element of sympathy for him as he guns his way through his oppressively normal life in southern California.

We sit and we watch; we cheer on Project Mayhem as it tears apart a fictional civilization on our television screens as we drink our beer and hang with our pack of friends and, in the end, do nothing of consequence.

Who are we, then? Angry, obsolete members of a society that no longer needs us, shaking our fists in impotent rage even as we are left behind, we modern men bemoan the loss of true manhood even as we do nothing to get it back.

The only question left is whether the real man has any place in today’s society. We’ll try our best to address that issue in our fourth and final installment to this series.