It is a film about the fragility of masculinity, men’s mental health, and how they are interconnected. Fight Club is a crude portrait of what happens when men’s insecurities turn into masculinity in overdrive. Thus, this film represents toxic masculinity. Fight Club shows men dissatisfied with the state of masculinity. The characters are different in that many of them were raised by their mothers because their fathers either left the family or got divorced. According to Ta, the result is that the characters see themselves as “a generation of men raised by women” (270). In their life there is not enough male education for the formation of their masculinity. It confirms the idea of phallocentrism, which is based on the image of castrated women. Women raise children so that they can enter into the symbolic order.
Fight Club is a wicked satire about finding, nurturing, and destroying yourself. It challenges ideas of masculinity, adding to the image of a real man several features that can be called associative and setting self-destruction and a destructive impact on society as one of life’s goals. The victory of Jack’s subpersonality over Tyler on the roof of a skyscraper shows that the good in a real man can overcome the destructive element. The ability to self-sacrifice and responsibility for his actions in Jack, who has gone through the evolution of masculinity, inspires some optimism, but the finale remains open.