The film Fight Club begins with the protagonist being a man castrated by the consumer products he possesses, depriving him of his masculinity. This is illuminated in the first scene of the movie, where Jack is hugging Bob, a man who tried to repossess his masculinity by taking steroids, but instead he developed breasts, and his masculinity was emasculated even further. Jack lives life as if he is an outside looking into the world and the only things he can latch onto are his possessions and the pain, depression, and the feelings the support groups give him in his passive life. Jack seeks these groups to gain back his masculinity, by knowing that he is unaffected by any of these aliments, but this gives him power over the others in the group. He is so taken aback when he finds out Marla, a woman attends these groups for the same reason he does, and this is emasculating since she does not need to boost her masculinity, as he does. Finding out Marla attends these groups as he does, turns him off to the idea that this is a good way to gain masculinity and turns to Tyler.

He creates Tyler, a hyper-masculine man and founds Fight Club, the one group that even Marla cannot infect with her femininity. Fight Club has men enduring pan and self-harm to prove their masculinity and encourages these men to reclaim their masculine birthright. This is truly illuminated when viewers find out that Bob has left his testicular cancer support to join Fight Club which allows him to forget that by trying to prove himself a man by society’s standards which ended up feminizing him, he can now fight to take back his manhood.  The theme of lacking identity is strong in this film with Jack trying to express his individuality with his consumer products and the lack of identity given to the members of Project Mayhem, as they remain anonymous and flock to be part of something that treats them as unidentified people. They flock to Project Mayhem to gain authority, and remaining anonymous gives them a secret power they are creating chaos and no one even knows it is them creating this chaos, strengthening their masculinity. Jack creates this world to fix his defeated masculinity but once his masculinity is strong, he defeats Tyler. He then realizes why he did not like Marla, because she represented a female who could disrupt the way he felt about his masculinity. Tyler, Fight Club, and Project Mayhem were all created because a man felt threatened by a woman’s ability to castrate him. This is illuminated when Jack says “Suddenly I realize that all of this, the gun, the bombs, the revolution, has got something to do with a girl named Marla Singer.”