[1] It is instead best classified as a retro-noir since its presentation of gender roles is "diametrically opposed" to neo-noir films, which in contrast "allow their protagonists to survive, thrive, and commit or solve crimes, with and without male companionship or assistance".
[2] The female character is introduced as a femme fatale, wearing a dress, hat, and sunglasses, smoking a cigarette, and possessing "voluptuous" red lips.
[5] Cultural critic Henry Giroux describes the nature of Marla Singer as "an ultra-conservative version of post-1960s femininity that signifies the antithesis of domestic security, comfort, and sexual passitivity".
Marla Singer finds her commodities in others' laundry or thrift stores, so "she transgresses both through her sexual appetites and her flaunting of the consumption-oriented conventions of femininity".
"[12] Additionally, one of Fight Club's main characters, Tyler Durden, advocates methods of "self-actualization and self-discovery", which are radical compared to those of "wholesome" heroes.
The love object Marla Singer accuses the narrator of having "serious emotional problems", and there is anger among fight club members that they will not be "millionaires and movie gods and rock stars".
[20] Fight Club is a film that "very powerfully reveals the astonishing limits of our political imagination", focusing on masculinity and centering on a "hip, stylishly violent" narrative.
[21] The critics write, "It tells us very little... about the real circumstances and causes of our discontent, which lie in a very different place than in the seeming emasculation of that social group that wields perhaps the most concentrated power the world has ever seen—urban, upper-middle class, white, male technocrats.
"[22] Giroux and Szeman identify Tyler Durden as a failed icon of the revolution whose public appeal is more due to his cult personality than any "strengths of an articulated, democratic notion of political reform."
The critics write, "For Tyler, success is simply a matter of getting off one's backside and forging ahead; individual initiative and sheer force of will magically cancel out institutional constraints, and critiques of the gravity of dominant relations of oppression are dismissed as either an act of bad faith or the unacceptable whine of victimization.
The critics write of this world, "The survival of the fittest becomes the clarion call for legitimating dehumanizing forms of violence as a source of pleasure and sociality."
In other words, Fight Club's vision of liberation and politics relies on gendered and sexist hierarchies that flow directly from the consumer culture it claims to be criticizing.
Dassanowsky writes, "[It] is not only possible and marketable in the real world, but the very concept of this postmodern self-improvement elitism derives from the most horrific inhumanity in human history.
Dassanowsky summarizes:[31] "Without his testicles and with female breasts Bob has become the extreme metaphor for middle-class, male-led panic in the postmodern era, a setting that features a recasting of the same factors of interwar German angst: dehumanization through (post)modernity and its technology: international economic and geopolitical instability; and lack of trust in social and political concepts and/or the national identity and role.
Another member of Project Mayhem, Angel Face (played by Jared Leto), is disfigured by the narrator in Sadean destruction "of the 'normal' or ideal as sexual act".
Audiences respond eagerly to the film's presentation of fascism, having a base desire "to experience the forbidden, to see the cornerstones of industry dynamited and collapse."
Fight Club concludes with the narrator and his female companion watching Project Mayhem's successful detonation of buildings that hold credit card information to reset society's debt.
Dassanowsky writes of the conclusion, "The ecstasy of a fresh start that can not be reversed... as the Narrator and [Marla] hold hands while the buildings sink, [is] as potentially wish-fulfilling as any hyperthyroid promise Hitler may have made to a tired and bruised nation in 1933.