Rivaling Romances in "Fight Club" and "the Notebook" (2012)

Undergraduate: Jenna Stout

Faculty Advisor: Jordynn Jack
Department: Journalism & Mass Communication

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Male and female characters displayed in films often chose to ignore feelings of love in order to achieve a desensitized security. Critics have often said “Fight Club” is a film describing raw masculinity and the consuming beast inside every man. Asbjorn Gronstad said in his "Film Criticism," “The crucial conflict which Fight Club dramatizes is the repossession of masculinity as a rejection of the world, a negation the site of which is the body and its capacity for violence.” My research agrees that this film displays a loss of manhood, but I lengthen that the man is absent because of his lack of emotional attachment to a female. My research states that this film and “The Notebook” follow a similar plot thickening because the characters choose to put aside the emotional attachment of a relationship to pursue security and therefore a desensitized sense of self. The nameless narrator in “Fight Club” displayed a suppression of emotion by his initial obsession with consumerism, a morbid job, and his identity as a “tourist” at self-help groups leading to his denial of a woman named Marla Singer. He seeks freedom in “Fight Club” which displays a desecration of the male body and lack of communication in what amounts to a cultic group of desensitized robotic males. “The Notebook” also displays a lack of communication between the two main characters branching from the female’s desire to please her family and maintain her wealth in competition with the affection she feels for her lover.