FIGHT CLUB.

Roger Ebert cannot rage against the machine, because he has become a cog within the machine.

Tyler Durden escapes from Jack to reclaim his ability to express his manhood in a way that postmodern society does not allow manhood to be expressed.

Fight Club is a work that concerns itself with raging against the machine in all its guises, with Tyler Durden and Project Mayhem existing solely to confront those implements of society that cripple and chain men, preventing their 'inner Tyler' from being freed, forcing men to play the vanilla role of 'Jack'. Fight Club itself is a manifestation of the internal war between Jack and Tyler; the fighting is not between the maitre'd and the copy boy at the office but between the office role and the inner man struggling to be released from the prison of the service industry, passionless, sexless, and soulless male.

All that thirty years of behavioral conditioning has done is drive manliness underground and distort it by severing it from traditional sources of masculine restraint and civility [. . . B]ut little boys still want to play war and shoot up the living room with plastic howitzers, and we can't give them all Ritalin. [. . .] Again, the point is to channel these energies into the development of character. Boys and young men still want to be heroes. (Newell qtd. in LiveReal)

Men work the inane jobs that Jack and Tyler suffer through to survive, and they are victims of the same existentialist torments that Jack suffers from because what he is told to be is what postmodern man is told to be:
"[T]he new workforce hero is now modeled on the image of the young computer whiz yuppie who defines his life and goals around hot start-up e-commerce companies, day trading and other get rich before I'm twenty-one schemes as well as the conspicuous consumption of expensive products" (Giroux "Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders: Fight Club, Patriarchy, and the Politics of Masculine Violence").

Fight Club speaks to listless and directionless young men in a calculated attempt to shock and disturb them from their mundane slow deaths that pass for existence, and it speaks to and shocks women in an attempt to wake them up to the way the change in society is damaging and killing their sons, brothers, and husbands.

The nameless narrator of Fight Club is the unfortunate and pathetic result of the placeless plight of the male in postmodern America. Jack, as he is called by those who discuss the movie (as a pun on the reused "I am Jack's _____" medical booklets found in Tyler's squat), is a prisoner of his own emasculation. Jack is miserable and suffering, a shell of a man who exists solely to produce and consume, but never to exist.