Can I Still Be A Feminist and Like Fight Club?

My sentiments exactly, Molly. Credit: Chris Large/FX

This is a serious question I have been asking myself for a while now. Of course, I am a feminist and I do like Fight Club, so there’s an easy answer to the question. But have I been so brainwashed by the male gaze that I can’t see fiction through the critical lens it deserves? I was watching season 1 of Fargo on a trans-Atlantic flight a couple weeks ago, and I found myself thoroughly entertained. I also found myself feeling guilty for enjoying something so male, white, and heteronormative.[1] (Allison Tolman is great, but she doesn’t make up for it.)

Obviously this is the standard for fiction in all its forms, and anything else is given a special interest label—“chick” and “urban” among my favorites—and made into a “genre” (and thus deemed inferior). Such books are pushed into the corners of stores and such movies are advertised on Lifetime, BET and Logo, so hetero white men don’t have to know they exist.

Diversity in film recently has been addressed by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. There are a lot of reasons why diversity is important, but one of them is simply that having more variety makes for better quality of art overall. I don’t know about you, but I feel like I see the same movies and TV shows and books over and over again. I understand that for publishers and studios trying to fatten their pockets, doing something new is risky, but I’m bored with remakes and reboots and retellings.

Mostly.

My problem is that occasionally something will come along that I really like even if it’s reminiscent of the same old thing.

Longer Than We Have Words to Describe

If I had to sum up 2015 in a word, it would be “loss.”

It’s a euphemism for death, and this year seems to have had a lot of it. Former teachers, professors, colleagues, and friends of mine are absent now, and my sphere of existence is dimmer because of it. Stepping outside of my own circles, it’s a fact of our world that death touches everyone–through violence, through disaster, through disease, through happenstance.

“Life and Death have been in love for longer than we have words to describe. Life sends countless gifts to Death, and Death keeps them forever.”

I’m not an alarmist or a fear monger. And I can’t evaluate the world in terms of better or worse, because to pass value judgments is to have an evaluative standard I don’t possess, but sometimes I can’t help but be afraid for myself and for people I love, because of where they live and how others judge their race or their gender or their culture. I don’t like being cynical, but I also can’t fathom feeling particularly hopeful in this chaotic world.