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.

I know it’s crazy.

I don’t want to write a tribute to J.D. Salinger. I don’t care about his literary merits or his reclusive lifestyle. I’m not good at literary analysis anyway. I know that Holden Caulfield is a hated literary character, and kind of a jerk, but there’s a part of me that’s still like him.

Even though I’ve grown out of teenage angst, in adulthood I still feel isolated, alienated and like I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do. I see a lot of the social world around me as totally pointless and unmoving, and a good deal of human behavior confuses and bothers me. Being a catcher in the rye sounds just as good to me as anything else.

When it comes down to it, reading The Catcher in the Rye just makes me feel less alone. That, I think, is precisely the point of writing, of music, and of art. Because, really, we’re all alone. Even being able to temporarily connect with someone (or their thoughts) on a non-superficial level is rare. We have to take what we can get.

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.” -Holden Caulfield
via J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 22