Women have Little Women, Lady Bird, Thelma and Louise, Fried Green Tomatoes; entire genres that let them explore identity, friendship, love, ambition, and transformation. They can laugh, fall apart, rebuild, reinvent. Men, meanwhile, get two movies: Fight Club and Dead Poet’s Society.
Those are our emotional instruction manuals. One says, “Beat the shit out of something until you feel alive.” The other says, “Feel something pure and beautiful … and then die for it.” That’s it. What’s the meaning? Become violent. Want beauty? Die tragically.
Both films are about suffocation. Tyler Durden and John Keating are mythic anecdotes to systems that crush men into obedient shells: capitalism and conformity. But look closer: neither story offers real freedom. Fight Club ends in collapse. Dead Poet’s Society ends in death. There’s no “after.” No reinvention. No softness that survives.
Women’s stories stretch across genres because culture allows them emotional variety. Men’s stories are narrower, louder, more terminal. We’re either punching our way to purpose or leaping out the windows of it.
It’s not that Fight Club and Dead Poet’s Society are bad movies. They’re fantastic. It’s just that they’re lonely ones. They’re cinematic islands for men starving for meaning in a culture that never taught them how to live without performing it. Maybe it’s time that men got more than two options.
Sisyphus Shrugged 