Glee: Breaking the First Rule of Fight Club
I started the Dalton Academy Fight Club, which I obviously can’t talk about!
Blaine is really a liminal kind of guy—he’s never really one thing or another. And if people feel his personality is “all over the place,” it’s because it is. Take, for instance, Rachel’s “Silly Love Songs” observation about Blaine having a “vaguely Eurasian” air. Even though we’ve no word yet on how the casting of a very white Matt Bomer will change this, at least for know Blaine occupies the space between two racial identities. As for how he presents himself through attire, Blaine again resides in the space between what many would view as traditional feminine versus masculine apparel. So Blaine wears typically male clothing, like bow ties, and yet doesn’t—like when he pairs them with colorful capri pants. Add to that how this season he’s been quite literally between two worlds: Dalton and McKinley. So, yeah . . . liminal.
Angry!Blaine
Now I don’t mean to suggest there there is only one way to be or the other—but characters having to navigate opposing spaces—whether those spaces are internal or external—is common in literature. I think there’s more to it than that, actually, because while Blaine might seem to merely occupy two spaces at once, I also wonder if we see a type of “doubling” occur. While we don’t get physical doppelgängers of the Frankenstein variety, there is a kind of fractured self we see in angry!Blaine versus polite!Blaine. Take Blaine’s ordinary appearance, including the excessively-gelled hair (an attempt to gain control over those locks), and contrast that with Blaine boxing in “Hold on to Sixteen.” His hair’s a mess, his minimal clothing is loose and sloppy, and his demeanor is quite unhinged. It’s not quite Jekyll and Hyde, but it’s a variation on that . . . and that brings us to the Fight Club reference in Blaine’s boxing scene, which at first glance seems completely throwaway and just for fun. Until you remember that Fight Club is in fact a doppelgänger film.
"Hey, you created me. I didn't create some loser alter-ego to make myself feel better. Take some responsibility!"
And what is Fight Club about? A lot of things, including a bunch of men trying to find their manhood in a society that has emasculated them. It’s about a fractured self—a narrator who creates an angry alter ego, Tyler Durden, who’s unwilling to be controlled: “All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.” Just as in many other doppelgänger texts, the narrator has to face the other side of himself. In Fight Club, Tyler Durden is “killed off,” but the narrator finds a way to blend the two extremes that represented his old self and the one he’d created in Tyler. He finds a middle ground.
If we take that passing Fight Club reference, then, and toy with its application to Blaine, what do we find? Is angry!Blaine his “Tyler”? It certainly works:
He’s tried to do everything he was taught to do, tried to fit into the world by becoming the thing he isn’t.
David Fincher, talking about the narrator in Fight Club.
Next consider this keen insight (as always), from Racheline Maltese’s Letters for Titan Tumblr home:
The actual girls on Glee are all fighters, vicious and grabby and rightfully, necessarily so. Kurt (honorary girl number one) learns to be an incredibly hungry, powerful immovable object. And Blaine (honorary girl number two) just doesn’t even think he has any right to fight. Even when he does literal fighting activities—it’s as sport or metaphor (boxing is a sport, sport fencing is a metaphor for an actual duel, and the performance to “Bad” in the parking garage? A metaphor for a fight he still manages to lose by getting seriously injured).
I like these comments so much, as they continue to outline some of the spaces Blaine keeps trying to occupy: he’s like the girls, but not like them. He’s like a fighter, but not like one. And is it telling that after this episode aired, many fans doubted that Blaine really started a fight club? There will be a point, I’m sure, where Blaine’s “Tyler” is going to do some fighting of his own—for dominance, or just to be heard. And we’ll see whether Blaine can integrate this part of himself (or even accept it). Or will he bury it? Or let it consume him?
I’ve spent so much space exploring Fight Club here, and will have to create a Part II to this post so I can get to my original plan for this piece: to use the doppelgänger trope as a way to talk about the female gothic—which is all about inner journeys and split selves, and gaining social acceptance by reconciling disparate halves. And for that, it would be fun to consider Jane Eyre and a related novel that’s also about liminality, Wide Sargasso Sea. So stay tuned—we’ll get there. Damn. This. Show.
