I thought it was interesting that the protagonist (Jack?) could only be content in situations where he could witness or cause pain in others. In the support groups in the beginning, he was surrounded by the pain of others, all with the knowledge that he was not condemned to die in the way that they were. At the same time, he gained their sympathy. He curses Marla for revealing his subterfuge: “Oh, this should be so sweet, the remembered warm jumble of Chloe still in my arms and Chloe dead somewhere” (27). In this sense, he seems to be vampiric or parasitic (and it’s interesting that a few of these support groups were for people suffering from parasites). He feeds on their pain. The fight club itself ostensibly reverses this tendency in the sense that Jack himself experiences pain. It seems that his own pain cuts through the anesthetized condition of consumer capitalism. But a more remarkable difference is that Jack is unsatisfied by the static and received pain of the other support groups. Instead, fight club generates and extends pain, causing pain where none existed before. Jack describes the first night that he and Tyler punched each other: “both of us knowing we’d gotten somewhere we’d never been” (44) – and the reaction is similar to that of the addicted consumer: ‘cool’ and ‘I want another.’ The narrator gives the following reason for fight club’s success: “Most guys are at fight club because of something they’re too scared to fight. After a few fights, you’re afraid a lot less” (45). This seems to empower them, but in a way, fight club acts as a release valve for social despair, a torture chamber that allows one to better deal with the regular world – but it doesn’t effectively change the world. Pain and violence become the commerce of the new system. When it extends outward in Project Mayhem, it seeks to change the capitalist social order, but really only in the amount of pain and violence active in the world. While the novel is clearly critical of the fascism of Project Mayhem, the effective result seems to warn against social change in general. In many ways, I agree with Giroux’s reading. He writes that “Fincher is less interested in fighting oppressive forms of power than he is in exploring the ways in which men yield to it” (14). The film acts a bit like a warning light in the dash of a car: it makes it very clear that there’s a problem. And although it may seem gratuitous to complain that the light doesn’t actually fix the car, the film’s reception warrants Giroux’s criticism, in the sense that so many viewers have responded to the warning light as just another light show, provoking that same “Cool” from the mouths of a new (masculine) generation.