Take Your Sword and Die Scarred: Masculinity in ‘Our Flag Means Death’ and ‘Fight Club’

The recently released HBO Max show Our Flag Means Death quickly gained a devoted internet fanbase of viewers, those used to queer baiting and homoerotic subtext, who celebrated this odd little comedy about the Revenge — a ship manned by a gay crew of pirates. Following Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) and Edward Teach “Blackbeard” (Taika Waititi), both very loosely based on their historical counterparts, the series’ first season tells the story of their budding romance and tragic break-up. Watching it brought to mind another work that touches upon those subjects in a very different way: David Fincher’s Fight Club, a dark and violent tale about succumbing to toxic masculinity.

The two works appear to be worlds apart. A light-hearted, queer comedy may seem to have nothing to do with a grimy tale of violence. 

Yet both works present a duo of central characters in a queer or queer-coded relationship who build up a community of like-minded men. That appears to be where the similarities end, but the messaging of the two seems rather similar.

“The flag’s suppose to be scary”

The first thing to notice is in the two works’ titles. In the title Our Flag Means Death, “our flag” signals a group of one allegiance while “means death” conveys the threat of violence. Likewise, in Fight Club “fight” points to the threat of violence, and “club” means a community that shares interests or goals. Although Fight Club is rather faithful to its title, Our Flag Means Death goes against it, with Stede’s crew being rather bad at pirating and not much of a threat. However, the title is not accidental, as it plays on viewer expectations of traditional pirate stories; pirates are to be bloodthirsty, violent, dangerous, and an archetype of traditional masculinity. The show begins with the Revenge’s crew pillaging a fishing boat for a plant, sewing up expressive jolly rogers, and listening to children’s books. However, the joke is not at their expense. OFMD celebrates this kind of gentle masculinity that is best embodied in Stede.

Early on in the series, Revenge’s crew is playing with the idea of a mutiny — something expected from a crew that’s treated poorly. In the case of the Revenge’s crew, it is their captain’s inexperience and surprising kindness that makes them consider this. Stede takes good care of his people, tending to their emotional needs and providing them with a steady income, no matter their loot. As a result, the crew grows to appreciate this captain that allows them to be themselves and takes care of them. The importance the men ascribe to listening to a children’s book: perhaps this is one of the first moments in their lives that they are allowed to show child-like vulnerability and gentleness. Flashbacks reveal that Stede has been dreaming about piracy for years and it had been mostly a fantasy he embraced while playing pirates with his children. Being a pirate gives him the freedom and fulfilment his head-of-family life could never give him. Childishness that comes with it is not a bug, but a feature. 

Fight Club presents another kind of childishness, a sort of manchild masculinity. Fight Club is the story of an unnamed Narrator (Edward Norton) when he meets suicidal Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) and mysterious and cool Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). The two men open a secret organisation — the titular Fight Club — in which men can participate in brutal fights to work out their emotions. The Fight Club eventually transforms into a shadowy, dangerous organisation headed by Tyler. During the course of the film, the Narrator’s psyche slowly unravels as he is battling his affection for Tyler and Marla and comes to realise that Tyler is a separate personality that his insomniac brain created and who he must fight for control.

 Project Mayhem is essentially a terrorist organisation that evolves out of the first Fight Club chapter. Project Mayhem’s purpose is to bring down modern civilization, which it plans to achieve by performing elaborate and devastating pranks on corporate USA. The Project is essentially a good excuse for the members to act like children — pissing into food, demagnetising tapes — without being emasculated. The members tell themselves it is for the greater cause — one that will bring a fall to the civilisation they see to be controlled by corporations and shaped by “men raised by women”. That would lead them to build the world anew according to Tyler’s gospel: with the men of Fight Club taking on a paleofantasy-style role of primal hunters and leaders. This fantasy of how the pranks eventually would lead to this goal makes the members of Mayhem empowered: they are not just pissing into food, but bringing down the system. And that makes them feel even more masculine.

Similarly, the Fight Club provides a space for its members to have social relations and physical touch from other men that is violent and brutal, and as such cannot be taken as a display of feminine emotions, or, what would perhaps be even worse, viewed as homoerotic. The members of Fight Club come there to reinstate their masculinity, not by winning a fight, but just by participating. Fighting becomes the only way they can relate to themselves and each other. As Tyler spreads his gospel, he establishes violence as a defining trait of his disciples. Eventually, violence is the only way that even the Narrator can express his feelings: as he grows frustrated and heartbroken with Tyler, he lashes out and assaultsFight Club member Angel Face because he felt like “destroying something beautiful.” The only times when the Fight Club members can perform acts that could be seen as feminine, such as making soap, growing plants, or even mourning a dead comrade, must be justified by Tyler’s masculine ideology.

Shining Wet Kiss

Fight Club has been a subject of plenty of queer readings over the years, and not without reason. The Narrator and Tyler live together, fix each other’s bowties, act like an old married couple, and plenty of dialogue and narration indicates that the Narrator experiences homosexual desire. The club’s members cannot find comfort in the arms of a woman because they feel they need to perform a certain level of masculinity to be accepted as sufficient partners — for example, the Narrator can only be intimate with Marla as the cool and handsome Tyler (Marla cannot even tell the difference, it is the matter of the Narrator’s insecurity). They can only feel like themselves with other men in the homosocial Fight Clubs. However, they cannot form relationships with each other. Not because of lack of desire — the Narrator clearly exhibits desire towards men, be it in how the camera follows his gaze to bare chested Tyler or in how he calls other men “beautiful” — but because any homosexual behaviour would be unmanly. Two men living together, sharing everything including a soap business might be seen as gay — and therefore feminine — but not if they beat the shit out of each other for others to see. This inability to accept homosexual feelings in the Narrator is clear in the lye burn scene. When Tyler kisses the Narrator on the hand, it is the only moment of erotic tenderness between the two. That tenderness is disrupted whenTyler causes a chemical burn and permanent kiss-shaped scar on the Narrator’s hand. The only moment of possible intimacy between the two men is destroyed, and the chemical burn kiss becomes a symbol among the members of the Club: intimacy is forbidden between men, and they can only relate to each other through pain.

As previously discussed, OFMD plays on the expectation of a gritty “realistic” depiction of piracy, only to deliver what has been dubbed online as “the gay pirate show.” The show plays with that expectation and the historical reality of both queer subtext in pirate and sailor stories as well as the queer history of the Republic of Pirates. This history has been rarely depicted in popular pirate media, rather being reserved for niche literature and trivia questions about pirate gay “marrige.” There was hardly a place for celebratory, central-stage, happy queerness that existed openly. However, OFMD wears its queerness on its sleeve, having no heterosexual pairings among the crew of the Revenge. Queerness is also not a joke, as it is often used with portrayals of incompetent men. The Revenge’s crew is bad at piracy, but their incompetence does not stem from their queerness. But what is most important whencomparing OFMD to Fight Club is the connection between queerness and masculinity.

Fight Club’s characters can only accept intimacy with other men through violence, which is present in OFMD as well, as portrayed by Blackbeard’s relationships before he met Stede. Calico Jack reminisces about how Blackbeard treated his crew “like dogs,” and Izzy Hands becomes frustrated with Blackbeard’s and Stede’s budding relationship because it causes his captain to soften. Blackbeard has a certain reputation to uphold and wild, performative violence is a part of it. His rough biker-gang leader appearance and the stories that surround him build up the legend of Blackbeard, similar to how Fight Club’s Narrator’s beaten up, teeth-missing visage builds up his persona. As Edward gets to knowStede, he looks at his reign over the seas in a new way, as if he works for Blackbeard’s reputation rather than Blackbeard representing his true self. As the series progresses, he starts to call himself Edward, shedding the Blackbeard persona. Similarly, the Fight Club Narrator becomes more and more independent of Tyler, who he created as a cooler, more masculine, and “better” version of himself, to eventually kill Tyler altogether and embrace his ordinary, more feminine self.

“Best part of yourself”

Stede’s gentle masculinity may seem caused by being raised privileged, which does not apply to the pirate lifestyle. However, lashbacks to Stede’s childhood that show the backstabbing, cruel, and prejudiced higher society prove otherwise. The masculinity of the higher classes might not involve feeding anyone their own toes, but it still demanded a level of hardness that Stede does not possess and refuses to engage with. What he brings to the Revenge is a “people positive management style” that shocks his crew: his men can perform poorly, have issues, and do not have to bottle anything down. When they get “a little bit angry,” they “talk it through as a crew.” This way of thinking is unacceptable to some: Izzy is ready to betray his captain to prevent him from becoming soft like Stede, and admiral Badminton cannot believe a crew would follow such a captain.

Despite that backlash, the gentle masculinity prevails, keeping Stede safe, his crew together, and eventually pushingEdward to give up the Blackbeard persona. It is a sort of masculinity that has a spot for everyone, where no one needs to prove their worth. While Fight Club’s men need to endure torture and assess dominance over others by threat of castration, there is no need for such sacrifice to join the Revenge’s crew. While Tyler’s cult ties their entire identities to whether they have balls (most obvious in a quote from the original book when the Narrator calls his testicles the “best part of yourself”), Stede and his crew seem to have one criteria: whether or not you would like to be a pirate. Members do not need to be a man or even masculine, as there is a place for everyone on their ship.

“I am the Kraken”

Be it a mysterious leader of a terrorist organisation or a legendary pirate, Tyler and Blackbeard are constructed personas. Tyler — a cooler, more manly, more handsome and better at sex version of the Narrator — and Blackbeard — who feeds people their own toes and bites the heads of turtles — are not real people, but constructs meant touphold a terrifying legend that can live on its own. 

Those personas arehyper-masculine and they thrive in the patriarchy. In contrast, the Narrator and Edward are “weak”: they admit to having romantic feelings, consider resolving conflicts nonviolently, and they are more feminine (represented by Edward shaving off his iconic beard and the Narrator being framed as a mirror reflection of Marla, looking as if both wear dresses in the final shots of the film). However, these are the real sides of the characters, the ones whose inability to deal with their feelings caused them to give birth to their alter egos. For Blackbeard and Tyler to be sustained, they must squash Edward and Narrator — otherwise, they might find a new way to deal with their emotions and may not need to engage with toxic masculinity. The characters then descend deeper into toxicity, rejecting more and more of the gentle qualities that differentiated them from their alter egos. The turning point in both narratives is represented by an act of violence against a feminine man: Edward drowns Lucius and the Narrator brutally beats Angel Face. It is a moment of re-asserting their own masculinity, assuring themselves they are still on the top of the pecking order, and that they have nothing in common with those feminine and queer(coded) men. The beating of Angel Face is closely tied to the growth of Project Mayhem, which gives Tyler a god-like status. Lucius’ death ultimately cuts Edward off from Stede, as Lucius was his right-hand man, and leads to Edward becoming Kraken — a murderous persona who Edward had cut out of his mind until then.

The characters at first engage in this self-fashioning rather consciously: the Narrator relishes coming to work beaten up, presenting as a more interesting and mysterious person than a corporate pencil pusher, Edward admits that a lot of his piracy comes from “fuckery” — a fear-inducing performance. The tragedy of these characters is that they can no longer distinguish between what is their real self and the mask they took on. As Stede says, “a lot of guys are sweethearts, deep down.” Unfortunately in a world in which being a sweetheart is the last thing a man should be, their softness must remain buried under cult leaders and krakens.

Lily-livered Boys and Snowflakes

The crew of Revenge can be their queer, diverse selves. They can talk about their issues and deal with trauma in a healthy way. They can live up to their potential in the fields that they choose. They have a great captain, who is a support figure rather than a boss. Why is it then that Izzy resents Stede and Edward eventually turns back to his dark persona?

A similar question can be asked about the men who join Fight Club: why do those men choose to participate in violence and terrorism in order to deal with their feelings instead of finding a healthier way?

The answer is simple: it is easier. It is easier to fall into the familiar order of things and perpetuate it, rather than examining toxic masculinity and wondering whether something better can be constructed. Ironically, this simplicity is a big reason why Fight Club is so popular even 20years after its release. Though it is seen by many as a critique of traditional masculinity, it is a complex work that at its surface appears to be abouthow men beat each other and how committing terrorism is cool. It is easier to view Fight Club like this, repeating Tyler’s gospel and arguing with all those delicate snowflakes, thus, it is still incredibly popular among the “men’s rights activists” of the internet. Although Fight Club warned against such men, it, unfortunately, became their Bible.

Still, I appreciate the twisted, though confusing and dark Fight Club. I know what it is saying, and unpacking it is fascinating. But I do not want to talk about Fight Club. It is a tiring piece to me, presenting in a brutal and painful way what internalised homophobia, misogyny and toxic masculinity in general does to men. Our Flag Means Death, despite a warm and sweet tone, tells a similar tale. It is a simple comedy, but it wears its heart on its sleeve and it is clear in its message, and that is not what usually gets a work to be pondered over by academics. It is made by and for queer people and it shows. It is a safe, comforting work, a safe space, which still portrays male pain, homophobia and oppression, but unlike Fight Club it does not go out of its way to hurt the viewer or force them to take in the violence it critiques.

That is why I will probably take Our Flag Means Death’s gentle approach over the bloody-brutal Fight Club. Simply because it is more pleasant to experience and indulge in kindness on a screen rather than men bashing each other’s teeth in.