Rhetorical Analysis

Eric Jett

            The writer’s purpose in this movie analysis is simply to describe the transfer of masculinity and femininity from a male to a female and vise versa.  Written by Tori Gibbs, she describes the transfer in the movie Fight Club between the characters Marla and Jack/Tyler. She uses Fight Club because Jack and Tyler are the two personalities in the same body. The feminist being Jack, who cries and looks both ways before crossing the street, and the masculine Tyler, who sleeps with women and starts the Fight Club.

The intended audience would probably have to be a teacher. The fact that Gibbs uses ethos in her essay leads me to believe that she was taught what ethos means that week in class and wanted to impress the teacher by using it. I think it would have been more impressive to get the point across with the definition of ethos and how it applies and not just stating that ethos is relevant to the relationship between characters.

            The subject is one of masculinity and femininity through a movie, which is a good way to involve many people that may not read. It is a ongoing issue with feminists pushing for the “blur” of the lines of gender constructs. And Gibbs offers a different view of the importance of differences in gender. She focuses on the importance of learning from the opposite sex to become a better person.  I think it would be appreciated by the audience because it seems to be an original thought that contradicts popular feminist movement.

            The evidence in Gibb’s piece is the plot of the movie. There is not so much a detail that she is thriving on but she is taking the beginning, where Jack is a feminist type, the middle, where Jack splits into Tyler, and the end, when Jack kills Tyler but still ends up with some of his traits. This makes Jack a well rounded person. Gibbs just uses the plot as her evidence.

            Gibb’s piece is arranged into a somewhat confusing somewhat summary type of essay. I mean of course the audience needs to be up to date with the movie but there seemed to be a little too much summary. I had to read all the way to the end to finally get what she was saying but at the end I did feel satisfied. So she wrapped it up fairly well. It just seems choppy with the, “Heres what im gonna do and not tell you why kinda deal.” However she pulled it together in the end.

            Gibbs seems to have wrote an analysis of Fight Club to prove a point, and in the end she did prove her point, but it felt as if she kind of stumbled into it instead of giving you the opinion clearly in the beginning of the essay. For this reason I would not consider her an expert but someone with an opinion. Although it is valid, she seems a little unsure herself.

            The essay itself does surprise me in that it is a challenge to historical and modern feminist movement. I am impressed with her willingness to find and say that the sexes learn from each other and make themselves better as a whole. It does seem to break the, “do not summarize” rule; however, I believe that somewhat of an overview more than just, “here’s the main point” helped tremendously, especially to those who have never spent the time watching the movie. It breaks that rule and I believe she was just in doing so. However she did go a little too far for my taste as well.

http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/227/1/a-generation-of-men-raised-by-women-gender-constructs-in-fight-club