Fight Club takes the themes of consumerism, emasculation, and liberation and meshes them together to tell a story of modern men who desperately seek to be free from a corporate controlled society.
The movie revolves around a nameless narrator the protagonist of the film, referred to sometimes as Jack who works as a recall coordinator for the auto industry and suffers from insomnia. While looking through an IKEA catalog he asks himself, "What kind of plates define me as a person?" He's not asking what personal characteristics define him but what possession most accurately does. The film shows many examples of how consumerism has placed certain values connected to being a man and how you must have certain material things to be important in society. Jack tells us a story that is meant to change our views on modern consumer lifestyles and the career-oriented goals society has imposed to enforce that lifestyle.
The film shows the emasculation of men, not only by a consumer-oriented society, but in a society where they do not want, or even allow men to operate, behave, and grow on their own. A society that essentially wants to rob them of what it means to be a man. Jack spends his spare time attending support groups for people with terminal illnesses, even though he is perfectly healthy, as an escape from his own life in order to sleep. He meets Marla Singer who is also completely healthy and attends the same meetings he does in search of some sort of meaningful human interaction. Jack rejects Marla because she reminds him of himself, later he realizes she was exactly what he has been looking for all along. He also meets Bob, who was once a champion bodybuilder, an independent and strong male, who is now a weak and dependent guy that has grown large breasts and cries since having his testicles removed because of cancer. At the end of the meetings, the men are encouraged to cry and give each other hugs.