Medical Humor

     So this was the second time I had seen Fight Club. The first time was last year, my freshman year at UCA. I have to admit, after viewing it for the first time I did not plan on ever wasting time on it again. However, after watching it in class last night and having foreknowledge of the outcome, I was able to appreciate some of the finer details and humor. I was particularly able to enjoy a few of the quirky attempts at humor thanks to my two semester anatomy class that I have just now completed. Just ask Anna, because I passed her a note that shared some of this enlightening information.  At one point in the film, when our main character (who is nameless) is giving Marla a breast exam, she asks him if, in return, he would like her to examine his prostate. Well, again, thanks to anatomy, I immediately grasped the humor behind this. You see, the prostate is a gland that sits just below the urinary bladder and surrounds the urethral tube. There is absolutely no way to examine this particular part of the male anatomy (just in case you don’t know, the prostate gland is not present in females) without something called a Digital Rectal Exam. This is precisely what it sounds like—digital means finger and rectal…well you get the picture. Sorry guys, but I just had to share that. It was funny.

      On a little more serious note, I really was able to appreciate more of Fight Club on the second go-around. I realized that the protagonist never has a name. What is even more interesting, is that his second personality does have a name, Tyler Durden. Another thing that I noticed, is that Tyler Durden was always trying to convince the main character that he depends too much on possessions to define himself. After a “mysterious” apartment fire, our main character loses all his stuff and moves in with Durden. The “two” of them start what becomes known as Fight Club. It appears to me that the protagonist simply progresses from defining himself with material possessions to defining himself with you he wanted to fight. Is that really any better? It still seems like he is still basing his worth on others. First on his outwards appearance, how many material possessions he can accumulate, and what other people see; then on whom he wanted to fight. Either way, he ended up depending on someone else to define himself. It was all just a little contradictive and ironic to me. It also made me wonder, can we ever get away from basing some part of ourselves on other people?