The narrator discovers that celebrity treatment as leader of the fight clubs prompts the question of how the narrator cannot be special. Gandal elaborates on the double-sided nature that results from the paradox: "Either the narrator is discovering his aliveness in the body's vulnerability and power to harm, or he is degrading his body and others' out of traumatic self-loathing and depression... Either the film is pushing humility or indulging in a martial, even fascist, fantasy of celebrity." Love objects are degraded in trauma films, but in Fight Club, degradation does not last to the film's conclusion. Gandal notes the separation, "[T]he abusive (and self-abusive) man and the degraded (and self-abusive) woman actually get together in the end—something seemingly unthinkable in a trauma film." Fight Clubs ending has characteristics of slumming dramas' and trauma films' endings. Like the "wholesome" heroes, the nameless narrator ascends from "bohemian depths", but like in trauma films, the narrator is not "physically unscathed", suffering a gunshot wound through his cheek. Despite the protagonist and the love object uniting, the film remains hostile to sentimentality through the display of the gunshot wound and a spliced frame of a penis, one of Tyler Durden's hostile acts during the film. Consumerist culture Cultural critics Henry Giroux and Imre Szeman describe Fight Club as a failed critique which focuses on the consumerist culture and how it shapes male identity and ignores how neoliberal capitalism has dominated and exploited society. They write, "Fight Club has nothing substantive to say about the structural violence of unemployment, job insecurity, cuts in public spending, and the destruction of institutions capable of defending social provisions and the public good." The film is "dangerously seductive" because of how it offers through Project Mayhem "a possible vision of a collective response... however disturbing such a response might be." The vision, in the form of "regressive, vicious, and obscene" politics, is presented as the only possible alternative to defeat contemporary capitalism. Fight Club is a film that "very powerfully reveals the astonishing limits of our political imagination", focusing on masculinity and centering on a "hip, stylishly violent" narrative. The critics write, "It tells us very little... about the real circumstances and causes of our discontent, which lie in a very different place than in the seeming emasculation of that social group that wields perhaps the most concentrated power the world has ever seen—urban, upper-middle class, white, male