speculated that the author, Palahniuk being gay himself played a role in the storytelling and could be reflecting his feelings about being gay and struggle to live up to heteromasculinity. Fascism Robert von Dassanowsky identifies Fight Club, alongside The Talented Mr. Ripley and Hannibal, as an American film released at the turn of the 21st century that examines European fascism through cinematic metaphor and explores fascism's cultural and sexual politics. Fight Clubs portrayal of the paramilitary Project Mayhem represents a response to the feminization of America, and the portrayal is reminiscent of the creation of Nazism in response to the "decadent" Weimar Republic of Germany. In the film, the counter to the feminized male is a model of male that is "an identity-less, violent and destructively nihilistic cadre that intends to discipline a world gone too tolerant". The paramilitary members' processing of human fat from liposuction into designer soap is a Holocaust reference. The process surpasses in potency Soylent Greens premise of processing people into food. Dassanowsky writes, "[It] is not only possible and marketable in the real world, but the very concept of this postmodern self-improvement elitism derives from the most horrific inhumanity in human history." The film's embodiment of the crisis of masculinity is former bodybuilder Bob Paulson, played by Meat Loaf. As a result of steroid abuse, Bob has lost his testicles, developed "bitch tits", and become estranged from his family. His body and spirit are crippled by failed modernity's science and technology. He embodies how traditional patriarchy is being lost and how his generation fears feminization. Dassanowsky summarizes: "Without his testicles and with female breasts Bob has become the extreme metaphor for middle-class, male-led panic in the postmodern era, a setting that features a recasting of the same factors of interwar German angst: dehumanization through (post)modernity and its technology: international economic and geopolitical instability; and lack of trust in social and political concepts and/or the national identity and role." Paulson is killed accidentally while participating in one of Project Mayhem's "urban terrorist" operations. In his death, he becomes "a mythical icon" who receives his name back, having previously gone nameless like other members of the Project. The scenario retells how Nazi activist Horst Wessel's death by communist activists was exploited by the Nazi movement to portray Wessel as a fallen hero. Dassanowsky observes the effect of Bob's death and the response to it, "Mythology and the