BEST WRITTEN FEMALE CHARACTERS – 1/10

FIGHT CLUB - MARLA SINGER

“Her philosophy of life was that she might die at any moment. The tragedy, she said, was that she didn’t.”

Fight Club may be the best film of the nineties, but Marla Singer is the best character ever created.

The best individuals in film are the ones who would make you cross to the other side of the street if you ever saw them in real life. Marla Singer is that person for me. She seems like she’d stub her cigarette on your new dress or spit in your mouth if you got too close to her on the tube, and for that, I respect her.

There is something that is almost aggressively alluring about her as a character. The way she is portrayed - shrouded in cigarette smoke - seems to immediately allude to an addictive and dependent personality. She hangs around a health risk of a kitchen in a bridesmaid dress, and compares Christmas trees to sex crime victims. She’s like if a manic pixie dream girl turned to meth instead of mixtapes.

Perhaps what I enjoy so violently about Miss Singer is how different she is to the stars of my other most treasured films. Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction is similar to Marla in that they are both polluted with drugs and easily swayed by alpha males, but beyond these points they contrast completely. Marla has seen the worst parts of the world and let them consume her, while Mia lives among the top one percent and spends her time being wined and died. Mia was a top priority for everybody close to her, while Marla was dumped by anyone she let get too close. After all, the woman who fakes having testicular cancer because it’s “cheaper than the movies” can’t be swimming in party invites.

Perhaps I cherish Marla so much because of what she represents for me. Fight Club was the film that first set my ambition of being in the film industry alight – the idea of being able to say whatever you want to people you don’t know for two hours seems like the ultimate slap in the face to the ever tightening grips of censorship. After all, when else could the line, “I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school” be applauded by every teenager who smokes in the school toilets?

Fight Club as a film is easily one of the most iconic and influential films of the 21st century, and I truly believe that a monumental reason for this is the gothic and masochistic presence of Marla Singer.