these three films also have something profoundly familiar in them when compared to Roger Water’s 1979 classic, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, made into a film

Each film has its own take on the subject, but in every instance the male protagonist has to fight physically against an overfeminized system as a key to achieving his identity. From a media effects point of view, these films are all not merely fictional manifestations of Neil Postman’s 1992 thesis in Technopoly—that culture had surrendered to technology—but to the idea that the feminine image had so replaced the masculine word that men were beginning to feel effeminate as a result. That the result was either homosexuality, rage, or a combination of the two in the lives of the authors or the protagonists, is telling. A culture-wide technological conditioning of homosexual inclinations, predicated on the absent father and the domineering mother in the form of mass media, may partially explain why Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club was so popular. From a marketing point of view, writing a gay novel for a straight audience is a sure way to lose 90 percent of the market, unless the market comes from a culture that has already been feminized. As Weezer sang, “Everyone’s a little bit gay,” and so the story strikes the audience as normal, or even documentary-like, in its presentation of gender and gender roles.