Fight Club
Introduction
Fight Club manifests a chilling state of man, the man who goes through life without a love other than his precious, treasured, IKEA catalog, working a 9-5 helping people die. Can't sleep, can't feel a thing other than the alluring call of his catalog. To this state, there is no escape. Not until you hit rock bottom and everything is gone. Your house, your curated collection of furniture, your life, your dignity. In some inexplicable event, that's what happens. It all blows up unforgivingly. The house, the curated collection of furniture, the life, the dignity. There is nothing left to do, nowhere to turn but join his “single-serving” friend in an abandoned lot. Under curious circumstances, outside a pub, something large starts. Larger than him, larger than life. Fight club. Men get together to fight, to let their anger out, to hit and be hit, to let it all fall away. To become free of the shackles of society, of their 9-5s, of a government that doesn't care about them. Possibly, this turn of events is unlucky, unfortunate, even unbelievable. But, possibly not. Fight Club argues possibly not. This movie–as it spirals down further into its abnormal territory–is able to convince its audience on the subject of these very shackles that chain us to our office chairs and flimsy morals. Possibly, they hold us back more than hold us down. Would it be better for it all to fall at our feet in a glorious age of anarchy, or will we remain complacent in a life that serves us nothing but pitiful empty calories in the form of our useless, petty things?
The Narrator
To begin the movie, Fight Club introduces the Narrator, who is more zombified than the zombies themselves. He enjoys his IKEA catalog, his sense of security. But he is miserable. He knows how useless his life is. On a plane, with another “single serving friend,”
Every time the plane banked too sharply on take off or landing, I prayed for a crash. Or a mid-air collision. Anything. Life insurance pays off triple if you die on a business trip.
He is an insomniac like you've never seen.
For six months, I couldn't sleep. With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything's far away, everything's a copy of a copy of a copy.
Finally, he finds his path to sleep: tears. It starts with testicular cancer and moves on to parasites, tuberculosis, brain tumors. Joining people with life-ending diseases, crying with them, sharing himself. Finally he feels OK again. It was his magic cure: “Babies don't sleep this well.” He enjoys going on flights, he enjoys the futility and non-commitment involved in single-serving lives on the airplanes. It is on one such flight that he meets Tyler Durden, the soapmaker. The day that he returns from his flight, his apartment–with all its beautiful handmade furniture–crumbles in a freak fire. Suddenly, he has hit rock bottom.
With nowhere else to go, he calls up Tyler for a drink and a place to stay. For no apparent reason, they decide to fight, for the hell of it, for the adrenaline. This strange occurrence becomes a ritual that slowly attracts more and more onlookers. The crowd builds until finally, one man steps forward to say, “Can I be next?”
This is Fight Club. It is just the start.
I. What
Living with Tyler, he has come to know something truer: the only real, pure thing in our lives is pain.
I made little Haiku poems. I emailed them to everyone. I got right in everyone's hostile little face. Yes, these are bruises from fighting. Yes, I'm comfortable with that, I am enlightened. Give up the condo life, give up all your flaming worldly possessions, go live in a dilapidated house in a toxic waste part of town and you have to come home, to this. (Loud noises)
This spark, this club, is blown into a wildfire, into Project Mayhem. What started as two men fighting outside a bar for the hell of it has turned into an insane escape from the monotonous life that we live. What started as a fight club has turned into Project Mayhem. Tyler leads the way into a world free of material possessions, free of inane obsessions. Like a violent monk, preaching his style of life, his way of being grounded and enlightened, but the end goal is not happiness.
It was the place for men who wanted to escape, who were sick of the usual life they lived, one that was meaningless. Like Tyler, who did what he was supposed to. He grew up, went to college, got a job, but found it to be empty, devoid of life, like living in a dream.
These men are sick of being asleep.
II. Why
“Hitting bottom isn't a weekend retreat. It isn't a goddamn seminar!”
Tyler has his own agenda. Who really wants to hit bottom? It's never something you are ready for. There is no good time to let it all go. In many ways, for many generations, it has been said over and over again that society is damaging to our natural state. It is not man’s place to spend his time earning money to buy things that break in a day. It is not man’s place to be a slave to his job. It is not man’s place to work himself to death in the name of a life of hollow, superficial trinkets. This work was to liberate men, to give them some sort of outlet, and eventually have the army needed to bring the system to its knees, begging for forgiveness from the proletariat that it fucked over. The end goal to Project Mayhem is to blow up the headquarters of eleven major credit card companies. Ground Zero. To start it all over, “This is it, the beginning.” But nobody knows that yet, possibly not even Tyler himself.
Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it an entire generation pumping gas waiting tables. Slaves of white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We are the middle children of history man. No purpose of place. No Great War, no Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war, our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we'll all be millionaires and movie gods and rockstars but we won't and we’re slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off. (Tyler)
In Project Mayhem, people would receive “homework assignments.” Vandalize company infrastructure, destroy franchises, break new cars, disobey. Tyler gave them out. On what seemed like a whim, for a homework assignment, he grabbed a gun out of his backpack and went into a convenience store.
In the back, he stands with a gun to the worker’s head. “Give me your wallet.” In this wallet there is an expired community college ID.
Raymond. You’re going to die. Is that your mom and dad? Mom and dad are going to have to call up kindly Dr. So-and-so to pick up your dental records. Want to know why? Cuz there's going to be nothing left to your face.
Cruelly, Tyler asks the man what he wanted to be. It's a veterinarian. He tells him:
Gonna check in on you. I know where you live. If you're not on your way to become your veterinarian at 6 weeks you will be dead. Now run on home.
. . .
Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day in Raymond Kahas’s life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I ever tasted.
[Narrator] You had to give it to him. He had a plan, and it started to make sense in a Tyler sort of way. No fear, no distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter, truly slide.
This is guerrilla terrorism.
III. Who
Before we can wrap our heads around this, something even crazier happens. We find out Tyler and our Narrator are, in fact, one and the same. Though we have, for the entirety of the movie, been seeing two separate people, a realization occurs in a hotel room that changes the whole story.
You're looking for a way to change your life. You could not do this on your own. All the ways you wish you could be- that's me. I look like you want to look, I f*** like you want to f***. I am smart, capable, and most importantly I'm free in all the ways that you are not.
All these fights–have they just been with himself? Has he been teaching himself these things? Burning his own hand with lye, teaching himself to stay with the pain, to accept it? Does everyone have a little voice in their head leading them into these things, calling to them? Should we give in to that or not? On top of a building we will watch as a district collapses into rubble, records lost. Will we accept it, or fight it until the end?
Our narrator is battling with himself to no avail, unable to be rid of this man in his head. Grateful though he may be, destroying the standing financial system is taking it too far. Would he rather shoot himself to be rid of this abomination, to be only one person once more? The gun is in his hands. In his mouth, and the bullet is out the backside of his head. We watch as dream-Tyler falls, and our Narrator stands, even with blood leaking from his jaw. Even as this happens though, we know that the towers toppling: the credit card companies HQ crumbling, is inevitable. For the final scene, for the grand finale standing on the top floor of a tower, our Narrator and his girlfriend watch while Tyler’s dream unfolds. Not happy, not sad.
Conclusion
Would it be better for it all to fall at our feet in a glorious age of anarchy, or will we remain complacent in a life that serves us nothing but pitiful empty calories in the form of our useless, petty things?
Reader, no one can answer this question for you. When we are introduced to the Narrator, he mentions Narcolepsy. He falls asleep and wakes up in places with no clue how he got there. These are the times when Tyler is in control. But who is truly the enlightened one, the woken one? Tyler, possibly just a cult leader, responsible for the death of a man, seeking destruction and nothing else. Or our Narrator, living without meaning, working a 9-5 helping people die.
In the end, we do not really know. But, “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate of everyone drops to zero.”
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