There aren’t many movies with a more iconic ending
than David Fincher’s Fight Club.
“You met me at a very strange time in my life.”
We spend most of the film following
the unnamed narrator and his new friend Tyler Durden,
as they hit it off and form a fight club.
“The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club.”
The numb, deadpan narrator
“I am Jack’s raging bile duct.”
and free-wheeling risk-taking Tyler are total opposites,
apart from shared penchant for getting beaten to a pulp.
“I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”
So first-time viewers get a shock
to learn that the two are actually the same person.
“Because we’re the same person.”
“That’s right.”
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The narrator is an unfulfilled everyman and a cog in the corporate machine.
“This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time.”
He flies endlessly for his job,
and his only joy in life is buying Ikea furniture for his condo.
So, to find a way out of his misery, the narrator invents Tyler --
the ideal man the narrator wishes could be.
Tyler is unpredictable, sexy, and embodies living in the moment.
“All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me.
I look like you want to look, I f-[BLEEP] like you want to f-[BLEEP],
I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I’m free in all the ways that you are not.”
The irony of course is that he already is Tyler,
so he has the potential in him to be everything he wants to be,
But he had to externalize these parts of himself as an imaginary other person
in order to let himself live as Tyler.
The film hints all the way through
that Tyler and the narrator are one and the same.
“I know this because Tyler knows this.
Sometimes Tyler spoke for me.”
“He fell down some stairs.”
“I fell down some stairs.”
And there are other uncanny similarities between them.
“We have the exact same briefcase.”
In one scene, Tyler is driving the car and crashes it --
but we then see him crawl out of the passenger side,
while the narrator has to be dragged from the driver’s seat.
We find out that Tyler blew up the narrator’s condo,
and the narrator’s denial is so strong that he’s deeply angry at his alter ego
“That was not just a bunch of stuff that got destroyed, it was me!”
But deep down the narrator obviously wanted to break free
and stop defining himself by his possessions.
“The things you own, end up owning you.”
He was just so paralyzed and repressed
that his mind had to create an imaginary frenemy
in order to express his true desires.
The fact that the narrator doesn’t even have a name
is a pretty big clue that he’s meant to represent all of us,
and all society.
We get intoxicated by Tyler throughout Fight Club
because,like the narrator, we’re socialized.
Much of the time,
we don’t let ourselves do what we really want to.
The big twist makes us look back at the events of the film
with different eyes.
All of the times we saw them together,
and thought the narrator was going along with Tyler’s outrageous behavior,
it was really the narrator behaving this way,
using the invented personality of Tyler to give him the daring
to act out on his repressed impulses for danger and aggression.
And we start to revisit our feelings about Tyler.
For most of the story, we’ve found his nonconformist,
devil-may-care outlook exciting, liberating, even inspiring.
“I say never be complete, alright so stop being perfect.
I say let-let’s evolve.”
But the character we’ve been seduced by is the mental projection
of a psychologically disturbed person.
There’s a dark side to Tyler’s charisma --
he manipulates people into serving his cause
with an intensity that feels like brainwashing,
“His name is Robert Paulson.
His name is-”
“Shut up!
This is ALL over with!”
and he does not like it when anyone defects.
He’s very good at pointing out the problems with society.
Almost two decades later,
his critiques of consumerism feel pretty spot on.
“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes,
working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need”.
But Tyler’s solutions to these problems are a little terrifying.
“In the world I see you're stalking elk through the damp canyon forests
around the ruins of Rockefeller Center.”
Is it really necessary to go back to being hunter-gatherers?
“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”
Tyler Durden is basically the id in all of us --
that instinctual drive to do what we feel, to destroy and create,
And to be totally honest and authentic.
“Is that your blood?”
“Some of it, yeah.”
A little bit of being like Tyler Durden feels fantastic.
But letting Tyler take over and run the show is catastrophic.
The narrator gives over too much of his agency
to this impulsive darkness within him.
“You’re making a big mistake, fellas.”
“He said you’d say that.”
“I’m not Tyler Durden!”
“He told us you’d say that too.”
The clues also indicate that the narrator is the one
developing a relationship with Marla.
“You won’t believe this dream I had last night.”
“Yeah?
I can hardly believe anything about last night.”
When we first see a sex scene with Marla, we assume it’s with the narrator,
even though he thinks she’s sleeping with Tyler.
“Except for their humping,
Tyler and Marla were never in the same room.”
This statement implies that psychologically
he feels he’s Tyler when he’s sexual with Marla,
but he’s himself at all other moments with her --
which we can imagine has been a really fun
and not at all confusing experience for Marla.
“You’re an insane person.”
One potential reading of Fight Club is that all of this
has really been about a girl --
meeting Marla sends the narrator into a state of disturbed confusion,
“If I did have a tumor, I’d name it Marla.”
and that’s what actually sparks his creating Tyler
to avoid dealing with his feelings about her.
“You big tourist!
I need this, now get out!”
He feels that he needs to be Tyler to start a sexual relationship with her.
Marla has put up with an awful lot in this relationship
“You are such a nutcase.
I can’t even begin to keep up.”
So by sharing this final moment with her,
the narrator is showing he’s open to connecting with another person,
as himself, not Tyler.
We feel optimistic seeing Marla
and the narrator take solace in each other.
They have the chance to start a real relationship
and to build a better future on the ruins of the old society.
When we first meet Tyler,
he explains that the oxygen masks on planes are really meant to sedate people
“Oxygen gets you high.
In a catastrophic emergency you take giant panic breaths.
Suddenly you become euphoric, docile.
You accept your fate.
Blank faces.
Calm as Hindu cows.”
In his view, we are all the people getting high on the oxygen masks
To avoid our reality.
We’re so numb thanks to our capitalist comforts
that we don’t see we’re pretty much dead already
So Tyler reverses this picture: he makes people think they’re going to die
so they feel alive.
“Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel’s life.”
While he’s driving, Tyler lets go of the wheel
and let’s the car crash.
Just to give the narrator a teachable moment.
“We’ve just had a near-life experience!”
So the fundamental seed of Tyler’s worldview is that:
“First, you have to know, not fear, know that someday you are going to die.”
Ultimately, Tyler’s attraction to death is really the narrator’s,
and we see this morbidity early in the film.
The narrator tries to feel close to death
through attending support groups for people with serious illnesses.
“When people think you’re dying,
they really, really listen to you instead of...”
“Instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.”
Marla, with her all black clothes and a cigarette always in her mouth
is the image of a death wish.
“Marla’s philosophy of life was that she might die at any moment.
The tragedy, she said, was that she didn’t.”
When she asks the narrator to come over and feel her breast for signs of cancer,
she’s let down when he doesn’t find a lump.
“You feel nothing?”
“No, nothing.”
Both characters feel that if they actually were dying
Then maybe their lives would mean more.
But the narrator can only get so much release
out of pretending to be close to death.
And so Fight Club is born so that he can feel real, physical pain
with an actual risk of death.
Fight Club starts as a male bonding fantasy
The film emphasizes how important it is for men to connect with other men,
“It’s for men only.”
and let out their aggressive impulses.
These men feel the need to fight
to express their larger cultural dissatisfaction.
“I felt sorry for guys packed into gyms,
trying to look like Calvin Klein or Tommy Hilfiger said they should.”
The fact that all of this comes out of a fascination with death
tells us there’s something deeply wrong with the regular life these people lead.
The men need Fight Club for the same reason the narrator needs Tyler.
Their society doesn’t allow them to be balanced, fulfilled human beings.
“We're the middle children of history, man.
No purpose or place.
We have no Great War.
No Great Depression.
Our great war is a spiritual war.
Our great depression is our lives.”
Fight Club makes men feel something by reminding them of their bodies.
Pain is feeling.
And feeling is living.
“It really hurts…”
“Right?”
“Hit me again.”
Fight scenes so blur the line between pain and pleasure
they almost look erotic.
“Oh, yeah!”
Tyler gets off on pain.
For him, living in the moment doesn’t just mean riding the highs,
but also being present for bad experiences.
“Stay with the pain, don’t shut this out.”
Tyler doesn’t want to just go on getting beaten up and feeling alive though.
His plan is to organize the fighters into an army,
so they can violently impose their anarchist principles
and bring down society.
He believes the the cure to capitalist depression is
to blow up the credit card companies.
“If you erase the debt record, then we all go back to zero.”
But Fight Club doesn’t really help the men build something better --
it just gives them another escape.
“When the fight was over, nothing was solved.
But nothing mattered.”
And by the end the narrator has to decide
if he really wants to destroy everything,
or if there should be a limit to this anarchy.
The ending of Fight Club forces us to consider
what would really happen if we blew everything up
and started a new civilization.
What would that new society look like?
“You will look down and see tiny figures pounding corn
and laying-strips of venison on the empty carpool lane
of the ruins of a superhighway.”
So the answer the film is giving us isn’t to buy into capitalist life
and become slaves to the system.
But it’s also not to unleash total chaos and violence on the world.
Finally, the narrator kills his mental projection
by shooting himself in the mouth.
“Why do you wanna put a gun to your head?”
“Not my head, Tyler.
Our head.”
Once he “kills” Tyler, he absorbs those impulses back into himself
and he becomes a more balanced person.
His reason and logic are back in control of his instincts.
But all of this began because, initially, his instincts weren’t awakened at all;
They were too oppressed by his rational and conscientious mind,
and this created a backlash.
The film tells us to confront death and darkness head on,
not just numb ourselves.
Fight Club suggests we should find a balance between structure and rebellion,
between boundaries and self-expression,
between having stuff and finding freedom.
As the explosives detonate, the narrator takes the hand
of his sort-of girlfriend Marla, watches the buildings fall and,
for the first time, seems to be at peace.
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