by Christopher Barr
If
you can wake up at a different place.
If
you can wake up in a different time.
Why
can’t you wake up as a different person?
Fight Club is a brilliant existential film from a
time when there was more hope then there is now. The film is about a man in the
screenplay simply known as Jack, who was a drone who worked in a high rise
office building and had a sleeping problem. ‘With
insomnia, nothing’s real. Everything is
far away. Everything is a copy, of a
copy, of a copy…’ He was the
modern man whose life lacked meaning and whose lust for life left him a long
time ago. What was left behind
in the rubble was a habituated consumer, a man desperately trying to find what
piece of furniture for his condo defines him as a person. IKEA became his place of worship and its
catalog, his bible. 
Fight Club is about the wasted life, it’s about the
tragedy of modern day society and the consumer culture that has been created to
help mask reality, hiding the truth about our servitude. It’s also about recognizing that
you’ve been living with a fast-food identity. One that wasn’t self-created but
rather mass produced for millions upon millions of worker bees to project,
while they devote their entire lives to the service of making money for filthy
rich white men.
Sadly our identities are formed in relation to the symbolic
network, the Big Other. These
fast-food, single-serving identities most of us possess is a call from the Big
Other to assume depersonalization, in spite of how deep down this goes against
who we spontaneously feel ourselves to truly be.
In the case of the film, Jack wasn’t himself and began to speak
with a voice that was not his own. So
he channeled his true voice within the symbolic network, in a desperate
attempt, to come to his aid. To
save him from his chained pointless existence. That identity came in the form
of…..Tyler Durden. Philosopher Slavoj
Zizek says, ‘to achieve self-identity,
the subject must identify himself with the imaginary other, he must alienate
himself, put his identity outside of himself, so to speak, into the image of
his double.’ There
eventually has to be a catalyst in the film where Jack finally needs to accept
his other identity as his own identity. He
has to see the illusion himself as the autonomous agent which is present from
the beginning, he must misrecognize himself in order to decentre what he
believes is real and what he believes is not. This
film truly navigates the complexities of the mind in all its layers and voids.
Prior to the revelation that Jack is Tyler Durden, Jack
investigates what’s happening to him and this investigation is in line with the
same epistemological trajectory as Scottie in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo. Here we are dealing with a man, a
detective, trying to solve the mystery of the meaning of our lives. Both of these films have their
radically destabilizing moments where the audience is pushed to a point they
must reshuffle their own ideas and values, about what it is to be subject to a
point of view rather then connected to the actual real world. In Vertigo,
we are under the illusion, along with Scottie, that we are in a romantic/tragic
unfolding love affair but ultimately it turned out to be a manipulative scheme
to which Scottie is used to witness a murder. Madeline was never real and Judy was
actually an exploiter pulling one over on Scottie. In the case of Fight Club, this is the moment when it is revealed to Jack that he
is Tyler Durden.
“You
were 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 fuck like you want to fuck, I am smart, capable,
and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.”
In the context of the film, Tyler Durden is a good looking,
free-thinking man that single-serving Jack meets on a plane and
befriends. They form an
underground gathering of men they called Fight Club. On the surface we see men beating the
shit out of each other and getting their respective jollies off in the process,
but when you look deeper, you see it’s their extreme attempt to feel something
in a society that only wishes to be numb.
As the film moves on, Jack becomes more and more awake and this
manifests itself in the form of where Fight
Club evolves. It rises
up out of the dirty dark bloody basement in the form of Project Mayhem, where as a member one has to have their hand
chemically burned to enter a new level of pain at rock bottom, because only
there one can truly see the light after you lose everything, a very Buddhist
sentiment, albeit it an extreme one. The
decisions for the group fall to Tyler, who has become more independent of
Jack. The anarchist
movement must be Jack’s own realization that he is part of a corrupt system
that can’t be allowed to continue. So
their revolution is Jack’s subconscious revolution, where real things happen to
the group along with real consequences. But
they still move forward with their plan to financially and societally collapse
the system to pave way for a more free-thinking romantic post-apocalyptic
world.
This is where we can firmly place this film in its time and
place. The late 90’s, where
the end of the century was just around the corner, where that bullshit Y2K
scare was lingering, but more importantly there was a hope of reform, a hope
for change within the system. More
cynically there was a naiveté, like in the 60’s they believed that there was a
real chance of winning. Fight Club falls into the category of
idealized hope for the future, as long as we all stick together we can beat the
money hungry capitalist and regain back our humanity and identities in the
process. Looking back now
you can see how hopelessly naïve that was. I wish it wasn’t, I wish that
grass-roots movement out of the 90’s did take hold and that change was a
possibility. The problem
with that is, ‘what then’? Using
dreams to combat reality has its purpose in some cases but usually dissidents
of the system are removed, or discredited, or assassinated.
“You
are not your job; you’re not how much money you have in your bank. You’re not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your
wallet. You’re not your
fucking khakis. You’re the all singing,
all dancing crap of the world.”
On its surface, Fight Club
had that dream to dial it all back to zero and rewrite our own history on our
own terms. But to be the
cynical reason in the room, I’m reminded of the events that transpired in the
George Orwell’s classic novel Animal Farm,
where freedom, as it were, could easily just lead us all back to a totalitarian
dictatorship.
I think the problem with society is there’s no possible version on
it that would work, at least on the massive population scale we all operate in. Like Agent Smith in The Matrix, telling a tied up Morpheus
about the earlier versions of the Matrix, where humanity was in harmony with
itself and then the program crashed, losing all the crops, Smith then told
Morpheus that human beings define their reality through misery and our species
is like a virus, it consumes an area of all its resources only to move to
another area and do the same.
There is a reality to the failed human project that needs to be
analyzed if we, as a species, hope to save what’s left of it all, but there I
go again with the romance. But
then what, rebuild?
“Right,
we’re consumers. We’re
by-products of a life-style obsession. Murder,
crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity
magazines, television with five hundred channels, some guy’s name on my
underwear. Rogaine, Viagra,
Olestra……”
The genius of Fight Club
was that the film was about a man that freed himself from the shackles of a
cave wall and walked into the light. A
man that was a prisoner of a controlling system and became free from it, in a
similar way as Neo become free from the technological panopticon of The Matrix or Truman freeing himself
from a fake TV reality in The Truman Show. So maybe in the beginning Jack thought
that meeting Marla Singer was a bad thing but in the end, she was the best
thing to happen to him. Because
he, up to the point of meeting her, was trying to solve his problems by escaping
them rather than facing them, Marla unknowingly forced Jack to deal with his
plight in the form of Tyler Durden, who himself was a part of Jack’s psyche
that screamed to get out. Whatever
it is that we are, we are not emotionless, consumer, workers that slave for a
greedy system day in and day out, only to be left wondering in the end what
does it all mean. We are
thinking, spontaneous growing beings that desire freedom and room to breathe
for purposes of growth, not to solve the mysteries of the universe or to
understand the microbiological behavior of germs, but to exist outside cages
with the freedom to chase possibility. Wait,
did I get all romantic again?
“I
am Jack’s Wasted Life.”
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