Fight Club and Breaking the First and Second Rule

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.”