This post contains all the spoilers. I assume you've seen the film and know the big twist near the end. You can watch the trailer at the bottom of this post.
The Credits
Fight Club is directed by David Fincher and stars Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter, Meat Loaf and Jared Leto .
The Plot
I will summarize this as viewed with the knowledge that Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) and the narrator (Edward Norton) are the same person. While this isn't revealed to the end, I would rather discuss this knowing that the narrator is insane and has developed an alter ego representing the person he wishes to be. So I will describe the plot in chronological order rather than the order depicted in the film.The narrator has insomnia. He works an office job. He has a modestly successful life based on his ability to consume and decorate his high-rise apartment. He begins going to support groups for diseases he does not have. He finally can sleep. He concocts different pseudonyms for each group. He notices a woman, Marla Singer, who is also showing up at these support groups. He can no longer fake it knowing there is someone there who knows his secret.
The narrator invents an alter ego, going by the name Tyler Durden. He experiences a dissociative identity disorder, seeing Tyler Durden as a separate person. As Tyler, he blows up his apartment and relocates to a large abandoned wreck of a house in an industrial part of town. He beats himself up in a parking lot behind a bar. Others ask to join him, so he forms a fight club that meets in the basement.
The narrator/Tyler forms a cult group of followers who eventually move into the giant house. With this group, Tyler begins Project Mayhem. They start with harmless pranks against consumerism, then become more destructive. Tyler starts fight clubs in other cities. By the end they plot to blow up the buildings belonging to the banks in an attempt to erase all the credit and debts, starting people back at zero. The narrator attempts to stop this despite it being his own alter ego who orchestrated the whole thing. He shoots himself in the mouth, which apparently kills off Tyler. The buildings blow up as he and Marla watch from a penthouse view.
Thoughts on the Film
Where to begin? It's been nearly 20 years since this was first released. Peoples' minds were blown after realizing the narrator and Tyler were the same person. This film stood as a statement against consumerism, modern jobs and toxic masculinity. Yet, like Tyler gathering his army of "space monkeys," this film has become beloved by men's rights groups inspiring much of the same extremism and misogyny it seemed to expose. Perhaps it's inherent in a movie that has only one prominent female character, who is abused by all of Tyler's personalities.I can see incel types worshiping Tyler Durden, an alpha male ego developed from the mind of an emasculated beta male working in a boring job that just adds to the misery and death in the world. The narrator says he feels sorry for the men packed into gyms to achieve a perfect body. He points out an underwear ad featuring man in perfect shape and asks "is that what a man looks like?" Yet that is exactly the body he he imagines for Tyler Durden, his ideal alter ego. Is Tyler cool? His wardrobe is a time capsule of discarded mismatched thrift store items that were once regarded by some desperate man as "cool." In way, maybe it is a rejection of fashion.
The film rejects the consumer culture that seeks fulfillment through things. It depicts social isolation in a time before social media existed. Where the men in this film connected through fighting, many today are bonding over the internet where each can imagine their own Tyler Durden to aspire to, without being exposed to the brutality of physical confrontation. The first two rules of fight club are you do not talk about fight club. But the modern masculinity movement has largely been fueled by message boards with a lot of talk. Eventually things boil over into mass murder.
The men in this film have a rage that has been long suppressed at jobs where they have no chance to use any of their abilities. Neither physical nor mental prowess is necessary to work in most office jobs, let alone waiting tables and pouring coffee. Tyler is just the person to channel that rage for his own destructive purposes. The men feel emasculated. The men all have testicular cancer in the first support group the narrator (as Cornelius) attends. They literally have no balls. Is this where his ideas about masculinity form? Is there a more nerdy beta male name than Cornelius?
The human alpha/beta male dichotomy is an idea that gained a lot of prominence in the 90s. By the time this movie came out it was a pretty mainstream view of social hierarchy. The idea was meant for the animal kingdom and not literally for humans. It was an analogy that has gained acceptance as fact in pop culture and embraced by incels and men's rights advocates. However, scientists have questioned the idea when it comes to humans. This is not say that social dominance does not exist, except that the transformations of strength brought about by the fight clubs are not going to change someone's looks, height or voice. The traits that are present in animal alpha males are simply not the same traits the give humans social dominance (source, source). The person who self-identifies as a beta male should despise the dominant male and yet they are easily led into destructive behavior by one who projects such an alpha male character. If Tyler were the alpha male pack leader, by definition every other member of Project Mayhem is a beta male.
Tyler is extremely charismatic, building a cult, with himself as the messiah. He sacrifices himself by letting Lou beat him to a pulp. He nearly sacrifices himself by crashing a car. Although the movie ends shortly after, he performs another form of self-sacrifice by shooting himself in the mouth. Yet the narrator lives. Will his followers know he is no longer the alter ego Tyler Durden?
The film seems to predict the rise of the angry male Trump supporter railing against the failed promises of modern society. Yet this exists in that strange era between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers. The tech economy boomed through much of the 90s. We were supposedly at the end of history, a time of "peace," where we seemingly had no enemy to blame for our problems. Yet we were left to ask "what now?" Movies like Office Space and American Beauty came out the same year and also dealt with this frustration of not finding a meaningful life working in an office with the promise of a middle class lifestyle. There was this melancholy brewing into anger as we moved into office and service industry jobs in a country that still mythologized the physical labor of working class jobs like steel workers and coal miners. Office jobs placed the workers right next to management, where it became quite glaringly apparent how little actual work was required of a manager. The lie of fulfillment through work was exposed as just a power struggle to get to the top of the office hierarchy. And we went to college for this.
The film has a lot I can relate to in my current situation. It's not that I can relate to the fight club aspect of it, but rather that I also am finding myself unfulfilled by my office job and find my possessions cumbersome. Like the narrator, I want to change my life. Unlike the narrator, this won't involve crafting an alter ego and forming a terrorist organization. If the film has any lesson, it's that asserting individualism can go too far, to a point that the individual just becomes a god for those who fall in line under him. This sort of individualism has room for only one autonomous person, while others just want something to belong to. The narrator/Tyler just becomes the socially dominant "alpha male" he was rebelling against in the first place. We can abandon consumerism and build something better without necessarily destroying everything around us.
This trailer is the property of 20th Century Fox.
