BREAKING THE FIRST RULE OF FIGHT CLUB

To be honest, I’ve written and re-written this way too many times because I just do not know where to start with this movie. Fight Club is the type of film that changes your mind about it the more you watch it, because, as with every other great film ever made, the devil is in the details. When I watched Fight Club for the first time, I HATED IT. The graphics, the ideas, the toxic masculinity, and the gore. I couldn't help but be repulsed by the whole film, I was convinced the last 40 minutes of the movie saved the whole thing for me, and I couldn't understand why it gathered the massive following it has today. I made my peace with the fact that it just wasn't for me and was prepared to move on when the universe decided it had other plans…long story short, I started obsessively reading about the movie, and the more I read, the more I felt like an idiot for coming to such a quick, SHALLOW judgement about the masterpiece that is David Fincher’s Fight Club. Now, you’re probably wondering how good can movie about a bunch of men beating the living daylights out of each other possibly be for me to go from being repulsed by it to calling it a masterpiece, and trust me, I understand. But by the end of this blog post, maybe you'll have an answer to that question.

Fight Club is a story about a depressed man (the narrator)—played by Edward Norton—and a series of events that turn his mundane life upside down. Now, before we get into the story, we need to understand what kind of a man our narrator is. He is, in a sense, every single one of us. He leads an uneventful life, has a 9-5 job, wears uninteresting clothes, and buys uninteresting things he doesn't actually need because he hopes to feel complete through consumption. He is almost like a drone, a perfect slave to capitalist society. His character and scenes are mostly associated with colours like pale blues and white—uninteresting and forgettable—a nobody with a rather depressing outlook on life. He suffered from insomnia and often found himself waking up in random places without knowing how he got there. The narrator gets addicted to going to different kinds of support groups and crying with other people because this was the only way he could tire himself out enough to get some sleep. His life went on the same way for a while until he stumbled upon someone with the same addiction as him, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter). He found her presence disturbing because she was just like him, an imposter who attended support group meetings as a kind of obsession. They come up with an arrangement that allows them to attend these sessions without running into each other, and Marla leaves her number with the narrator. This is when the story starts to progress faster. One day, the narrator goes on a business trip and finds himself sitting next to a man named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who is the second important character in the movie. Tyler Durden is the exact opposite of our narrator. He is everything society rejects, and he is everything the narrator wants to be. An anarchist who doesn't go by the rules. He wore flashy outfits and RADIATED generic primal masculinity-something the narrator lacked due to the emasculating consumerist society he lived in. When the narrator returns home after the flight, he discovers that his apartment has been blown up and that he must find another place to stay. He then decides to call Tyler for help, and this phone call leads to the formation of a strange friendship. He moves into Tyler Durden’s dilapidated house that barely has basic necessities because this is how Tyler chooses to live, a primal existence that rejects consumerism and commercialism—the opposite of how the narrator lives. They form a club that is similar to the support groups the narrator used to be addicted to, but the difference was that this club was for men who wanted to reject the society that "emasculates them" and makes them "soft" and wished to return to primal instincts where they essentially just get together and beat the crap out of each other because this is how they expressed themselves (our typical emo middle school boy). This is where the theme of toxic masculinity is highlighted in the movie. While the narrator and Tyler live together, Tyler also forms a relationship with Marla Singer. As the story progresses, Tyler Durden creates an underground terrorist group called "Project Mayhem". An anarchist group that goes around destroying things and basically raising hell all over the city. This army of men- led by Tyler Durden, who is almost like their dictator, shed their identity and blindly follow everything Tyler says with the belief that they are fighting against capitalism, corporations, and materialism. They eventually come up with a large-scale operation to destroy credit card companies with explosives, which would cause the economy to crash and put everyone back on ground 0. When the narrator realises the actual scale of the organization, Project Mayhem, he tries to find Tyler to stop him. This is when Tyler reveals *dramatic pause* that he and the narrator are the same person DUN DUN DUNNNNNN (no trust me it's way more shocking in the movie). Tyler was the narrator’s alter ego that he formed due to psychosis caused by his insomnia, and Project Mayhem was his creation (there are MANY small details hidden in the film that hint at this, but the fun is in finding them yourself). The narrator manages to kill Tyler by shooting himself in the cheek but fails to stop the explosions from taking place. At this point, Marla Singer finds the narrator standing in an empty building with blood dripping from his face, and the two of them stand together, holding hands and looking out through the windows where the buildings come crashing down.

Okay, I KNOW that was a lot of information to process, but just trust me and watch the movie, it’ll blow your mind, but in a good way. My explanation doesn't do enough justice to it.

The reason this movie is so relevant, now more than ever, is because of the striking similarities between the society the narrator lives in and ours. The world we live in today is all about fast service, materialistic views, convenience, order and, most of all, commercialism. The film depicts this in many ways like the ridiculous number of Starbucks cups placed throughout the movie to show the rampant commercial culture we live in. David Fincher uses countless subtle elements in the film that make it the work of art that it is, but I decided not to write about them because, again, the fun lies in discovering them yourself (thank me later). The narrator represents a typical person living in our society. Someone who believes that the more things he owns, the more complete he is as a person. And every once in a while, we all feel the need to be our own kind of Tyler Durden. The rebel, the anarchist, the man who doesn't follow the norms of society. Someone who finds the answer in violence and hypermasculinity. To completely reject materialistic desires and gain ‘enlightenment’ by existing in our primal form. The movie- in my opinion- tries to show us the importance of balance. The narrator-- our typical white-collared man-- lived a life that was just as doomed as his alter ego’s- the anarchist- even though they were on opposite ends of the spectrum. Even though what they represented were two opposite things, they were strikingly similar. The way Project Mayhem was strategically organised, uniform, blind and followed a single authority figure- Tyler Durden, is also the same way our society works. Liberation from the ‘emasculated’, mundane and materialistic system trapped them in a system that was, in many ways, much worse. Hypermasculine, violent, thoughtless and dangerous. Both stripped the respective characters of their individuality and made them less than human. It made them mere statistics.

What stuck with me the most, was the ending of the movie. When Tyler Durden was shot dead, and the buildings collapsed in front of the narrator, to me, it looked like the death of two ideas. Two extremes. And while they both fell to their destruction, all we were left with was the image of the narrator and Marla Singer holding hands, a human connection. There are many ways the ending can be interpreted, of course, but this is what resonated with me the most. Because when stripped away from the way we choose to exist in society, the only thing we have left with us is our humanity. And it is the only thing that is real.

Overall, Fight Club is a movie that cannot be summed up in a few words. Every single detail in the movie adds up to a deeper meaning that could easily be an essay on its own (no really, ask me to write an essay on the significance of soap and Starbucks in Fight Club and I’ll do it). The message, the iconic dialogue, the cinematography, the soundtrack, the themes, and the symbolism all add up to make it the masterpiece it is. Released in 1999, David Fincher’s Fight Club was a movie that was way ahead of its time, and it's no surprise why it is considered one of the greatest films ever made.

If you made it this far, THANK YOU SO MUCH <33

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