Purity of Impulse in Fight Club

Where is My Mind:

Notes on Purity of Impulse in Fight Club

What excited me about Fight Club was the visceral appeal of the filmmaking, the scathing insight of the ideas, the basic appeal of the three stars (I am soft on Brad), the sheer energy and passion of everyone involved, their apparent commitment to doing something different. Above all it was the film's desire to assault the audience, to keep poking it or goosing it or clubbing it with "naughty" twists and subversive touches. The first time I saw it, I admit, I was left half cold. Someone who announced they preferred it to The Matrix received a barrage of disagreement. Fight Club seemed to offer no positive alternative to balance out its total denunciation of 21st century soullessness; all it came up with was that tired old shtick, revolutionary action. This bothered me, that the film advocated destruction, "destroying something beautiful," as the only conceivable response to a sense-deadening, soul-sapping life. The second time I saw the film, I satisfied my misgivings and let it carry me away. I think that this film, as much as Natural Born Killers, is like an acid test of the ever-growing gap between recent generations. Even with no more than a decade or two between us, we are bound to different sensibilities. Fight Club, like NBK, is one of those movies that, however much I might like it, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. I imagine Kael taking it apart piece by piece, maybe showing a grudging respect for Fincher's technique but rejecting the movie's smart-assy nihilism and the sheer cocky tastelessness of the whole thing. And I would say in response that, to your taste or not, the movie taps into (and maybe exploits) a collective sensibility that is growing every day in the younger generations: that nothing is what it seems, for one thing; that maybe pain really IS the only way to feel alive, for another; and that extreme measures are the only kind that make sense anymore. Though I no longer "belong" to the youth myself (if I ever did), most if not all my friends are in their early twenties, if that, and I gauge by their response to movies like NBK, Matrix, Fight Club, that they are finding therein messages and meanings that the critics (all in their 30s at the very least) simply are not catching. If you were to spend one or two long, long nights partying (and partaking in the illegal substances) with these "kids," you might be surprised to find just how much of a second nature nihilism has become to them, even the most creative and responsible (and lively) of youths. In these latter (which are the "kids" I know), it does of course go beyond nihilism, which is why The Matrix is truer to the new youth zeitgeist than Fight Club (or than any other movie to date).

"There's only two constants: entropy and chaos." David Fincher.

Fight Club is a love it or hate it enterprise. Since it goes straight to the heart of the schizophrenic nature of society, and not only exposes it but positively wallows in it--taking delight in trashing consumer culture and Western values and spitting in the face of the collective zeitgeist--it's only natural that it invoked the intensest reactions of both admiration and loathing. As a general rule, viewers under twenty-five respond freely and easily to the movie's "destroy all values" nihilistic message. Older generations, on the other hand, can only react with dismay, even disgust, to a film that essentially pisses all over their chosen way of life. Fight Club is not a movie that ingratiates itself easily. It's probably the most virtuosic and passionate nihilist work ever made; it goes beyond nihilism, however, beyond the mere denunciation of values, into a celebration of the absence of values. Certainly, though it's smug and self-satisfied in its contempt for society, and even for humanity itself, it never stoops to moralizing about it. It's both a reactionary work (in that it posits only negative responses to a negative situation) and even, at a pinch, a "fascistic" one (it appears to advocate blind force as a solution). But this is a superficial (political) reading of a film that is at heart purely anarchic in spirit, and hence beyond all political readings. It advocates chaos as the only response to a fucked-up order, and entropy as the inevitable answer to an evolution that has plainly come off the rails. Fight Club is deep, but it brings it depths to the surface and puts them out in the open; so it may also seem simple-minded, facile, even asinine at times. As a sociological study of a culture on the brink of collapse, it hardly offers much by way of revelatory insights. It is far too extremist to really qualify as a serious inquiry into society's ills: it is a fantasy work, and as such, closer to a nihilist's It's a Wonderful Life than anything. Fight Club is an excursion into a single psyche; it shows how this psyche relates to (or disconnects from) its environment, how it shapes it to its own (far from benevolent) ends, and how it eventually transforms it, through willed schizophrenia, from a mundane nightmare into a transcendental Hell. Fight Club is the last word in a cinema of schizophrenia (or the first, if it ushers in a new cycle, God willing), because it depicts the process whereby the schizo inflicts his madness onto the world at large, in which the lines between objective reality and (the schizo's) subjective perception of it have become so blurred that any distinction is no longer possible. As much as The Matrix, though in a totally different manner, Fight Club takes the viewer through the looking glass (slips him the red pill); it strips him of the luxury of objectivity or distance, of discerning between real and unreal or, for that matter, right and wrong. In other words, it gives us the schizophrenic experience from the inside out, and adeptly--with low cunning and artistry--it turns the act of watching the movie itself into a simulation of schizophrenia. (This is acknowledged, finally--after many hints of what's to come--when the movie stops and the narrator tells us, "It's called a changeover. The movie goes on, and nobody in the audience has any idea.") Fight Club, much like The Matrix, begins in high gear and gives us barely the time to fasten our seatbelts. Actually it begins (for the credit sequence) inside the narrator's brain. (As Fincher succinctly puts it, "Fade in: sick motherfucker." ) It introduces us to an insomniac protagonist so drained and oppressed by the empty pursuits of his consumer lifestyle that he is literally ready to try anything. "Like so many others, I had become a slave." Fight Club may get off on the wrong foot (or out the wrong side of bed) for many viewers. It begins as a rather spiteful, not especially funny comedy that specifically mocks the afflicted. The narrator, unable to sleep, visits his local doctor asking for chemical remedy. The doctor tells him to chew valerian root and get more exercise. When the narrator whines that he is in pain, the doctor counters drolly, "You want to see pain?" and recommends he check out the testicular ca ncer therapy groups for a glimpse of what real pain is like. The narrator begins passing time going from one self-help group to the next, giving a different name each time, and apparently deriving a perverse, vicarious pleasure from hanging out with hopeless cases. "If I didn't say anything, people always assumed the worst," he says. At first, he is mocking and aloof towards the other men there, but at a given moment something snaps and he finds himself weeping into the sagging breasts of Bob (Meatloaf). "Losing all hope was freedom," he realizes; and he finally overcomes his insomnia as a result. "Babies don't sleep this well." But the narrator becomes addicted to the groups, addicted to "freedom": in other words, another kind of slave. "Every evening I died, and every evening I was born again." In The Matrix, we are introduced to a sleeping Thomas, on the verge of being awoken to his true nature. In Fight Club we meet a protagonist who cannot sleep, who (as it turns out) never sleeps, since even when he believes he is sleeping he is in fact living a secret life (his alter ego Tyler Durden). Both films blur the line between sleep and waking, reality and dreams, sanity and madness, and posit as it were two opposing yet overlapping identities, each pertaining to a different realm. Just as Neo is dreaming Thomas (who must awaken to discover his true nature), so the narrator (Edward Norton) dreams up Tyler Durden, in classic Jekyll and Hyde fashion, as a means to live out and embody all his repressed desires. Tyler (played to the hilt by Brad Pitt) allows the narrator to unleash a side of himself that is being suffocated by his prim and proper, phony existence. Tyler is the ultimate id monster, perfected over the ages into an idealized version of manhood. He's Frankenstein's monster with all the rough spots ironed out: tall, blonde, fearless, witty, charming, handsome and lithe; in a word, Brad Pitt. The narrator summons Tyler out of nothingness, out of the depths of his own unconscious. He is both his shadow, his doppelganger, and his complementary other half. (The first subliminal flash image of Tyler appears while the narrator laments his vacuous existence, as "the copy of a copy of a copy.") Like Elmore Dowd's Harvey, Tyler is the narrator's imaginary friend, his magical guide through the underworld. Fight Club is a kind of love story, a story of self love, in which loneliness and isolation have grown so total that it becomes necessary to create a soul mate out of nothingness, out of one's own isolate psyche, in order to live. The narrator splits himself off so as to have some company in the void; making Fight Club a kind of postmodern, schizophrenic creation myth (except of course that it's about destruction). The narrator is the lonely god who, in his frustration and impotence, creates a devil to act out all his fantasies. Tyler arrives into the narrator's life slyly, without fanfare, like a thief in the night. Following several subliminal inserts, an appearance (on a TV commercial as one of four hotel waiters saying "Welcome!"), and a fleeting glimpse on an airport conveyer, he finally emerges next to the narrator on a plane (following his fantasies of being in a plane crash). Tyler introduces himself by talking about emergency exits; he quotes the in-flight material recommending passengers ask to be reseated if the demands of being sat next to one are too much. The narrator counters, "That's a lot of responsibility," and Tyler asks him if he wants to swap seats. "No, I'm not sure that I'm the man for the job," answers the narrator. He then notices that they both have "the exact same briefcase." Of course they do: he is seeing double, and already shirking the responsibility. (This is the first overt clue as to the real nature of the encounter, and in retrospect, it's a dead giveaway. Emergency exit is also perfectly apropos, symbolically speaking, since Tyler, as apocalyptic usher, is effectively showing the narrator an option for escaping the sinking ship of his life.) Tyler makes snappy small talk about the reason for oxygen masks on planes (they get you high before you die), gives his card, and points out the in-flight material that shows passengers going to their deaths, "calm as Hindu cows." He also asks the narrator how "being clever" is working out for him. "Fine," says the narrator. "Keep it up then," smirks Tyler. This chance encounter--being of course nothing of the kind, but rather the full awakening of the narrator's other self--leads to immediate and catastrophic consequences. The narrator's apartment is blown up, apparently due to a freak accident (gas leak ignited by the compressor spark of the refrigerator), but really through Tyler's intervention. (Tyler has already informed us he makes soap, the precise same ingredients needed to make explosives. Since Tyler does not exist, however, the bombing is clearly auto-sabotage on the narrator's part. The fact that Tyler could not possibly have rigged and exploded the narrator's apartment having only just met him is another dead giveaway.) As a result of this setback, the narrator calls Marla, but hangs up at the sound of her voice (and Fincher aligns the images so that the sound of Marla's voice appears to be triggering the explosion, as he visualizes it, in the narrator's apartment). Cast and crew opine, "she is too much like him, he sees himself reflected in her too much." Hence he must turn to Tyler, to fantasy, since he is unable to acknowledge his true feelings, both about himself and for Marla. He calls Tyler up (Tyler never answers his phone, but calls him back on Star 69), and the two men meet up in a bar. Tyler lays out his anti-consumer, anarchic, quasi-spiritual (and somewhat simplistic) philosophy ("The things you own end up owning you"), and the narrator laps it up. Outside the bar, Tyler presses the narrator into coming right out and asking him if he can stay with him, tells him, no problem, then asks for a favor in return. "I want you to hit me as hard as you can." Here begins Fight Club proper. "How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?" Tyler challenges, adding, "I don't want to die without any scars." The narrator obliges him, and the two men rough each other up. In fact, the narrator is really beating himself up, but either way he realizes that the thrill and intensity of physical violence--as a cathartic means for cleansing his psyche of dross (literally knocking the shit out of himself)--was just what he had been looking for. All his dithering about at cancer groups had been a way of evading the problem rather than confronting it head on; through Tyler's help, he is finally able to do this. As an unconscious schizo (the narrator really believes himself to be sane), he is tormented (permitted no rest) by the ceaseless, meaningless chatter of his thoughts: add to this the hideous pressure of awareness that his life amounts to nothing but a blight and burden upon his manhood, and you have a desperate case. But though aware (like Thomas in The Matrix) that something is deeply wrong, both with the world and himself, the narrator has no idea of what it might be, or of how to confront the illusion directly, how to tear it down and so arrive at the truth. Tyler is no Morpheus, but his red pill is every bit as bitter, and just as tough to swallow. Once again (as for Thomas), the illusion is not merely his empty, automaton life, but his very identity: the person he has come to believe himself to be. Hence Tyler (like Neo), though a figment of the narrator's imagination, is in fact more real than the person who dreamed him up, since he is a manifestation--not p hysical but psychological--of everything that he has repressed in his vain, self-negating bid to fit in. Tyler Durden is wild and unruly and destructive, not to mention plain imaginary; but he is also honest, uninhibited, and fearless. He may be unreal, but his ideas and his actions are not. Tyler's first idea--to get hit--is essentially a wake-up call, just as blowing up his own apartment is for the narrator. Tyler is the Zen master administering blows, in order to insert new programs in the moment of silence which the violence (and pain) creates. Physical pain and brutality have the direct result of causing the intellectual, rational mind to shut down briefly, so allowing pure instinct to take over. The fight clubs are not simply a means to return to primal, instinctive behavior, since this in itself is the means for a profounder end: that of (for lack of another word) enlightenment, or self-realization. The fight clubs, for all their wanton brutality, are actually workshops geared towards reprogramming the participants. The narrator starts with himself (both of him), but soon finds himself a following, and so becomes (by default) a kind of guru of violence. Like Hitler and Manson before him, he has tapped into an atavistic current, that of transformation through pain, or (male) regeneration through violence. If Fight Club is "fascist," then the critics should know better than to disparage the movie for it, and look instead to the more troubling implications in society itself. They might consider the possibility that fascism has become (just as it did in Germany in the '30s) the only viable political solution to our present social predicament. Fight Club is not advocating these extreme measures, it is prophesizing their inevitability, and hence cautioning against them. But as ever, the messenger gets the rap, in order that the message can be ignored.

"If you woke up in a different place, and in a different time, could you wake up as a different person?" --Narrator, Fight Club

Tyler and the narrator strike up a perverse but mutually satisfying friendship, and into this idyllic partnership (of self and other) steps, inevitably, the third player. The "tourist" and troublemaker Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) arrives to stir things up and take the boys to the next level. She is the anima, and it is meeting Marla that "engenders Tyler" in the first place; through his repressed desire for her, the narrator is compelled to invent someone with the balls to take Marla on. Hence Marla, the anima, is the catalyst, and moments after her introduction the second subliminal insert of Tyler appears (as the narrator watches her walk away with loathing). The flash image of Tyler suggests that the narrator's loathing is mixed with longing, and that this is resulting directly in his conjuring of the super-male Tyler--his own sex instinct, or libido--in order to chase after the coveted object of desire. Marla (in whom director David Fincher apparently saw himself) is a desperate sort, a "fashionable nihilist" who, in Tyler's estimation, is a genuine seeker of oblivion, in contrast to the narrator's half-baked dilettante. ("At least she's really trying to hit bottom," he mocks.) When the narrator first meets her, she is in the process of ruining his fantasy refuge at the self-help groups, by arriving under the same subterfuge as he (as a "tourist"). Like Harold and Maude meeting at funerals, Marla and the narrator seem made for each other, and if they fail to hit it off, this is only because the narrator is too threatened by Marla's presence to admit his attraction to her. He feels that she is exposing his own designs: "Her lie reflected my lie." As a result he is unable to feel anything anymore (he can't cry in front of Marla), and his insomnia returns. He finally makes a deal with Marla so they won't have to meet again, assigning specific nights to each of them, and for a while he is free of her. (Though he may still fantasize about her: At a lecture on the healing power of pain, the narrator follows a meditation to imagine his power animal and encounters a penguin that tells him "slide," and promptly does just that. Later he re-enters the same cave and finds Marla in place of the penguin. She has entered into the deepest layer of his being, and assumed her place as his "familiar.") Marla is in a long tradition of demented, doomed movie heroines; when she wanders into traffic seemingly indifferent to physical harm, she may remind us of Jeanne Moreau jumping into the Seine in Truffaut's Jules et Jim. (The narrator tells us, "Marla's philosophy of life was that she might die at any minute. The tragedy was that she didn't.") And unlike the narrator, we may be sad to see her go. Sometime later, however (once the narrator has abandoned cancer groups for fight clubs), she calls him up at his new abode (Tyler's derelict house on Paper Street) and informs him that she has taken a bunch of pills ("soul, prepare to evacuate!"). He coldly leaves the phone off the hook and skulks away, whereupon Tyler takes over. Intrigued, Tyler goes over to Marla's, brings her back, and fucks her all night long in order to keep her awake. This fulfills Tyler's lament of being "a generation raised by women" and his wistful thought that "maybe what we need is a woman." Of course, since Tyler gets laid, so does the narrator, albeit unconsciously, and this is presumably (nonetheless) a major catalyst for him. (It's also here that the film's schizo logic begins to suffer under the strain of the story; even though Tyler forbids the narrator to mention him to Marla, there's hardly any way she wouldn't notice that he is a split personality. One could put Fight Club under the microscope and scrutinize it every which way, and find that it fails to hold up at every turn, but why bother? It's a fantasy, and such criteria hardly apply to fantasy works. Fincher claims that, besides Tyler stealing the red Ferrari at the airport, the movie is "bullet proof," i.e. free of impossibilities. I beg to differ. Maybe everything we see is physically possible; but then so is hanging an elephant from a cliff face by a daisy. The chances of it happening, however, are so slim as to be non-existent. One major "bullet hole" in the movie's text is when the narrator returns home to find Marla and Tyler fucking. This makes no sense, even within the twisted logic of the narrator's fantasy, since his schizo projections only include Tyler, not Marla. Fight Club is implausibility taken to a natural extreme, but this is only a legitimate criticism if you actively fight its charms, and try and pin it down to "realism." Plainly that's a self-defeating policy. Fight Club invents and adheres to a logic all its own.) Tyler ups the stakes when he begins to recruit his "Space Monkeys," and what started as two men indulging their masochistic (and machismo) urges turns into a bona fide movement. As the narrator points out, all the space monkey recruits are essentially morons, and the impression given is that not only are persons of sub-standard intelligence most readily drawn to the fight clubs, but that Tyler's "reprogramming" tends to accentuate the slavish, doltish side of the recruits. He appears to be working on crushing their individual tendencies and inculcating them with a dronelike, collective will, or "spirit," by which they may become "microscopic cogs in his catastrophic plan." If the fight clubs seem finally to be lacking in a unifying vision, this is because Tyler himself seems incapable of truly creative thought or actio n. He is closer to antichrist than Messiah, finally; hence "In Tyler we trust" is a necessary prerequisite for the movement to move. Blind faith that all this destruction has a greater purpose, beyond the elaborate pranks of a chronically adolescent anarchist-nihilist seeking his own satisfaction, is required. Tyler is not planning a regeneration of the people, however, much less a golden new age; he is not drawing the Phoenix out of the ashes. He is simply burning everything down for the pleasure of seeing the flames. He is seeking personal catharsis above all. Doubtless this is the primary reason why (older) critics so despised the movie and treated it with such vitriolic contempt. This was their world that was being trashed. What's more, it was setting a bad, bad example for their children! (And I have heard, though been unable to confirm, that fight clubs are indeed taking off with younger people in the U.S. since the movie was released.) But Tyler's perspective (and that of the movie itself) cannot be understood if seen as a social or political one. It is apocalyptic, or it is nothing at all. "Our great war is a spiritual war," he intones with uncharacteristic solemnity. "Our great depression is our lives." What's happening around the narrator, and as a consequence of his actions and ideas, is secondary, finally, to what is happening within him. Likewise, Fight Club the movie--a great movie in its way, and expressly made for an apocalyptic generation--can only really be appreciated, or grokked, if seen as an externalization of an internal process, a process hitherto perceived as a "disease": that of schizophrenia. In no other movie (not even The Matrix) is the blueprint for personal evolution/social revolution (breakdown) more clearly and fully described than here. Fight Club has layers and layers of meaning; it is there in the details, the background, the throwaway jokes, the very texture of the movie (which is probably the richest in design since Blue Velvet). It exists between the images themselves, subliminally, like Tyler's cocks, spliced into the story, bawdy playfulness with a more serious intent. Fight Club is a ludicrous, offensive, absurd, tasteless, glib, obnoxious, immoral, self-important, preposterous, and irresponsible movie. But, whatever else you may say about it, it is also true to itself: impassioned, inspired, and visionary in its nihilistic zeal. It may not possess the usual attributes of a work of art--such as compassion, for example--but it is possessed by a spirit so fierce and original and devastating--so devotedly iconoclastic--that, love it or hate it, it must be respected as such: Art (with a capital "A" for Anarchy).

"Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken." Tyler Durden, Fight Club

The afore-mentioned "blueprint" is roughly as follows: The narrator, unable to sleep, finds certain relief in surrounding himself by worse-off cases than himself. (Note the parallels with Travis Bickle, of Taxi Driver, after whom the narrator seems to model himself: Travis is unable to sleep and rides around at night on subways; figuring "I might as well get paid for it," he takes a job as a cabbie.) When Marla--which is to say, his anima--shows up to remind the narrator what a faker he is, he has to cut a deal with her (they split their time) so that he can carry on at the self-help groups without being haunted by her presence. The fact is--a fact Marla makes plain to him--the narrator does not belong among these victims, since he is himself not a victim of cruel fate or random disease, but of his own relentless, irrepressible id. One supposes he cannot sleep because his id has become so unruly that the only way to repress it is by staying awake, hence avoiding its clutches for as long as he can. Finally, he represses it so long (avoiding sleep) that it is forced to "materialize" (project itself) into his waking, conscious life. It crosses over, as it were, from the dreamtime into the wakeworld. Traditionally, this is akin to the myth of the doppelganger, or double; but in Fight Club, the id's subterfuge is that it actually disguises itself as everything that the narrator is not: it dons all those characteristics which the conscious ego denies in itself. Hence he never suspects that they are one and the same person. This gives Tyler, the double, a mixed advantage: on the one hand it gives him more freedom (being unlimited by conscious fears), but on the other hand, it limits his movements, since he must be careful not to allow the ego to realize the truth (or to reveal his schizophrenia to outsiders). The doppelganger's first act is to explode, totally and irrevocably, the narrator's life, destroying his former, cozy existence and so drawing him, as it were, into his own orbit. Tyler inhabits a parallel track, if you will, to which the narrator must align himself, without ever realizing what is happening (that he is learning to cross over from left to right side, or from self to Other). The narrator is tricked, or snared, into complicity with the Other, and his being accepted into Tyler's underworld (the run-down house, half flooded and full of faulty electrical wiring, is the perfect id-yllic abode for him) is contingent first of all on the narrator asking Tyler outright (vocalizing his will), and, second, on his honoring Tyler's first wish (to hit him). Thereby the two men, the two sides of the psyche, are allowed to "bond" through the traditional (and primitive) male rite, that of violence. Once they have bonded, the narrator is sold immediately on the sensual-sensational aspects of their partnership; he even likens it to the sexual act when he says, "We should do this again some time." From here they are ready to co-inhabit, as brothers if not lovers. The "motion" (by which the ego undergoes initiation by--and into--the Id) is now underway. Visceral awareness is what the initiation amounts to. Since "being clever" is not really working for the narrator (it's what is driving him insane), it is time to try a more instinctive, irrational approach. Hence the running line of the film, "I am Jack's colon," etc., and also the opening credit sequence (that of the viscera of Jack's skull), are references to this: bodily awareness over mere intellectual cognition. (One might even say that, while the ego resides in the brain, the id belongs to the body.) The primary result of this perceptual realignment is that the narrator is now able to sleep (Tyler the id-monster has been unleashed, and so his unconscious is safe again; as it happens, of course, while the narrator sleeps, the monster runs free). Beyond this, the narrator's daily life becomes tolerable to him again: "everything gets turned down." Compared to the visceral intensity of the fight club, ordinary concerns come to seem petty and inconsequential. (The narrator expresses this as Tyler's imperative: "The ability to let everything that does not matter truly slide.") He abandons his cozy, stifling life of "condos and sitcoms" and embarks on a greater quest for meaning. This is not a passive quest. In order to change, it is not enough simply to move out of his apartment and take up a new routine. You can take the boy out of Babylon, as it were, but you cannot so easily take Babylon out of the boy. Hence the narrator must go to war with his former self, engaging in a constant battle against his weaknesses, his neuroses, in order to tear down that lying specter--identity--to which he has so long enslaved himself. And from these ruins, he must build a new identity, namely: Tyler Durden. The proces s is a process not merely of initiation/transformation but of self-realization. The narrator is forced, through this process, to realize that his teacher and guide is none other than his own true, hidden self. Tyler forces the narrator to "reject the basic assumptions of civilization" and to confront his fears one by one, until there is nothing left but the naked, abject, quick of his false self. Tyler compels him to reach bottom in order to start over from scratch. At this level (the internal level), Fight Club's philosophy of destruction is a positive, progressive philosophy. Beyond mere nihilism, it approaches Zen. The all-knowing, all-singing, all-dancing Id Tyler Durden will stop at nothing, and stoop to anything, to help his apprentice realize his non-existence and attain "the clear state." This is also the nature of Tyler's "human sacrifices," in which he selects random individuals and allows them to believe that their end is at hand, then gives them temporary reprieve in order expressly to change their ways. If he finds them failing to assume responsibility for their lives, to resume a self-determining path, he promises to come back and kill them. (This latter appears to be a bluff, since his gun is never loaded.) The point of this is, all or nothing. The warrior's way. The demand of Tyler, the unflinching id with nothing to lose (being already dead), is simply: no compromise. It is "To thine own self be true" or bust. Seen in this light, all of Tyler's acts--however destructive or demented--are justified, for the intent behind them is pure, unbending, and selfless. He is a madman, but with a method and with a purpose. This is perhaps best depicted (in one of the film's most effective scenes) when Tyler pours lye onto the narrator's hand and forces him to endure agony and scarring in order to fully assimilate his teachings. The narrator is forced to face up to his mortality, to "know that some day you are going to die." He must pass, beyond the pain and the fear, into pure understanding, to get "one step closer to hitting bottom," and realize that only when he has lost everything will he be free to do, or become, anything. He is marked for life by this ritual, in more ways than one. He comes to understand that real change entails letting go not just of the parts he doesn't like, but of everything. In this moment Tyler becomes the narrator's god, torturing him for his own enlightenment, and finally releasing him and giving him relief, balm (in fact vinegar) to ease the pain and lance his wounds. Tyler delivers his most profound and searing message in these moments, describing how human sacrifices of the past resulted in a discharge from the "melted fat of bodies" (the "ashes of heroes") that filled the river below with soapy substance, which the locals then found was the best spot for washing their bodies and clothes. Since soap comes from human body fat, which in turn can be used for manufacturing explosives, Tyler traces a full, apocalyptic circle here between human sacrifice, cleansing rituals, and back again to holocausts and terrorist action. "Without the pain, without the sacrifice, we would have nothing! This is your pain! This is your burning end! Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell us about God? Consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. We are God's unwanted children? So be it!" And from this moment on, the narrator "belongs" to Tyler (who has put his mark on him, just like God on Cain). The ego has been conquered, and the Id reigns supreme. And the price, though high, is also fair. Freedom is not free, and tearing off the mask that enslaves one invariably leaves scars. But, as Tyler says, who wants to die without scars? Visceral awareness involves an awakening of all the senses, not just the rational ones. These senses have been so long dormant that, to break the spell of slumber, shocks are entirely necessary. Trials, ordeals, initiation rituals that involve pain and scarring, all this is par for the course of enlightenment. The narrator lets his unconscious do the driving, and if he comes off the rails as a result, this is only and exactly what he needed to come to his senses. And the more beaten and shaken he gets, the more scars he racks up, the more near-life experiences he endures, the closer he gets to being alive. Once again, the philosophy, or "message," of the movie may seem harsh, even extremist; but if so, we have only ourselves to blame. The harshness of the "cure" is in direct proportion to the gravity of the condition. At this point, nothing short of a head-on collision seems likely to bring us back to ourselves.

"I used to be such a nice guy." Narrator, Fight Club

Shortly after Tyler initiates sex with Marla (for her own salvation, naturally), the narrator endures his chemical burn ritual and Tyler begins giving out homework assignments to fight club members. The narrator's sexual liberation is taking place unbeknownst to him. He is in the peculiar position of being jealous of both Marla (for coming between him and Tyler) and of Tyler, for fucking Marla (he is jealous of himself). At a conscious level, this is only serving to increase his frustration. Yet, so far as his behavior as Tyler goes, he is being further unleashed, and appears to be finding his true purpose at last. Once Tyler begins assigning specific, anarchic tasks, his until then personal quest for individuation becomes an authentic movement, and the ramifications of his madness begin to spread out into the world, like a spreading virus. Essentially, this is what Tyler is: a virus, hatched in the solipsist brain of the narrator, a virus that soon grows too insatiable to satisfy itself with a single host. Tyler infects anyone he can get close enough to with his particular brand of dementia, and this is the means for the narrator to unburden himself of his own psychosis: by inflicting it upon society (the parallels with Travis are certainly more than passing). Critics of the film who balked at its "message" (i.e., Tyler's) not only ignored the fact that all of Tyler's converts are essentially moronic hoodlums, but that the whole movement is the brainchild of a complete and total psychopath. For most of its length, the film may appear to idealize Tyler and to evoke our sympathy for the narrator; but once the revelation of their being one and the same has dawned, our feelings are forced to undergo a similar 180° shift. As partners in mischief, Tyler and the narrator make an irresistible pair. As a single, split soul working out its own psychosis, the character is both appalling and pitiful in equal measures. Of course, by the time this apocalyptic penny has dropped, we have been hurled into a surrealist landscape and all criteria (or capacity) for judgment have been suspended. We are allowed to sit back in bewilderment, and marvel at the spectacle of runaway schizophrenia in its fullest expression. The process the film now maps is that of the gradual alienation or distancing between the two sides of the psyche. Tyler, "the spirit of mischief," "purity of impulse," having taught the narrator his art and molded him in his own image, begins to stray ever further beyond the bounds of what he, the narrator, considers viable or sane behavior. In other words, the closer the narrator comes to fulfilling his own idealized image and expression of self (the more precisely he imitates Tyler), the further into madness Tyler must go. His intention is to take his apprentice to the limit and, if possible, beyond. When the narrator b eats himself up in his boss's office (the film's comic highpoint, and a new peak in absurdist violence), he is proving just how far he has come under Tyler's tutelage. The enactment reminds the narrator of his first fight with Tyler because, of course, there too he was really fighting himself. Only now he no longer needs to imagine an adversary-accomplice to do the deed but is able to act alone, thus demonstrating how far he has come. This scene is his real graduation, his personal victory, and he is rewarded by a year's severance pay and a cartload of office goodies. But Tyler is unimpressed, and merely moves on to the next level of mayhem. The "human sacrifice" scene is the first time we see the narrator beginning to have misgivings about Tyler's methods, and although he all-too-quickly recants of his doubts (most of all when he sees that Tyler's gun isn't loaded), we in the audience may not be so easily placated. If Tyler hasn't yet crossed the line between mischief and malignancy, then it's only a matter of time. It's at this point that Tyler's recruitment program begins and we begin to see the darker, more dubious implications of his agenda. Tyler appears to be on a power trip as well as a joy ride. Tyler/the narrator insists that "nobody is the center" of the movement--"The leader walked through the crowd, out in the darkness"--but this hardly jibes with his manner of indoctrinating the recruits. He may be telling them that they are all equal, "You are not special. You are not a beautiful, perfect snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We are all part of the same compost heap." But it is still Tyler, the grand master, who is telling them this. And the narrator feels threatened and rebellious at what he perceives of Tyler's assumption of power, as well as his own loss of central importance to Tyler, who now has many minds to fuck with, and not just the narrator's. "I am Jack's enflamed sense of rejection," he grumbles. In the following scene, the narrator gratuitously pummels the young blonde youth to a bloody pulp, all for the sake of "destroying something beautiful." Since the narrator is breaking Tyler's (his own) rules at this point, he is effectively establishing his independence from Tyler, albeit in the most aggressive and vicious manner. He is taking on Tyler's uninhibited nature as his own, but, perhaps inevitably, he takes it a step further, out of mere machismo and into psychosis. Tyler, realizing that his apprentice is now ready to make it on his own, stages one final enactment (theatre-as-deprogramming) and gives the narrator his "near-life-experience" car crash. This is the symbolic dramatization of the end of their association. Before they enter the car, the narrator bows to Tyler, "After you, Mr. Durden," but Tyler returns the courtesy, "After you." This signifies the narrator's wrestling with his responsibility, since the first one in the car goes into the passenger seat; by allowing Tyler his courtesy, he also secedes to him the driver's seat. Tyler is driving, while the narrator sees himself as being the passenger, i.e., passive. At this point the two sides of the psyche, ego and id, have their first argument, while the two space monkeys in the back, hearing a two-way conversation come out a single mouth, are realizing just how schizo their leader really is. Once again Tyler reminds the narrator that "This does not belong to us. We are not special!" In response to the narrator's complaint about not being included in Project Mayhem, Tyler snaps back, "You decide your own level of involvement!" Tyler lets go of the wheel and allows the vehicle to steer itself. Now is the time for the narrator to assume responsibility for his passivity. He is jealous and threatened by the introduction of all these outsiders into his cozy relationship with Tyler, and Tyler assures him that he has some rethinking to do. "Forget about what you think you know. . . . Especially about you and me!" By letting go of the wheel, Tyler is effectively stepping down from his position in charge. He's moving out the driver's seat, and so acknowledging that he was never there to begin with, that the narrator has been living a life that has, effectively, been driverless. Here is the ultimate test: if he can't take over the reigns, then he will have to surrender himself totally to the momentum, and go wherever it takes him. Paradoxically, this is the prerequisite for assuming responsibility for one's actions: accepting that one has no control over anything except these actions, that life is a fast ride to death, and at best one might be able to choose the time and place of death, but above all, one must decide how one meets it (fearlessly, or not). The narrator surrenders, and passes the test (he survives); whereupon Tyler disappears, like the dream he always was. His work, in theory, is now done.

"I can't even begin to keep up." Marla, to the narrator, regarding psychotic behavior, Fight Club

The narrator has been freed from fear and accepted his death, and so assumed responsibility for his actions. In theory, that is; but this is contingent on his realizing the truth about Tyler and about himself, and this he does not do. Instead, he chases Marla off ("Tyler is gone. Tyler is not here!"), and is confronted for the first time with the deadly consequences of Tyler's "mischief," when Bob is killed in one of the space monkeys' little "escapades." At this point, he abandons Paper Street and the whole fight club organization, and goes in search of Tyler. The ego in search of the id, "like following an invisible man," or worse, a man seeking his own shadow. Every place he visits, he experiences a sense of déjà vu. His whole life has become déjà vu. It is not that he is chasing his shadow, then, but that he is the shadow of his own true self, and as such always one step behind (the fate of the shadow). Wherever he goes, he finds Tyler has been there before him, setting up fight clubs and spreading mayhem as he goes. The narrator is gradually facing up to the truth of himself, the only way he knows how to. Incapable of simply putting one and one together (and coming up with zero!), he must act out his schizophrenic delusion to the end; he needs to have the truth spelled out for him in black and white. The otherworldly bartender identifies him at last, and little by little he begins to glimpse the truth of his dementia. (We also may realize at this point how unlikely the whole thing is, namely that no one has pointed out to him the truth in all this time.) He calls Marla on the telephone and demands of her, "Have we ever done it?" In despair and disgust, she finally calls him by his real name (once again it is a stretch to believe she hasn't done so until now). Still incredulous, he remanifests Tyler before him in his hotel room, and Tyler explains the score to him, as to a small child. This has to be one of the most original scenes of any movie anywhere, and is beautifully played by the two leads. Indeed, the success of the movie really hinges upon Pitt and Norton immersing themselves in the part(s) as totally and as passionately as they do. Both gifted performers, yet with completely disparate styles, they affectively mesh into a single persona. What unites them above all, and what makes the performance(s) so remarkable, even unprecedented, is their shared belief in, and affection for, the material. You feel as if they have given everything they have to the role, and then a little bit more, to do justice to the conception of Tyler. As the narrator flash es back on everything he has done (as Tyler) and the full weight of reality descends upon him, the moments come together, like a shifting kaleidoscope in our heads and on the screen (and Fincher's touch was never more deft and assured than it is here). In a matter of seconds the untapped promise of schizophrenic cinema is realized, in full. This is movie history in the making. The narrator passes out under the pressure and everyone in the audience is left suspended, jaws hanging, assimilating the awful, psychotic truth. "Changeover." Everything we have seen has been a lie. Yet from the schizo's point of view, the truth has finally dawned. From here, all that remains is for the narrator to fully assimilate (face up to) the truth. What this entails is not merely the destruction of Tyler but his total absorption. The narrator (like the viewer) must acknowledge the unthinkable fact that Tyler never existed, and that everything Tyler ever said or did was a fantasy, being really said and done by the narrator himself. He must assume total responsibility for his fantasy, for Tyler's mischief, and for his own runaway psychosis. If he can do so--i.e., admit to himself that he is completely insane--then he may reintegrate himself, allow his ego and his id to co-exist in conscious harmony as a single entity, and so regain (or rather, attain for the first time) his sanity. Tyler tells the narrator, "I'm free in all the ways that you are not." He points out that "sometimes you're still you," but that the "cross over" is almost complete, "little by little you're letting yourself become--Tyler Durden." The movie's climax--though it takes the almost conventional form of a showdown between the two men, defusing the bomb, reunion with Marla, etc.--is really a dramatic working out of this maddening conundrum. Though the narrator realizes that Tyler is but the projection of his own id, Tyler has by now gained a nigh-autonomy unto himself as an acting id-entity. As such, he does everything he can to stop the narrator from stopping himself. And yet, since they really are one, this is really Tyler's final lesson, or test, for the narrator. If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him. (There are serious weaknesses however; the narrator's determination to undo all Tyler's work may strike us as rather spineless. He is resisting the inevitable, plainly, and some of these scenes, most especially those of the narrator turning himself in to the police, may seem forced and rather unnecessary, not to mention plain unconvincing. The film seems uncertain as to whether to present Tyler as the bad guy or the savior, and as a result we can't really tell if the narrator is finally coming to his senses or coming off the rails at last. Fortunately it leans more towards the latter view, by having him running through the street in his boxer shorts and exhibiting all the classic behavior of a loon--a fact which the rematerializing Tyler is delighted to point out to him. But I think the scene in which the narrator discovers that even the police are under Tyler's control, and narrowly escapes a castration at their hands, though funny enough, stretches our credibility just a little too far. Since it's not strictly necessary to the film's narrative, it might better have been dropped entirely.) For the apprentice to finally attain his own individual freedom, he must reject (overcome) not only everything that Tyler has taught him to reject but also, finally, Tyler himself. And the essence of this final split-off (individuation) from all that is not-self in the narrator is his affection for Marla. Tyler's desire to destroy Marla (as a potential threat to his existence, or more precisely, his own control over the narrator) is the one desire, finally, that the narrator cannot share. Hence it is the narrator's own desire (to save Marla, the anima) that establishes his independence from Tyler. It forces him to make his own choice at last. And so, by finally defining the Other as other, he attains to the Self. Paradoxically, but rightly, to overcome Tyler he has to shoot himself, in the head (though actually in the mouth, which is also correct, since the self effectively speaks the shadow side into existence). The narrator is destroying Tyler by becoming him. Since Tyler is the "purity of expression" by which the narrator's true nature has been released, found form and inherited life, it is rather the false ego construct, and not the unleashed id, that must die. This is Cain and Abel all over again: the slayer becomes the slain, the victim the victor. Absolve et coagula. Analysis and synthesis. Alchemical wedding. It is not Tyler who is dying here, but the narrator who must sacrifice himself, at last, that Tyler (his perfected self) be born. Hence the moment coincides not only with Marla's reappearance and their long-avoided union as lovers (as opposed to demented sex partners)--his acknowledgment of the anima--but also with the final realization of Tyler's anarchic dream, project Mayhem, that brings modern civilization crashing to its knees. The age of repression is over. Civilization, the sacrificial lamb, the burnt offering on the altar of freedom by which the true self may finally be born--and the Other inherit its own--is the price. Tyler is dead. Long live Tyler. I am Jack's manifested destiny.