Fight Club (1999) Pt. 1
So, this was inevitable: those who know me know that this is one of my absolute favorite films of all time. Those who don’t have probably seen this movie anyway, and anyone left in the margin? Well, have I got a gift for you.
This movie came out in the middle of my formative years, and I dismissed it. I dismissed it because, back then, unless your movie had Adam Sandler or Chris Farley in it, I just didn’t care. It was a very strange time in my life- but eventually, thanks to a buddy who refused to let me keep living without seeing this film, I discovered a classic.
So, to preface this review, I need my audience to understand a couple of quick points:
* This is easily in my top 5 favorite movies of all time. It’s very important to me, and I have planned to review this for a long time- as such, it is with great care that I review/analyze this film.
* I somehow finagled my way into writing this review for my L462 class at school, a class examining the rhetoric in popular culture. Because of this, this review will:
a) include an analysis section, along with the standard “pros v. cons” structure, and
b) focus on concepts related to the class.
This is for a grade, so, bear with me. I thought this format would be awesome for analyzing this film. I’ll instead divide this into sections, then hit the pros and cons to finish ‘er up.
Now, with no further ado, I will begin. Enjoy.
THE PLOT:
Wow. The plot of this film is difficult to write about without spoiling major points of the film, so I will attach this obligatory *WARNING: SPOILERS* tag.
In this film, the narrator, suffering insomnia, finds solace in support groups for terminal illnesses. Since the narrator is not actually afflicted by these illnesses, he becomes offended when he sees another “tourist”, a woman named Marla, attending these meetings. His problems return, but in his travels for work, he meets a strange man. Coincidentally, his apartment is destroyed, and the aforementioned man welcomes him into his home, where they develop a friendship. Together, they create “fight clubs”, where men can go to, for lack of better terms, feel like men. Eventually, these fight clubs transcend their original therapeutic purpose and become something bigger (and more sinister), with the narrator losing his control over them. Eventually, he discovers that he had been living a double life, with his “friend” actually being a repressed personality that his mind had created in order to deal with his life. The friend had been running the fight clubs while the narrator thought he was sleeping, and through these fight clubs, the friend had amassed an army bent on making the world hit “rock bottom”. To achieve this, the friend had set up bombs in places throughout the city in the buildings that store the world’s debt records; bombing them would erase those records, erasing the world’s debt. The narrator, unwilling to do the kind of harm necessary to make that happen, fights his personality and the film ends with the narrator convinces the personality that he had just committed suicide. The personality dies, but it turns out it was too late, the bombs go off, and the narrator watches from his vantage point.
The Why:
Before I continue, it’s important to me that I explain why I think this movie merits analysis.
First, Fight Club was the first mind-fuck movie that I can remember seeing. The revelatory final act and ending gave me pause: “Wait, really?” I asked. “No way, was he not actually in that scene-?” It made me want to watch it over and over again, to catch anything I might have missed. Coupled with the subversive nature of the film (I was a teenager when I first saw it, after all, and if there’s anything most teens understand, it’s rebellion), it just made me more and more curious.
What I found most interesting about this film (and what I continue to find interesting about it) is that it challenges a lot of prescribed ideas- the main character in the film has a secure, seemingly well-paying job, but he still can’t sleep at night. Additionally, he appears to have a split personality, though the movie remedies this by saying “people do it everyday” (Fight Club). It asks questions, questions like: “The character Tyler is metaphorical, but what is it that he is supposed to represent? Why is the movie concerned with a return to simplicity, or what is it saying about our nature that this otherwise well-balanced man creates another personality for himself? What happens when our society is no longer a slave to materialism anymore? What happens to us when we face our own mortality?” These types of questions are tough, in that some people are very averse to answering them. I always thought that was something special- something that merited a closer look. In hunting for material to use in this analysis/review, I found a quote that troubled me:
“Some people still thought that this film was just an excuse for men to continuously punch each...” (KuriousKatz)
And that, I cannot abide.
Now, I’d like to take a look at what some of this stuff actually means.
The Lenses:
- Psychoanalytic
Let me preface this by making a statement about myself: I am naive. I am incredibly thick-skulled, and meaning takes a great deal of time to reach me; longer than the time it takes to reach my peers. That said, I might be the last person on the train here, but I noticed that Fight Club has a serious tie to Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory of Personality. “Who is Sigmund Freud?” you might ask? Freud is a man from the early 1900′s who developed a theory about how our psyches work. He theorized that the psyche was split into three distinct elements: the Id, Ego, and the Super-ego.
The Id is the part of us concerned with desire and unchecked; it’s unconscious and operates within us from birth. It acts independent of any other influence, and drives us to make the choices that bring us the must “immediate gratification of all needs, wants and desires” (Siegfried). R. Kelly, perhaps unknowingly, explains it in the first 12 seconds of this song:
Go ahead. Listen to it ALL. Ain’t nothin’ wrong...
The Super-Ego, on the other hand, is governed by societal rules and other types of regulations. According to William Siegfried, “the Super-Ego aims for perfection.” For example, while a person’s Id tells them that it would be really awesome to punch a child and steal a lollipop (because lollipop), the Super-Ego reminds a person that society tends to frown upon such acts. The Super-Ego actively works against the Id, inhibiting a person, urging them to act only in a way that is “socially appropriate” (Siegfried). We get this all the time; for example, whenever a person has the need to eat, rather than leaping over the counter and stuffing the burger directly into their face, their Super-Ego tells them that society doesn’t really get psyched on that.
Sometimes, the Super-Ego takes a vacation.
Finally, both of the aforementioned parts are reconciled by the Ego, which combines the expression of desires (from the Id) and a socially acceptable way of expressing those desires (the Super-Ego) (Siegfried). The Ego is all about compromise. Look at the picture above; to go into a restaurant and order that many hot dogs, then scarf down on them without using your hands is a bit of a faux pas. Still, this woman yearns to eat a truckload of hot dogs; her Id is telling her so. So she compromises- instead of just committing treason against her Super-Ego, her Ego gives her a reconciliation: “Just enter a hot dog eating contest, dummy,” it might have said, “It’s socially acceptable to stuff hot dogs down your gullet there.” The Ego mostly combines the desires of the Id with the established rules defined in the Super-Ego to create socially acceptable desires. Wow!
The tie-in here is that these sections of the human psyche, I believe, are represented by characters in Fight Club.
Consider this scene:
On its own, the scene looks like a couple of buddies who have had a few too many drinks and decided to test their masculinity. Looking at their language, however, I discern that Tyler and the narrator are actually pieces of the human psyche- look at the dialogue:
Narrator: Well, what do you want me to do? You just want me to hit you?
Tyler Durden: C'mon, do me this one favor.
Narrator: Why?
Tyler Durden: Why? I don't know why; I don't know. Never been in a fight. You?
Narrator: No, but that's a good thing.
Tyler Durden: No, it is not. How much can you know about yourself, you've never been in a fight? I don't wanna die without any scars. So come on; hit me before I lose my nerve.
Narrator: This is crazy.
Tyler Durden: So go crazy. Let 'er rip.
Narrator: I don't know about this.
Tyler Durden: I don't either. Who gives a shit? No one's watching. What do you care?
Narrator: Whoa, wait, this is crazy. You want me to hit you?
Note that Tyler is being expressed as the one having wants, his dialogue revealing a desire to be hit? The narrator, conversely, shows apprehension about the whole idea, because of how he thinks society will view him (”No one’s watching”, Tyler assures him). Tyler represents the Id in this scene, begging the Narrator to cut loose and fulfill his desires (since, after all, he is Tyler). The Narrator is apprehensive because he represents the Super-Ego, which tells him that “this is crazy”, and that society frowns upon this sort of thing. This scene ends with the Id winning out- the Narrator hits Tyler (himself), and “the movie goes on, and nobody in the audience has any idea” (Fight Club).
Also, consider this quick clip:
This is from a scene in the movie in which the Narrator is explaining, hypothetically, what he would do to Marla, if only he were able. In his words: “She was a liar. She had no diseases at all... Marla: the big tourist. Her lie reflected my lie. Suddenly, I felt nothing. I couldn’t cry, so once again, I couldn’t sleep.”
This is a Super-Ego struggling with the idea that it knows it is breaking the rules. It had found reconciliation by going to support groups, but seeing Marla, a reflection of the fact that the Super-Ego was being tricked, caused the Narrator more trouble.
Admittedly, while I was convinced that I could pin the Id and Super-Ego on Tyler and the Narrator respectively, I had a bit of trouble trying to figure out who best embodied the idea of the Ego. At first, I thought Marla worked- being the only other character receiving enough attention to merit the title. Marla, however, spends far too much time indulging her own desires and ignoring conventional rules to fill the role of the Ego; there’s not nearly enough compromise to make sense. After much consideration, I think I found a solution: the Narrator becomes the Ego; the analogue is transformative. In the beginning of the story, he best represents the Super-Ego, doing all of the things that a person molded by the rules of capitalist society (more on this part soon) should (e.g. holds a job, has an apartment, buys stuff). The twist comes, and he realizes that Tyler (again, the Id) is a part of him. There’s a line of dialogue in the film that gave me pause and helped me make the connection:
Tyler Durden: “Hey, you created me. I didn't create some loser alter-ego to make myself feel better. Take some responsibility!” (Fight Club).
It made me realize that, since they are all the same person, then they all are pieces to the same complete human psyche. They all make one singular, whole character. This is evidenced by the reconciliation that the Narrator attempts to gain after the revelation that he is Tyler; he begins trying to cope with his needs while remaining within the confines of what society deems acceptable.
“So what?” I can hear you asking yourself. Why create such a schizophrenic character? Tyler/the Narrator’s purpose, in so far as his split personality is concerned, is to highlight the struggles that we all face every single day. In addition to making a great plot twist, the idea of a character representing parts of the human psyche forces us to ask ourselves questions; things like, “What is right or wrong?” or “If I want to do it, why is it bad?” One of the things that I think the film specifically wanted to address was this idea that we, as humans, yearn for things constantly, but we’re suppressed in our ability to just do what we really want to. Society is stifling; our Super-Egos constantly remind us of what we can’t do rather than what we can. The human psyche move was subtextual to help us find the connection between the film and our desires in reality. It exists to give us pause- “Yeah, maybe I don’t want to die without any scars.” I think the deeper meaning here was to go out and experience things, do bad stuff; live. Listen to our Ids more, you know? Which reminds me, there was another lens I’d like to examine this film through, and this can be my segue into it.
Let me take a moment to interrupt my regularly scheduled program to tell you that Tumblr is apparently upset with all the links and photos I have dumped into this review; I have to split it up into segments. Let’s call this “Part 1”, and say that it has concluded here. Part 2 should be below, and Part 3 will close out the review. Stay tuned.