The Polarity of a Man
The conflict between conformity and rebellion has
always been a struggle in our society. Fight Club is a movie that depicts just
that. The movie portrays the polarity between traditionalism and an anti-social
revolt. It is the story of man who is subconsciously fed up with the materialism
and monotony of everyday life and thereafter creates a new persona inside his
mind to contrast and counteract his repetitive lifestyle.
The main character
is actually unnamed, but sometimes is referred to as Jack, which comes from a
medical book he reads in the Tyler’s house perhaps. He is the normal, everyday,
worker bee that carries on his overly boring life day in and day out because he
is the typical conformist that society tells us to be. Jack is the everyday
common workingman to which the audience can sympathize with and relate to. His
character portrays the struggles and longevity of the American dream. He is
constantly rating his life and his lifestyle by his furniture. The designer
furniture that he orders out of mail catalogues defines his personality and self
worth. This is due to the fact that he is constantly trying to improve and
complete his lifestyle by buying certain pieces of furniture to create a modern
but still simple and traditional household. His house is beyond perfection but
yet he still tries to further its flawlessness, which relates to his dream of
the typical American. But as he constantly tries to improve himself with his
furniture and work habits to define his personality, he actually fails miserably
and does quite the opposite. When Jack buys his furniture he destroys every
attempt that he has made to improve himself. He only falls deeper into the hole
that he digs himself. Every piece of furniture that he buys, he loses another
part of his identity.
Jack’s conformity follows him to work as he becomes a
doormat. His socialization is confined to the limits of his cubicle with the
only exception being when he is on business trips. During flights he develops
relationships with the passengers around him. This is not done out of a real
honesty for a conversation, but out of a need to fill a void, a loneliness, a
lack of self-worth. His life is full of “single serving friends”, car crashes,
and wishes of an eventful death because the monotony of his life gives him
strict boundaries to live by. His job is to go around and examine horrible car
wrecks and determine if the vehicle needs to be recalled. He observes the
aftermath of vehicular violence with as much dispassion as another inter-office
memo passing across his desk. Death and violence are trivialized by the brutal
nature of his job. He subconsciously yearns for death and violence to be
tangible, not something he witnesses after the fact. One sleepless night, he
decides to go into a support group for testicular cancer survivors. He has never
had cancer but finds release by pretending to sob on the shoulders of other
recovering men. The ultimate "letting go" permitted in the support group clues
us in to the mental illness we are about to watch unravel amid the violence and
desperation of Fight Club. Eventually, he starts attending other support groups;
he becomes addicted to addiction recovery from his lack of a social life.
On
a plane during one of his business flights, Jack for once has an empty seat next
to him. He is so used to discussing life's unimportant matters with
“single-serving” friends in the neighboring seat that, on this occasion, he
invents the perfect one to fill the void. Enter Tyler Durden, a mysterious man
who is apparently full of information. Subliminal images of him are present
early the film. He flashes onto the screen in four split-second appearances
before they actually encounter each other. This is to show how Tyler has always
been inside Jack’s mind, just waiting for his chance to come out. Tyler also
briefly appears in a television ad for an upscale restaurant that Jack watches
from his hotel room. He lives in a rundown house that looks like it should have
fallen to pieces years ago. Almost every window is boarded up, there is no lock
on the front door, and it has the stench of a fart. Tyler is America’s
quintessential rebel. He shows no obvious care for other people, he splices
pornographic footage into family films while working in a projection booth and
urinates into a bowl of soup as a banquet waiter. To Tyler, happiness is pain.
Away from his support groups, Jack’s insomnia returned without him realizing
it, and he creates Tyler. Tyler states, “I look like you want to look, I fuck
like you want to fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly free in all the
ways you are not.” Tyler is everything that Jack wants to be. When comparing the
two you can begin to notice how opposite of each other they really are. Tyler
dresses crazy, always wearing bright exciting clothes, while Jack is always
dressed in a white, button down shirt, tucked into his khakis. Jack has a
somewhat out of shape body, and on the other hand Tyler has an 8-pack and is
well toned. Jack’s former condo was the epitome of perfection, while Tyler’s
house was by far unlivable. And most importantly Jack is the conformist as Tyler
is the rebel. They are the antithesis of one another, but for a very good
reason. Together, Tyler and Jack found Fight Club.
They begin Fight Club,
which is essentially a view of a contemporary man behaving primal, in effect
freeing themselves from the surplus of things that people value most. Stripped
down with just muscle and instinct to help you, a millionaire and a homeless man
are the same. It is the release from who you are and what society deems you,
what you own is of no consequence all that matters is the fight. With the no
social constraints everyone is their own person and no boundaries to be focused
upon by your peers. Tyler tried to take fight club to a global level as well.
His master plan was to blow up major bank buildings so that everyone’s debt
would revert back to zero. If nobody had any bank records or debt they would
have nothing, and a sense be equal to every other man. A rebel’s instincts
always point to creating chaos, and what better chaos could there be than no
social status. With no social status Tyler could bring his fight to a whole new
worldwide stage.
Jack symbolizes the everyday workingman, as Tyler is the
man everyone wants to be. Fight Club shows a man that everyone wants to be but
can’t because of laws and in most cases common courtesy. The movie states that
there is basically a Tyler in all of us, wanting and waiting to come out. None
of us will let him out though because we don’t have the courage, or maybe
stupidity to do it, although Jack does. For a while in the movie Jack did get
everything he wanted. He had no care in the world and couldn’t have felt better
about himself as a whole. Not until later does the final message come in,
without any control there is chaos. When Tyler ran rampant and did what he
pleased things began to get out of hand. For instance his final act of defiance
towards society was the blowing up of credit card companies in order to erase
the debt record so that everyone’s debt would go back to zero. This is only to
create total chaos and embody Tyler’s world without rules. Tyler sums up the
movie in his own terms, “You are not your job. You are not how much you have in
the bank. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your khakis. You
are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. The things you own end up owning you.”