Most people who enjoy fighting don’t enjoy it for the same reasons they did in “Fight Club.” 
Wait, you mean most people DON’T fight because of some gaping existential hole in their lives?
Well, most people don’t fight at all, but among those who do, that’s usually not why. 
Of course not, silly, because then we’d all be fighting.
More seriously, the first part of the movie resonated more for me than the second part (more of a comment about me rather than the movie, but I just wanted to add another impression to all that this movie offers).
That whole speech at the beginning about the furniture, solving the sofa problem, it showed that life was a series of burdens at which you don’t win, you just postpone failure. What Tyler showed him was what the help groups showed him: if you embrace failure, you often find it out it isn’t really failure, it’s just another place to be. That can be a huge relief.
It’s like those people who go confess to crimes they couldn’t possibly have done. If they get believed, then the fear is over.
What Tyler brought to the game was that sometimes, embracing loss isn’t just letting go of fear, it can actually start to feel like winning. The strongest scene for me was when Tyler let himself be beat up by the gangster, and then came back laughing, saying 'You don’t know where I’ve been!" The point is that not fearing failure means not just that you don’t have to worry about it anymore, but you gain power from it.
Which both Tyler and Narrator pursue in different ways. But I’ve always been more attracted to loners, so the army isn’t boring, it just is the end of a story that already gave me its best.
I agree with you that the message you attest to can be taken from the film. That being said, I don’ believe that the author intended it to be there. Pretty much all of Palanihuk’s work has the same “you need to destroy yourself to save yourself” theme.
I love Fight Club, but the fact that this wasn’t explained pisses me off so much. Almost enough to hit someone as hard as I can.
One of the best things I took away from it was the message of taking risks. Tyler pushed “Jack” and the others to live way out on the edge. It’s scary there, but the rewards are also great.
Instead of watching his life dribble away one minute at a time at a job he cared nothing about, the narrator quit, built a new life, figured out who he was, showed other people who were also broken a path for change. For them, the change involved a violent rejection of society, and publicly destructive acts that were privately constructive.
Tyler’s worldview pushed them into a kind of self-contemplation that they probably would not have undertaken on their own. A scene that brought this home is when Tyler asked “Jack” what he wanted to do before he died. The Project Mayhem guys all knew, because they’d thought about it.
With acts like the lye burning, they were testing their limits. Granted, they weren’t performing this introspection in the most constructive way, but they were doing it.
There was also an element of self-sacrifice in some of their projects, like when they were supposed to get into a fight…and lose. The lesson there was double edged. The Fight Club guys would learn that losing isn’t necessarily the worst thing that can happen, and they would be deliberately choosing to go through an unpleasant experience in order to reach a goal. At the same time, they would be teaching another person how it feels to break social rules, and what it was like to win a fight.
Yeah, no argument that nihilism was a big part of Fight Club, but there were some positive messages there too. And in the end, the narrator integrates that vital, frenetic, creative, but self-destructive part of himself into a whole personality. He outgrew the need for Tyler.
I actually thought that the best part of the film, message wise, was when Tyler threatened to kill the clerk. I loved the quote: “his breakfast will taste better than any meal you or I have ever eaten.” Talk about reaffirming the beauty of being alive.
Not to resurrect this thread, but I just saw Fight Club tonight. I don’t have much to add, except:
- Tyler Durden, for whatever he was, had some clear vision. Yes, that clerk’s breakfast would be the best he ever had.
- All of Tyler’s comments about hitting rock bottom are the Narrator’s comments, too, so I guess the Narrator felt this need in him to hit the bottom.
- I *understood *it. Even though I don’t particularly feel the need to fight anyone, nor do I feel trapped in the commercialism, but those parts still resonated with me.
A very entertaining ride made better by the (totally unexpected for me) plot twist. I’d never seen it and somehow managed to avoid all of the spoilers.
Now. Should I borrow the novel from the library? Is it worth it?
The novel is merely okay. Fight Club is, I think, the only movie that is not only better than the novel it’s based on, but far and away better than it.
For fun, watch the movie a second time and try to look for all the things you missed. A few hints: look very carefully for brief flashes of Tyler, spliced into the film, at various points. Also, pay attention to what ‘Jack’ says both in start when he’s got a gun in his mouth and at the end when they return to the same scene.
I really didn’t like the novel, which I read after seeing the movie, but I’m not really a huge Chuck Palahnuik (sp?) fan personally. I found it a bit pretentious. It’s interesting if you really loved the book, but I felt like it lacked the…oomph of the movie. I didn’t feel totally taken to another dimension by the book.
I think “Fight Club” is one of those rare situations where the movie is better than the book. But it’s a fairly short and easy read, and I thought it wasn’t that bad.
ETA: Seriously, how many people post at 10pm? Sheesh.
Hehe. I think I basically agree with you, BlackKnight. I mean, I didn’t like it that much, but it is a short/easy read, so it’s not as if you’ve lost anything by reading it, especially if you’ve seen the film first.
The novel hits on a few points and goes a few places that the movie doesn’t quite get to, but overall, I consider the movie to be the better executed work. The book just came off to me as needing a better editor, albeit with some very visceral images.
Some differences:
[SPOILER]In the book, Tyler Durden kills the Narrator’s boss, by rigging his computer monitor to explode when he turned it on in the morning. The narrator grieves over this, as he realized too late that his boss was the closest thing he had to a father figure. This was right around the point where his whole situation goes into a tailspin leading into the final act.
There are some recurring thoughts in the book that pay off later, such as the discussion of how to make a type of explosion, and how some people use paraffin (which never works for the narrator in his experience)
Also, in the climax of the book, Narrator, having just dispatched Tyler, is standing on the roof of a building Tyler has rigged to explode, accepting that he is about to die. Marla shows up with the people from the Tuberculosis group (you know, those who are actually suffering, and not just the disassociated middle age white guys whose dads did not hug them enough as kids) to try and convince him to come down from the roof. Just as he realizes what his actions are about to cause… nothing happens. Tyler used paraffin… which had never worked for him.
Then there is a creepifying epilogue where everyone the Narrator meets tells him that Project Mayhem will be ready when he is ready again.[/SPOILER]
If you want to read it, by all means, go for it. It’s short, pretty much a weekend read depending on how fast you are. The plot more or less is the same as the movie, with some differences for media.
Fun fact: The bit about the oxygen in the breather masks on airliners putting passengers into a state of euphoria is physiologically incorrect: Extra oxygen will make you more likely to panic (fainting is the body’s natural defense against hyperventilation, hence why people sometimes pass out when they panic), while lack of oxygen puts the body into a state of euphoria, leading to the pilot’s rule of thumb: If everything is going A-OK, check your oxygen. More than one airplane has crashed because the crew succumbed to hypoxia.
Sometimes, I wonder if it’s not just another retelling of the King Arthur stories. Ed and Brad are just Arthur and Merlin, founding the Knights of the Post Modern Roundtable. Fraternal Order, Knighthood, Slaying Dragons, saving and saved by the maiden.
Most people don’t fight about anything because they have been conditioned from birth to follow the rules. Listen to your parents, your teachers, your bosses and your reward will be a comfortible but thoroughly mediocre, unfullfilling life.
Unfortunately, unlike the Baby Boomers and Gen-Y Millennials, we weren’t born and raised with a pumped up sense of self importance. Fight Club isn’t about “feeling sorry for yourself”. It’s about the quinessential Gen-X question of why the lifestyle we have been sold since birth - go to school, get a job, get a nice place full of stuff, find a nice girl and settle down - seems unobtainable or unfullfilling.
Look at the life of a typical Gen Xer in movies and TV of the day - My So Called Life, Pump up the Volume, Heathers, Say Anything, PCU, Chasing Amy, Clerks, Reality Bites, Singles, Office Space, Friends, Fight Club, Empire Records, High Fidelity, etc. The reoccuring theme is alienation and dissatisfaction (and John Cussak). Constantly unsatisfied and frustrated with jobs, relationships, life.
Yes, there is a certain element of “complaining about the good life”. But maybe that’s what happens when you have things too good with no real hardships.
I think the message of Fight Club is simply “stop being what you think everyone else wants you to be and be yourself”. Taken to it’s most logical extreme of course. I mean the happiest guys in the Gen-X films are the 30-something year old guys who open a small local record store much to the chagrin of their professional girlfriend.
“We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives.”
Well. It looks like I’ll take a pass on the book, at least for now. Perhaps in the future.
As for watching it twice, well I got it off Netflix and really want to get the next one (The Adventures of Robin Hood, with Errol Flynn) so in the future I’ll rewatch it.
But I was surprised at how much the movie pulled me in. Really, really enjoyable.
The message of fight club is the clearly that “Jack” and Tyler Durden are Calvin and Hobbes grown up 
Alienation and dissatisfaction is the prevailing theme of Friends? Good god man, stay away from high ledges.
Oh, and My So Called Life was the first show to portray the sad little teenage life of Gen Y kids, not the last gasp of Gen Xers who think they’re special because they’re “not Boomers or Gen Yers.” Millenials are the kids that are being born now.
For what it’s worth, I just watched “My So Called Life” (yay, Netflix!) this month and I didn’t find it horrifyingly depressing. Compared to pablum like “Saved by the Bell,” or the later “Dawson’s Creek,” yeah, but only in that it felt a lot more real. There are ups and downs, but they’re just not as photogenic and cliche as in other teen drama shows.