And btw, no, you’re not supposed to feel sorry for the narrator in the beginning. Why would you? The entire point is that he’s just like the rest of us.
You fundamentally don’t have the mindset to be able to identify with the narrator.
Essentially - if you’re intuitively okay with being part of a modern society, the narrator’s character will baffle you. If you think that you could somehow replace ikea with another furniture company, or replace his job with some other generic white collar job, you’re missing the point entirely.
Essentially - there’s a primitive maleness in some people that becomes suppressed in modern society. Everything is sanitized and safe and boring and distant from primal function. Your job probably isn’t necesary - you aren’t out killing boars, you’re pushing some numbers to support some corporate entity which in urn supports other entities that have no necesary, primal function. You are not in charge of your own destiny, you are a cog in a great social machine.
You buy into a lifestyle that focuses on stupid shit. You’re programmed to chase the sort of safe, irrelevant shit that keeps people motivated to be consumers and drones in this great social machine. There’s a huge disconnect between who you are inside, at a primal level, and the function you serve as a cog.
This is why Fight Club (the entity inside the movie) took off - it tapped into that primal need. People had to cope with their bullshit existance within society, but they were able for a while to become their primal selves, to experience life without the distant, plastic-wrapped boring layer to modern existance.
If you essentially lack this mindset, you won’t understand the basic premise of the movie. A lot of people just don’t get it - that’s okay. It’s not an intellectual realization - it’s not some theme you need to figure out. You either have this fundamental dissatisfaction in your life and if so, this movie resonates with you, or you don’t, in which case you can’t understand why the narrator can’t just settle in to his (by most people’s standards) pretty decent life.
Fight Club also deals with “uncomfortable truths”, like the aforementioned nature of Narrator’s job, which is to justify the death of innocent people, or where soap originally came from. So, he figures, why not take a more active role in society’s self-destruction?
Of course, this is bullshit, but the movie knows this. I think in the last decade we’ve moved a lot more away from the mindset of “you are what your job is” so the notion of being lost in society as a meaningless cog isn’t as prevalent. Or that just could be my take on things.
There’s an irony in that, since that’s an image that is foisted upon males in society. Of course, that image has become dulled since the 1950’s or so, but it’s still there. That’s the hysterical thing to me, that and when Brad Pitt (of all people) points to the male models and says ‘are we supposed to look like that?’. Then his rants on ’ we all grew up thinking we would be movie stars, etc, etc’.
Very ironic.
The narrator is pathetic and Tyler is a terrorist. The tragedy is that is what society has made the options for men, either a pathetic drone working at a evil corporation or a nihilistic terrorist who wants to return society to the hunter gatherer phase. Being the pathetic drone drove the narrator to mental illness and being the terrorist left him shocked at his own evil and depravity. Tyler is an embodiment of the seductive power of evil and part of the fun of the movie is to enjoy being seduced by evil right alongside the narrator before the ending comes and you find out the only plan is destruction with nothing to replace.
It is a very single guys movie, once you have a family the nihilism is not as attractive.
I’m wondering if another woman is the answer we really need.
A “single guy” movie. puddleglum, that was accidentally clever.
This.
The Narrator is trying to find some sort of meaning and enjoyment out of life. Not just mere comfortible existance.
It’s a pretty common theme in movies from the past few decades. Characters that live trite, lonely, meaningless existances working jobs they hate (or opting out of work), no relationships or relationships that are superficial or toxic because it’s more comfortible than taking risks that might actually lead to a more fullfilling life. For example:
Peter Gibbons from Office Space
Ryan Bingham from Up in the Air
Bob Harris from Lost in Translation
Andrew Largeman from Garden State
Patrick Bateman American Psycho (or any character from any Bret Eaton Ellis book/film)
Miles from Sideways
Rose from Sunshine Cleaning
Mitch from Old School
Columbus from Zombieland
Dante from Clerks
the title character from Billy Madison
any character from Singles, Reality Bites, Empire Records or any other Gen-X film.
Basically the message is that unless you are a selfish, superficial, narcissistic, materialistic psychopath or an imbecile, life in modern post-industrial society is a pretty lonely and frustrating place.
I always thought Fight Club, American Beauty, and Office Space were three different ways to tell the same story.
Fixed. 
This is the point where I retstate my theory that the film is a parable about the rise of fascism. Disaffected young males, warrior ethos vs. effete “womanized” society, a charismatic leader, rights of passage - it’s all straight from the Mussolini playbook.
Well spoken, Bruce!
On a personal note, I teach college courses in… well, it doesn’t matter. On an exam, I recently asked, “What is the first rule of …” (the topic of the course).
One student answered: “The first rule of … is, you do NOT talk about …!”
Even though he clearly had not paid attention in class, I had to give him an A.
I haven’t read the book that the movie is based on. Does anyone know how close to the book the movie stayed? Would you recommend the book?
Yea, that’s why I haven’t really responded to this thread …mabe two people have actually read the book in this thread. It’s a recommended read, as well as several of whassisname’s books.
Chiuk P Chuk
I’ve read the book. The film stays VERY close to the book. I would recommend it. You might be put off the style, though. It’s very dry and lacks a lot of the personality that the movie possessed. One thing that’s in the book that’s absent from the movie is what I interpreted as an undercurrent of homoeroticism that takes place between the Narrator and Tyler- which is funny considering that they’re the same person.
I’m sure people told him to go fuck himself so many times, it was inevitable.
It has been a long time since I read it (I did so not long after the film came out) but I seem to remember there were some areas where there were noticeable changes. Maybe Project Mayhem was explained more, had more depth or a slightly different makeup?
Fight Club the novel has a completely different ending which calls into question a lot about the preceeding story.
It’s also one of the rare cases where the movie is better than the book. A lot better.
I haven’t read it in a few years and I can’t remember much, tbh. I just remember thinking that the film had been pretty close. I could be wrong.