Corporate Driven Destruction: Fight Club’s Hope For Survival?

The movie Fight Club, filmed in 1999, is the story of a mentally instable, middle-class, working man who finds himself partaking in an overwhelmingly hard to grasp scheme full of violent and cultish characteristics. The main character in the movie suffers terribly from insomnia and the effects have tragic results, some of which he himself is not even aware of. The multiple identities used in the various support groups that he attends eludes to an underlying cry for help to escape from the oppressive forces of the corporate lifestyle, which ultimately results in the causing of destruction as a means of releasing frustration and anger. The advocacy of destruction and violence by others serves as a solution to the many problems that are within Fight Club.

At first glance, the movie seems to be overly packed with insignificant violence and blood, but when further analyzed, there are multiple prominent themes in the movie, all of which go hand-in-hand with one centralized main idea: the oppression from the corporate world and the effects that result from it. The many themes in this movie, arguably, can all be directly linked to this main idea.

In the movie, the main character, who is first introduced as Cornelius and later referred to as Jack, unknowingly leads a dual lifestyle. On one side of him, everything about him is just average. His lack of enthusiasm and tone of voice when he describes his “condo on the fifteenth floor filing cabinet for widows and young professionals” demonstrates very well the resentment he feels towards his corporation. As Jack says on page fourteen of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, “This isn’t about love as in caring, this is about property as in ownership.” He hates his job and his unexciting life and finds a way to help cope with this. Jack’s involvement in his support groups such as “Remaining Men Together”, “Seize the Day”, “Melanoma” and “Parasites” are seen by Jack as uplifting and help treat his insomnia. Jack says, “When people think you’re dying, man they really care”. At this point in the movie Jack begins to grasp the concept of hitting “rock-bottom” which his alter ego, a man who calls himself Tyler Durden, further explains. Tyler comes into the movie when Jack is daydreaming while he’s on the plane. Tyler’s introduction to the movie is a salient turning point in the film because his introduction comes at the opportune moment – the point in time where Jack is most vulnerable and needs someone or something to straighten him out and help fix his insufficient lifestyle. Tyler’s well-kept composure, his confident personality, and his independent nature is what Jack wishes he was – a polar opposite of his own lifestyle. Tyler is Jack’s way out of entrapment from the corporate system and his falsification of identity at his support groups. Tyler impresses Jack with his theory as to why the passengers in the emergency situation card on the plane are so calm. He says that the oxygen masks are provided in the event of an emergency because, “oxygen gets you high” and “in a catastrophic emergency, you are taking giant panic breaths and you become docile, calm -- you accept your fate”. Hitting “rock-bottom”, Tyler says, is important to human survival because, “it is only when we’ve lost everything that we are free to do anything”. Introducing himself to the movie, Jack is still living his routine, “single-serving” life going to work, sitting in his cubical and then returning to his “condo on the fifteenth floor”.

Jack has a mediocre job and an inadequate lifestyle. He tries to compensate for this lifestyle by purchasing expensive furniture out of magazines in hopes of fulfilling the standards that the media forces upon society. As if life could not get any worse, he returns to his apartment only to find it literally been blown away. Someone had set homemade explosives his apartment, destroying every possession he had, and yet still he was not at “rock-bottom”. When he returns to the scene of the crime, the only thing he notices is how his house was “full of condiments and no food”. The importance of this quote is that despite Jack’s knowledge of how inadequate his life is he still does not feel like he has accepted his fate as a “byproduct of a lifestyle obsession”. Tyler stresses the consumer-based culture that people get sucked into and how people will not survive if they fall victim to it. As men tend to do, they discuss this idea more over a couple pitchers of beer. Tyler says, “never be complete, stop being perfect – let’s evolve and let the chips fall where they may”. Tyler and Jack’s night out at the bar leads to the founding of their fight club. Tyler addresses Jack by saying, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can”. As any normal person would say, Jack responds with, “why, that’s crazy” and Tyler’s main point in his request was that he says, “how much can a man know about himself if he’s never been in a fight”. They start fighting one-on- one in the parking lot outside of the bar and then the next scene is them sitting on the curb of a street reflecting on what a great thing they had just done and that they should do it every night. The next night, a few more guys show up and want to fight too. Even more people show up the next night, and the next and the next. The following workday, Jack is in his office and his boss approaches him and asks him a question. In the meantime, the narrator says, “after fighting, the volume of everything else in your life gets turned down – you can do anything”. This is the start to the forward motion he is making in ridding himself from the oppression felt in the workspace.

An important aspect of the movie is the fact that Jack and Tyler start living together. They stay up late and have talks with each other about random topics. For example, Tyler asks Jack who he would fight if he could, and he said his boss. When the question comes back to Tyler, his answer and the reason why link to an important subtheme of the movie. He says that he would fight his dad of all people maybe because of the bad advice he gave him such as going to college, getting a job, and getting married. The getting married part was the main reason why he wants to fight his dad. The reason Tyler says that is because since we are a “generation raised by women”, he is “wondering if another woman is really what [he] needs”. The next morning, which is the following scene, there is a change in pace of the movie and this specific scene adds a small and simple comical aspect to the movie. In the scene, Tyler is coming into the kitchen and is on his way out. He grabs a cup of coffee and before he goes, Jack straightens his bowtie. The narrator says, “most of the week we were Hazy and Harriet but every Saturday night we were finding out more and more that we were not alone”. “It was right in everyone’s face, we just made it invisible. It was on the tip of everyone’s tongue, we just gave it a name”. The creation of Fight Club by Jack and Tyler was the answer – it was the medicine to the sickness that all the men had come ill with. The rules of fight club such as not talking about it, calling the fight if one says stop of goes limp, and no shirt no shoes is an example of the relationship of play and war. Here, the men fighting is and example of how play can be tied with war. As said by Jonah Huizinga in his Homo Ludens, the relationship between “play” and “war” is one of many characteristics and multiplicities. Although it is entirely opinion, Huizinga says that “young dogs and small boys fight ‘for fun’, with rules limiting the degree of violence; nevertheless the limits of licit violence do not necessarily stop at the spilling of blood or even killing”. This new fight club joined men together and helped release there anger and frustration. As can be seen in the movie, most of the men end up smiling during and after their fights. “Who you were in fight club is not who you were in the rest of the world”. This statement backs up the claim that the men who join Fight Club are not satisfied with their current lifestyle and want to express who they really are; Fight Club allows them to do this. They are able to escape their dull lives and become another person. The attracting features about Fight Club are that it operates every night of the week and is open to any man who thinks he is ready for it. The organization grows larger and larger and soon thereafter, tightly knit branches of Fight Club start sprouting up in all the major cities all composed with the same secrecy and devotion as the original club that Jack and Tyler started. Despite the notably large expansion of the club, the progress of the members is also seen. The narrator says “a guy came to Fight Club for the first time, his ass was a wad of cookie dough – after a few weeks, he was carved out of wood”. The men who come to the club for the first time are mentally unstable employees of the corporate working machine and after a few fights are born-again men free to do as they please. They are finally able to live the live they have always wanted.

Huizinga speaks of play and war as a “cultural function so long as it is waged within a sphere whose members regard each other as equals or antagonists with equal rights”. In other words, once the idea of play and war leaves its sphere of confinement, in this case the basement of the bar, the integrity of the organization and its possibility for expansion becomes questionable. Tyler and Jack both share a similar opinion to Huizinga. For example, the first rule of Fight Club established by Jack and Tyler, “do not talk about fight club”, creates the so-called “sphere” which Huizinga speaks of. Moreover, the club’s growth can be directly tied to Tyler. Tyler says that, “without pain and without sacrifice, we have nothing”. In addition, the relationship between the members of the club and its two leaders is one of extraordinary unison. The key to why Fight Club becomes as large and powerful as it does is because of the inexistence of ranking. All members of the club are equal to each other as well as the founding fathers, Jack and Tyler. On multiple occasions in the movie, Tyler exclaims to Jack, “we are not special!” and then when they are in the car speaking about Project Mayhem, which Jack was not informed of, Tyler yells, “You decide your own level of involvement”. Tyler’s exclamations back up the claims of Huizinga himself and serve as a basis for which Project Mayhem is to operate under.

With the organization growing immensely, the ultimate goal was not just a goal that could be strived for and temporarily slaved by starting a fight club, it was now a national goal viewed and desired by the eyes of thousands. Tyler’s ultimate order was the execution of Project Mayhem, a project designed to liberate Americans from the brutally painful oppression the economy has thrust upon them. In Palahniuk’s book, when Tyler and Jack are at the top of the building waiting for the bombs to detonate, Tyler says, “This is our world, now, our world.” This statement, in the context that it was said, is an implication for one of the major reasons behind Project Mayhem. The goal was to blow up the major credit card companies with the intent of destroying all credit history so that people could start new and be free. Without this credit history, there would be no credit scores and everybody would be equal in this sense. This equality is similar to the equality of the members of the Fight Club.
The movie fight club is one that at first glance may seem to be just another action drama with a weak plot, but after multiple viewings and more in-depth analysis, actually is a multifaceted and inspiring movie. This inspiration is seen through the theme of how one man’s insanity is shared by thousands and yet still, the economic and social structures have not changed. Although every member of the club is viewed as equal, they actually do all share one thing in common – their dissatisfaction with their lives, especially in reference to their occupation. This opposition to the current economic system has yet to change the standard.

The references seen in Fight Club having to do with play and war as interlinking ideas, all have significant meaning. Huizinga conveys the true meaning in detail in his book Homo Ludens and his ideas serve as justification for much of the scenes and actions that take place in the movie.