“People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden.” The protagonist of David Fincher’s Fight Club, a film based on Chuck Palaniuk’s cult-hit novel of the same name, makes this statement a number of times throughout the course of the film. His life, in his estimation is routine, boring even, as he shuffles to and from his job as an investigator for an automobile company. He has a quiet niche carved for himself, complete with “a stereo that was very decent and a wardrobe that was getting respectable.” However, suffering from insomnia and searching for some sort of catharsis to relieve his psychological trauma, he encounters two people who will change his life. The first is Marla Singer, a fellow malingerer amongst the support groups which the narrator attends. The second is named Tyler Durden, an outlandish and flamboyant soap salesman. These two seemingly unrelated figures serve to send the already ailing narrator into a psychological spiral, characterized by Insomnia, Dissociative fugue, and Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Fight Club‘s Narrator’s descent begins with a bout of Primary insomnia. In the narrator’s own words, “For six months I couldn’t sleep. With insomnia, nothing’s real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.” Characterized by difficulty initiating or maintaining sleep, to the point of life impairment (Meyer, 2006), the Narrator’s insomnia is left untreated by his physician. Instead, he is urged by his doctor to visit a support group for testicular cancer in order to see what real suffering is.
This “prescription” is, by any standard, rather unorthodox. One would be hard pressed to find a physician willing to send someone in need of treatment to an unrelated support group. However, without psychological counseling, the Narrator’s condition begins to improve. However, as he comes in contact with Marla, a fellow malingerer among support groups, his Insomnia relapses.
It is only through contact with Tyler that the Narrator achieves any lasting peace. As Tyler and the Narrator begin to use physical violence as a means for catharsis and an avenue for the expression of the male ego, the Narrator begins to come to a deeper understanding of his own capabilities. In Tyler’s words, “How much can you possibly know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?” (Fincher, 1999) The naked aggression of this new release is, according to Lee, an “external manifestation of internal destruction of [the Narrator’s] old ego position.” However, this new found relief comes with a price.
The Narrator is completely unaware that Tyler is in fact nothing more than an elaborate alter ego. While the Narrator seems to sleep through the nights thanks to the new found release of Fight Club, Tyler is in fact expanding the club, opening chapters around the country and slowly transforming them into a highly disciplined paramilitary force. To begin, the Narrator is not conscious of his nocturnal wanderings. However, when he begins to find gaps in his memory, he becomes suspicious. “If you woke up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?” (Fincher, 1999)
Tyler’s nocturnal wanderings are consistent with the symptoms of Dissociative fugue. This disorder is characterized by disruption of one’s identity coupled with travel away from home (Meyer, 2006). While the Narrator-consciousness is at rest, the personality, Tyler, becomes active, free to move about the country and pursue his plan, Operation Mayhem, leaving a very confused Narrator to wander the path of Tyler, unraveling the plans and suffering massive bouts of déjà vu.
The primary mental disorder portrayed in the film, contrarily, is not Insomnia or Dissosciative fugue, but rather Dissociative Identity Disorder. Perhaps known more widely by its more universally recognized name, Multiple Personality Disorder, DID “is defined [in the DSM-IV-TR] as existing when a person has two or more identities or personalities, each with its own way of being; its own relatively enduring pattern of perceiving, relating to and thinking about the environment and self” (Stickley, Nickeas, 2006). The split between the relatively passive Narrator and the quick-witted flamboyant Tyler Durden is characteristic of such a split. According to Meyer, “Usually, the core personality is passive, dependant, guilty, and depressed, but the alternates may be hostile, controlling and self-destructive” (2006). Durden’s exploits on the arena-floor of Fight Club, as well as his propensity for assuming command mark him as noticeably removed from the primary personality, the Narrator.
Further splits may be discovered in a number of one-line monologues by the Narrator. Lines like “I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise” or “I am Jack’s raging bile duct” show a tendency for the Narrator to portion himself out, psychologically placing himself into separate entities, entities which can be characterized separately from the primary personality. According to Humphrey, et al, “personality [is] a community of voices, each representing the traces of past experiences. Problematic voices are kept separate by painful emotion.” It is interesting to notice that the Narrator is most apt to “portion” himself off at moments of high stress or times rife with such painful emotion.
As the film draws towards its inevitable climax, the Narrator and Tyler struggle for supremacy. The Narrator, aware now that Tyler orchestrated the events which led to their meeting, and possessed of a need to stop Tyler from seeing Operation Mayhem through to its final success in the destruction of several credit card headquarters buildings. When the Narrator finally succeeds in catching up to Durden, he is faced with the task of stopping what is essentially his better half. In Durden’s words, “I look like you want to look, I fuck like you want to fuck, I am smart, capable and most importantly: I am free in every way that you are not” (Fincher,1999).
In a moment of defeat, the Narrator finds himself at the mercy of his split personality. Held at gunpoint by his alter-ego and forced to watch the destruction orchestrated by Durden, the Narrator realizes that he is essentially holding himself hostage. In a staggering display of drama, he “kills” Durden by shooting himself in the cheek in a kind of mock-suicide.
While this may seem a bit far-fetched to be among the realm of reality, Middleton posits:
“In the Dissociative individual, ‘there is no uniting self which can remember to forget’. Rather than use repression to avoid traumatizing memories, he/she resorts to alterations in the self ‘as a central and coherent organization of experience. . . DID involves not just an alteration in content but, crucially, a change in the very structure of consciousness and the self.” (2005)
While the Narrator’s “alterations” may have been a bit extreme, the trauma of his gunshot wound is enough to rid him of the construct of Tyler Durden once and for all.
Fight Club, with all of its gritty intensity and frenetic twists, still manages to include a bit of fact with its fiction. The split between Tyler Durden and the Narrator can easily be characterized as Dissociative Personality Disorder. The Narrator’s unconscious trips around the country under an alternate identity are perfect iterations of Dissociative fugue. Even the Insomnia which opens the gate for Tyler’s entrance is well portrayed. While the cure to the Narrator’s Dissociative disorders, like that of his insomnia, may be a bit unorthodox, the symptoms are, nonetheless, all there.
References
Fight Club [DVD]. (1999). (David Fincher). Los Angeles, CA, USA: Art Linson Productions.
Humphreys, C., Rubin , J., & Knudson, M. (2005, June). The assimilation of anger in a case of dissociative identity disorder. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 18, 121-132.
Lee, T. (2002, January). Virtual Violence in Fight Club: This Is What Transformation of Masculine Ego Feels Like. Journal of American & Comparative Cultures, 25, 418-423.
Meyers, R. G. (2006). Case Studies in Abnormal Psychology 7th Edition. New York, NY: Pearson.
Middleton, W. (2005, March). Owning the past, claiming the present: perspectives on the treatment of dissociative patients. Australasian Psychiatry, 13, 40-49.
Stickley, T., & Nickeas, R. (2006, April). Becoming one person: living with dissociative identity disorder. Journal of Psychiatric & Mental Health Nursing, 13, 180-187.
