Fight Club is a movie that is swiftly moving from status of cult hit to generational touchstone. It’s themes and concerns have been held up as cinematic examples of nearly every philosophy known to man. The film’s obsessive preoccupation with the ambiguity of reality and truth, along with its twist ending, caused it to immediately be embraced by the postmodernists. I personally choose to view the film from a Marxist point of view in which Jack’s arrival at class consciousness is the impetus for the economic revolution the characters in the movie embark upon. These and many other readings are all valid, but then so is the existential reading. But lately I have begun to think about the movie from an existential perspective and I think it holds up very well along those lines; especially in the conception of the central character of Jack/Tyler, whose existence absolutely precedes his essence.
Only those who have never seen Fight Club, and have no interest in seeing it, still cling to the belief that the fight club of the title is what the film is really about. It isn’t; the fight club and the violence that takes place in those scenes stand as a metaphor for the battle for expression and identity. Tyler Durden expresses the belief that previous generations were defined by the battles they fought, whether those battles were on the killing fields of Germany and Vietnam, or the battlefields on college campuses in the 1960s. Man, by which I mean specifically the male of the species and not humankind, has especially been defined through violence. The lack of either a “proper, respectable” American war taking place between Vietnam and the Gulf War I or II, or any social cause around which the youth rallied, stripped that immediate definition away from a couple of generations. The result of this void was the rise of the philosophy of distraction, and the unquestioning acceptance of consumerist mentality. The lasting imprint made by the post-Vietnam generations has been the belief that you can define yourself by what you own instead of what you believe in and fight for. This disconnect between action and consuming as a means of establishing identity leads to a truly existential moment that is dramatized perfectly in this film.
Before meeting Tyler Durden, Jack is living in fat city in his prefabricated “essence.” However, as existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre makes clear, “man chooses his own self” and the movie follows Jack’s existential journey as he does that very thing. What makes this film so memorable, however, and what makes it stand out from similar films is that the fight for Jack’s identity is presented not as an existential struggle between a man and his own soul, but rather as a struggle between two different men.
Tyler Durden intrudes upon Jack’s comfortably, though hollow, life and forces him to expose his existence for exactly what it is: not something of his own choosing, but a bill of goods he’s been sold and eagerly stood in line to buy. As Tyler begins to reveal the possibility of a real identity to Jack, Jack begins to see the world differently. The world that he accepted as natural, normal and true he slowly comes to accept as being nothing but a veil that must be pulled back and peered through. Before long Jack is joining Tyler on his mission to inform and educate others about this veil. In that respect, Tyler is already to the point where Jack will soon arrive, a point where Sartre insists that “in creating the man that we want to be, there is a not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be.” For Tyler, it’s not enough that he has successfully created his own essence; he must also show the world that his values are the correct values.
SPOILER ALERT
The trajectory of the movie turns on a shocking twist (and this twist truly is shocking because it hasn’t been built on a cheat, unlike that more famous twist which can be seen coming from a mile away despite all the worst efforts of its director to cheat the audience, I’m talking of course about The Sixth Sense): Tyler and Jack are not two separate people, but the same. Tyler is Jack’s actualized identity, the person he is on the other side of the veil. The film also visually portrays Sartre’s conception of the dread that comes with this knowledge that we not only create our essence, but we must face up to responsibility of it. In a comical scene shot from dual perspectives, Jack is seen fighting with both Tyler and with no one but himself. The Jack/Tyler character in this film is truly an existential figure in that he comes to terms with his own essence long after his existence. This coming to terms is not done easily and involves a struggle, fear, and dread just as Sartre expects it would.
