Fight Club is an excellent example of Freud’s Structural model of the psyche. The main character and his split personality, Tyler Durden, are polar opposites very similar to the angel and devil idea represented in our textbook.
The main character is an insomniac and instead of prescribing him sleep aides, his doctor sends him to support groups. He finds the support groups soothing and they help him sleep so he starts attending a different support group every day. His support groups stop helping him sleep when he realizes there’s another faker, Marla, going to the groups, and he confronts her and asks her to not go to the same groups he goes to. But it doesn’t work well.
The main character meets Tyler Durden in an airplane. The main character’s car blows up and he goes to Tyler and asks to move in, Tyler agrees only if they can have a fistfight. They start a fight club with other men who use this to get out their anger and aggression. The club turns into a group called Project Mayhem, which has a lot of “unspoken” rules. Tyler uses the group to plan attacks against the culture he hates and eventually has a cult like group working all over the world to bomb buildings. The main character decides he needs to stop Tyler but through a call to his girlfriend, he realizes that he is Tyler and he has split personalities. He decides to shoot himself, but when he shoots himself Tyler falls to the floor and the main character wakes to find himself in a mental hospital.
The main theme of the film is existentialism, which is shown with Tyler trying to make meaning of a chaotic world. There is a point in the movie where Tyler burns the main character (let’s call him TMC) and tells him that he will never be able to get anywhere in life until he hits rock bottom. The Freudian theory of the id, ego and super-ego fare shown well in this movie. TMC is first satisfied with the common life of having a normal boring job and his super-ego is doing a good job. His id creates Tyler Durden in order to offset his boring life. TMC is rigid, polite, unemotional and conservative. Tyler is aggressive, sexual and uninhibited. Tyler and TMC are polar opposites representing the super-ego and the id, and the ego has to be a mediator between the two, which isn’t realized until we see TMC realize that he is Tyler Durden. In the end, TMC can see that he had two personalities and he can see that he needs to balance his old self with the Tyler within.
Another issue within Fight Club is the issue of insomnia. TMC wanted prescription sleep aids but since he could not get them he had to use other ways to cope. Often sleep deprived people often develop schizophrenia which would bring sense to the fact that TMC felt that he and Tyler were two separate entities.
This movie is very popular with people in Generation Y because they feel they can relate to the struggles that TMC deals with as well as Tyler’s resistance to conform with society. Many people feel that they have a good side and a bad side that correlate with Freud’s theory and it is interesting to see it acted out.
