Fight Club may seem to be a movie about punching. A closer look, however, will reveal an expression of frustration with American capitalist society. Go to college, now what? Get a job, now what? Get married, now what? Have kids, now what? "We are the middle children of history, raised by television to be believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning this fact [...] so don't fuck with us."
Fight Club begins with a nameless narrator working a job to buy things he doesn't need- completing himself "one Ikea shelf at a time." It all comes to a stop when his apartment blows up. He's forced to live with one Tyler Durden in a crumbling mansion the complete opposite of what he's been living. From small, purposeful and orderly to dirty, disorganized, and wastefully big.
One small detail. Tyler Durden isn't real.
He's a figment of the narrator's insomniac mind- he's all the ways the narrator wishes he could be. A conjuring, able to do what the narrator is unable to. The narrator IS Tyler Durden; a man with a mission to destroy the false comforts of American society and consumer culture; a man who is tired of being emasculated and by capitalism, tired of being owned by his possessions. Dissatisfied, angry. "I see the strongest and the smartest men who have ever lived [...] and these men are pumping gas and waiting tables." These men will never be famous, will never be anything but waiters, trash collectors and convenience store workers. But that's what they're supposed to do. "Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need." It's an empty, consumerist society. For the characters in Fight Club, this rationalized world is dehumanizing, and emasculating. It's an isolated, single-serving lifestyle. Everything is small and disposable, including the people the narrator meets.
"This is what all those people must've felt before I filed them as statistics in my reports" the narrator says, after experiencing a car crash for the first time and realizing his way of rationalizing people as statistics, not humans. Identity destroyed by modern life. One that has fractured the narrator into two very, very different people, one repressed and one freed. But Tyler and the narrator's underground Fight club turns docile, meek and consumerist men into a force of chaos and anarchy better known as Project Mayhem; Tyler Durden's mission and army, all home-grown from what began as a simple, innocent Fight Club to allow these men the expression of masculinity they were denied outside (copious amounts of manly man violence). "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile." Through this speech, Tyler turns the dissatisfaction of his generation into a mantra, transforming it from disappointment into empowerment. "You're not how much money you've got in the bank. You're not your job. You're not your family, and you're not who you tell yourself." They're fighting back. Order is bad. Project Mayhem's ultimate goal—a return to a primitive lifestyle—would be the ultimate equalizer. Everyone would have to learn to survive based on their own merits.
Masculinity. What does it have to do with capitalism? It's the way Tyler sees it; consumerism is an assault on masculinity. The men in Fight Club feel degraded by their jobs- fearful that society will turn them into women. Bob is the physical embodiment of this; once a body builder, Bob looses his testicles to testicular cancer and as a result of hormone therapy grows "bitch tits" and is now is weak and goes to support clubs where he hugs other people and cries. Girly things. The culture surrounding this Lost Generation is very much influenced by absentee fathers. "We're a generation of men raised by women". The whole movie constantly addresses the fear and possibility of losing one's balls, both under Tyler's rule and under capitalist rule, perhaps suggesting that the same way Tyler and the narrator are two sides of the same coin, so is capitalism and anarchy,
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