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The movie opens up with our Narrator in a cold sweat with the barrel of a gun down his mouth armed by a man to whom we haven’t been introduced at this point in the film. An insomniac automobile recall specialist, he finds euphoria attending support groups where he pretends to be afflicted with various medical diseases. Attending public support groups and guided meditation, we are introduced to Marla who like the Narrator, takes pleasure in being faced with certain death. This causes him to become sleep-deprived and go days without sleep. On his flight home, we are introduced to Tyler Durden, a soap entrepreneur who we don’t find out is a figment of the Narrator’s imagination until the end of the film. Arriving at his condo he finds his apartment has exploded as the result of homemade dynamite, later confirmed by Detective Stern. With his material possessions gone, he contacts Tyler, and after several drinks, the two exchange punches in the parking lot of Lou’s Diner. With that, the fight club is born.
Fighting took away from his ability to focus on work until it eventually consumed him. The Narrator content with his way of life was no longer upset about losing all his material possessions. Eventually, Marla finds her way back into his life through sexual affairs with Tyler. Tyler believes a philosophy similar to that of Marla’s first encounter, they could die any day. “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything”, this was a quote directly from Tyler that best captures the progression of the movie. Little by little we see the Narrator becoming Tyler Durden. Tyler would assign his men homework where they would create public disobedience through a series of property crimes and vandalism. Tyler begins letting applicants into his house that he saw were ready to sacrifice themselves for the greater good and like that he built an army to carry out his requests. His operations became known as Project Mayhem. The target of these operations is the headquarters of credit card companies and the T.R.W. building. Their intention, was to erase all debt records and most importantly, chaos. The project became something the Narrator didn’t come to agree with. After Tyler mysteriously disappears, the Narrator engages in a hot pursuit using airline tickets under his name. The two rendezvous in a hotel room where the Narrator confirms that he and Tyler Durden are the same person. After fighting in the garage of an unnamed building the Narrator wakes up to the first scene of the film. A gunshot to the head and his alter-ego Tyler Durden disappears into smoke and he watches the credit card companies self-destruct with Marla.
Tyler Durden’s “You’re not your f*cking khakis. We are not defined by our possessions” best captures Fincher’s philosophy of anti-consumerism and draws attention to society’s infatuation and obsession with materialism. Like many before him, the Narrator had become a slave to the ‘Ikea nesting instinct’. Flipping through the catalogs of Ikea he bought anything and everything he thought was clever or ingenious. The apathy experienced by the Narrator is based on his relationship with his furniture and material possessions, defining his character by Johannshamn sofa with the Strinne green stripe pattern and his Rizlampa wire lamps of environmentally-friendly unbleached paper. It wasn’t until the unforeseen explosion of his apartment that we see that he truly felt delivered.
This is best represented in the plot of the film. Tyler’s hatred of consumerism drives the plot. Everything the audience sees from the beginning of the film to the end of the film. Unbeknownst to the Narrator, Tyler has been organizing multiple cells of trained fighters to carry out his anti-corporation operations. Through a series of operations, they denote several explosives on the foundations of corporate statues destroyed a corporate coffee shop, vandalized large corporate-owned buildings, and destroyed an electronic store with Apple-licensed products. They achieve their ultimate goal of erasing all debt records by blowing up credit company headquarters using homemade explosives. They intend to hinder consumerism and devastate a corporate industry that survives on our materialistic addition. Fight Club’s answer to materialism, is the destruction of capitalism.
Our Narrator can be observed stuck in the mundane cycle that is his life and he looks desperately for a way to change it, for a way to break free from the constraints of society. To do this he is introduced to Tyler Durden, an extension of the narrator's conscious. After Tyler and the Narrator retrieve human fat from a liposuction clinic for soap production Tyler delivers his signature line, “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything”. The idea that ‘losing all hope is freedom’, can be seen in how attitude and behavior change following as an excruciating experience. In psychology, this is known as ‘post-traumatic’ growth. Trauma and personal growth aren’t just a result, it’s the objective. The Narrator creates Tyler to help him change his mundane ways and unfulfilled life, and the only way he could see his creation through was through total self-destruction. The difficulty in learning from this philosophy lies in the ability to grasp a new appreciation of the world without having to nearly die. Instead, the answer could lie in being able to understand the everyday trauma around us.
We see this represented in the film when the Narrator begins attending public support functions. The Narrator who was previously an insomniac was suddenly cured of his sleep-deprivation. He expresses strong emotions with people who have been afflicted with life-threatening conditions. Lost in oblivion, our Narrator finds bliss and suddenly finds himself addicted to attending support group meetings. Like the Narrator, Marla begins attending these functions because she too wants to feel close to death. This theme appears once again with Tyler pours lye on the Narrator’s hand and insists that the Narrator can find enlightenment by embracing death and pain. While it doesn’t pose a serious threat to the Narrator’s life, it is apparent that he is in serious pain. This becomes an induction custom for those who devote their lives to the operations of Project Mayhem. The lye gives the Narrator and every member of Project Mayhem a kiss-shaped scar symbolizing the “painful pleasure” of Tyler’s philosophy.
I found that we were introduced to a wide range of characters over the continuation of the film.
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