Fight Club

I watched Fight Club on a small computer monitor in a student room containing nearly everything a student room is expected to contain: an inexpensive desk, cables in permanent negotiation with one another, books stacked horizontally because the shelf was full, CDs, clothes waiting to become laundry, and several objects I had bought because owning them had briefly seemed like progress.

Then Tyler Durden began talking about possessions.

The timing was irritating.

That was part of the film’s attraction. It attacks the small agreements people make with ordinary life: that a better object may improve the person who owns it, that a job can serve as identity, that comfort and purpose are approximately the same thing.

I was young enough for Tyler’s anger to sound intelligent before it sounded dangerous.

That distinction matters. A charismatic idea does not need to be entirely wrong. In fact, it works better if the first diagnosis is accurate. The narrator is numb. His work is meaningless to him. He buys objects to give shape to a personality he cannot otherwise feel. His insomnia is the body’s refusal to participate in the arrangement.

Tyler sees the weakness and offers an answer with perfect confidence.

The answer is worse than the disease.

This is what I appreciate most now. Fight Club begins as rebellion against a system and gradually becomes another system, complete with rules, hierarchy, ritual, uniforms and obedience. Men who wanted to escape being interchangeable consumers become interchangeable members of Project Mayhem.

The joke is brutal because it is believable. Rebellion can become conformity with different clothing.

Consumer culture says: buy these things and become yourself. Tyler says: reject these things and become yourself. Both instructions still provide a package.

The support groups at the beginning reveal how hungry the narrator is for something unmanufactured. He enters rooms where people are confronting illness and death because their emotion feels real enough to break through his numbness. It is ethically dubious and psychologically precise. He cannot feel his own life, so he borrows access to someone else’s.

Fight Club provides a more violent version of the same solution. Pain forces attention into the present. A fist is difficult to multitask around. The body becomes undeniable.

That fantasy has obvious appeal in a life dominated by abstract anxieties, deadlines, screens and imagined futures. We sometimes want an experience so immediate that it leaves no room for rumination.

But immediacy is not meaning.

The first time I saw the film, I remembered Tyler’s sentences. They were designed to be carried away. Years later, I remembered the structure that destroys them.

That change probably says more about getting older than about cinema.

When the credits ended in that student room, I looked around at the desk, the CDs, the cheap chair and the things I had accumulated. None was impressive enough to represent a consumerist tragedy.

Still, for a few minutes the room became an interrogation.

Why do I own this?

Because I need it?

Because I enjoy it?

Or because I once imagined that a person like me should have one?