The philosophy of Fight Club
What the film reveals about our search for meaning
The 1999 film Fight Club, based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name, was considered a flop at the box office despite making more than a hundred million dollars in revenue and a profit of roughly thirty-seven million dollars. How ironic that a film offering such a powerful critique of capitalism’s excesses and which made its producers so much money was considered a failure for not having made them even richer.
Fight Club challenges viewers to reflect upon the mindless consumerism of capitalist societies and the emasculation of men within them, as well as on their own mortality, the nature of identity, and the harms that can arise from both order and chaos. This last point is the genius of the film: it presents a critique of capitalism, which as an ordered system nonetheless leads to the apathy and nihilism of many, but in its final scene the film also rejects anarchy, a system of organised disorder, as the solution to the existential problems caused by capitalism. Instead, the film tells us that to find ourselves again we must reclaim our inner childhood innocence, which in turn allows us to hope for the future, to love another, and ultimately to love ourselves and life again.
A rejection of capitalism and flirtation with anarchy features prominently throughout the film through the character of Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt. In a bar scene Tyler says to the main protagonist, an unnamed narrator played by Edward Norton:
“We are consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me; What concerns me is celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear, Rogaine, Viagra… I say never be complete. I say stop being perfect. I say let’s evolve. Chips fall where they may… The things you own end up owning you.”
In another scene at the fight club Tyler says, “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.” Despite statements such as these, Henry Giroux argued that the film is less concerned with “exploitation associated with neoliberal capitalism than it is in rebelling against a consumerist culture that dissolves the bonds of male sociality and puts into place an enervating notion of male identity and agency”. While this is an important theme of the film, it is not the main takeaway. Such a reading of the film is based around the machinations of the aggressive and charismatic Durden, which the narrator ultimately rejects in the final scene.
Fight Club is better understood through existential themes of fear and death, and Nietzsche’s revaluation of values. The film repeatedly reminds viewers of their own mortality and depicts people so numb they are essentially dead already. Marla, played by Helena Bonham Carter, nearly has a fatal overdose. The narrator has a near death experience when the car crashes because Tyler let’s go of the wheel and says, “Stop trying to control everything and just let go.” Tyler’s lesson is that remembering we will die, indeed nearly dying, is what allows us to feel alive again.
In order to feel content people need to satisfy their need for competence, control and connectedness. The film deals with issues of connectedness, as both the narrator and Marla are lonely before finding each other, and both feel life is meaningless because they’re disconnected from their capitalist society as much as they are disconnected socially.
The theme of mortality, however, relates to control, for death is the one thing no one has any control over. It is important for the narrator to accept that his death is inevitable, because while it is true that one day he will die, to accept this and to be willing to die on his own terms is to regain some sense of control. Indeed, without this mindset the narrator would not have been able to put a gun to his head and free himself of Durden. It is as Tyler said, “First you have to know, not fear, know, that someday you’re gonna die.” And when speaking of Marla, the narrator says, “Marla’s philosophy of life is she might die at any moment. The tragedy she said is that she didn’t.”
Marla and the narrator both feel that if they were dying their lives would mean more. That’s why they both attended and met at support groups for the terminally ill even though they weren’t. But these support groups didn’t satisfy the narrator’s need to be close to death, so he created a fight club through Durden so he could feel pain and the real risk of death.
The members of this fight club need it for the same reason the narrator needs Tyler — society doesn’t allow them to feel fulfilled, because it doesn’t allow them to feel connected to themselves and their identity as men, or connected to others as a result of their emasculation, or connected to the wider society that ultimately is what makes them feel so disconnected in the first place.
The purpose of the fight club is twofold. First, by exercising control over their bodies in a way that allows them to feel something again, even if that something is pain, it frees the men beating each other up of the numbness they have come to feel — beating sense into each other rather than beating each other senseless. This is the cure to the numbness exemplified by the narrator early in the film, when his life is consumed by his material possessions.
Second, the feeling of pain, and of inflicting pain upon others in aggressive testosterone-fuelled fights, allows emasculated men to once again feel like men, or at least to feel like how they think men should feel, which is as much a product of their living in a gendered society as their nihilism is a product of living in a capitalist one.
One could view the fight clubs as an attempt to literally beat the ‘system’ out of people and masculinity back in.
Project Mayhem, which arose from the fight clubs as a terrorist plot to take down the financial system, was the natural progression of fight clubs having channelled the anger of emasculated men toward the capitalist system that is the source of their emasculation. Once they had regained their masculinity, and re-established a connection to themselves, and to others who they met at the fight clubs, they had the strength to turn their attention toward re-establishing a connection to society at large, which involves a fundamental re-shaping of society given it is what caused their disconnection in the first place.
It is because of his emasculation the narrator manifests Tyler Durden, the ideal alpha male, who we learn is not real but rather the alternate personality the narrator at times becomes and at other times experiences in the third person as some sort of schizophrenic, insomnia-induced hallucination. Durden is the ideal man, or at least the narrator’s notion of an ideal man: a charismatic, sexy, alpha male.
Upon realizing that they are one in the same person, Tyler says to the narrator, “You were looking for a way to change your life. You could not do this on your own. All the ways you wish you could be — that’s me.” As Nancy Bauer said, “Tyler is Cartesian scepticism distilled into its essence: a personality whose existence is perfectly coextensive with his thinking”. The character of Tyler gradually emerges throughout the film, as if consuming the narrator, or perhaps it could be better phrased, as we are about to see, as if Nietzsche’s lion eats the camel.
It is not just the threat of the narrator’s own mortality that features prominently throughout the film. Perhaps even more significant is the existential threat of his life not having meaning.
Nietzsche saying “God is dead” was not a claim about a transcendent deity; but rather as Murray Skees has argued, about the existential threat — social, cultural and moral — in modern society that would ultimately lead to nihilism. The problem for Nietzsche was that to assert the existence of God is to rob this world of ultimate significance, and to reject God is to rob everything of meaning and value.
How then to escape nihilism? Nietzsche’s answer was the revaluation of values. To achieve this one’s will has to be at the right stage. Nietzsche describes three stages in a person’s will as three metamorphoses of spirit.
The first is the camel, well loaded and strong, it bears “the weight of tradition, the duty of absolute morality, and guilt of ultimate punishment.” In its loneliest moment the camel becomes a lion, which conquers his freedom and becomes the master of his own domain. The lion rebels against authority, for it seeks to be a law unto itself. The lion says, “No.” The lion says, “I will.” It does not listen to “thou shalt.” The lion seeks an ultimate victory over absolute value.
The third and final metamorphosis is the child. “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes’.” Only the child can revaluate and create new values. Nietzsche’s three metamorphoses of spirit reflect the three stages of the narrator’s will in Fight Club. The camel is the narrator at the film’s beginning, who bears the weight of society’s expectations, and who eventually becomes so lonely he transforms into the lion, who is his alternate personality Tyler Durden. It is only in the final scene of the film the narrator undergoes their final transformation and becomes the child.
Fight Club is undoubtedly a rejection of capitalism, but it does not favour anarchy or nihilism in its stead. The choice between wanton destruction and hope is one the narrator makes. The narrator chose hope, and in doing so gave hope to Marla, who almost gave up in her desperate search for it.
The central message of the film is that what brings people back from the depths of their modernity-induced insomnia, depression, emasculation if they are a man, and ultimately their identity and existential crises, is finding someone who understands them, someone who also knows what it feels like to feel lonely, someone to love; for with love comes hope for the future, and with hope comes purpose, and with purpose comes meaning.
While chaos and disorder feature prominently throughout the film, they do so primarily through the character of Durden, whose philosophy the narrator ultimately rejects when he says, “I’m begging you please don’t do this… this is too much, I don’t want this… my eyes are open”, before shooting himself, killing his alternate personality Durden in the process but miraculously surviving in body and mind as the narrator.
But there is something different about the narrator now. He has transformed. In Nietzsche’s metamorphoses of spirit he is now the child. He has a newborn innocence, and says to Marla, who is concerned about his gunshot wound, “Trust me, everything’s going to be fine.” The two then watch on as one financial building after another implodes before them. The world as they knew it is falling apart. A new world is beginning. Norton’s character takes Marla’s hand. Everything’s going to be fine, because the two have found themselves, and even better, they have found each other.
Jonathan Meddings is an author and advocate from Melbourne, Australia.
