Fight Club Text Review

Fight Club is an amazing fictional film about an unnamed narrator meeting a bold adrenaline junky that goes by Tyler Durden. Throughout the film, Tyler Durden decides to work with the narrator to form a club called Fight Club which would consist of men who agree to fight each other until one of them taps out. Throughout the film, it starts to shine a light on the narrator’s life and how it was flawed before Tyler Durden came along, specifically the rat race mentality of going to work, pushing papers around, sitting at a cubicle, only to repeat this process the next day and so on. It also has subtle messages within the film about corporatism, and whether people truly have an identity in society. For example, after the narrator got his new apartment, he considered himself an “Ikea guy” since most of the furnishings he bought were exclusively from Ikea. After his apartment exploded, Tyler Durden mentions his Ikea guy label by saying “You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years, you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.” This quote addresses how people can get carried away with buying items to the point of being attached to the item as if it is a part of their personality. Tyler’s goal with fight club is to go against the idea of having material possessions own you by recruiting people through a process in which, everyone in the group has no identity at all, being put on a level playing field. Regardless of race, ethnic background, age, etc. One assumption that can be made based on the group members of fight club and what they stand for could be that most members are those who are in a lower economic class, part of the rat race, living paycheck to paycheck, and in Tyler Durden’s eyes, slaves to the elites. By forming the group, it gives the unnamed members a glimmer of hope that they will make names for themselves with the actions they take rather than the material they own. One example of this is when Tyler threatens an individual responsible for launching an investigation to try and stop fight club’s project called project mayhem which had an end goal of terrorizing buildings owned by big corporations such as credit card companies. “The people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances, we guard you while you sleep. Do not f**k with us.” -Tyler Durden (1:34:00-1:34:55). The Threat in this scene signifies how people of higher rank and class tend to underestimate the power of the “little guy” that is responsible for making food, driving the ambulance, connecting calls, and guarding people of interest when they are most vulnerable to an attack. My takeaways from this movie are that your identity should consist of what you have accomplished as an individual, not the items that you possess, and that people tend to underestimate the power they truly have in society against the corporate elites.

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