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The Polarity of a Man
The conflict between conformity and rebellion has always been a struggle in our
society. Fight Club is a movie that depicts just that. The movie portrays the
polarity between traditionalism and an anti-social revolt. It is the story of
man who is subconsciously fed up with the materialism and monotony of everyday
life and thereafter creates a new persona inside his mind to contrast and
counteract his repetitive lifestyle.
The main character is actually unnamed, but sometimes is referred to as Jack,
which comes from a medical book he reads in the Tyler’s house perhaps. He is
the normal, everyday, worker bee that carries on his overly boring life day in
and day out because he is the typical conformist that society tells us to be.
Jack is the everyday common workingman to which the audience can sympathize
with and relate to. His character portrays the struggles and longevity of the
American dream. He is constantly rating his life and his lifestyle by his
furniture. The designer furniture that he orders out of mail catalogues defines
his personality and self worth. This is due to the fact that he is constantly
trying to improve and complete his lifestyle by buying certain pieces of
furniture to create a modern but still simple and traditional household. His
house is beyond perfection but yet he still tries to further its flawlessness,
which relates to his dream of the typical American. But as he constantly tries
to improve himself with his furniture and work habits to define his personality,
he actually fails miserably and does quite the opposite. When Jack buys his
furniture he destroys every attempt that he has made to improve himself. He
only falls deeper into the hole that he digs himself. Every piece of furniture
that he buys, he loses another part of his identity.
Jack’s conformity follows him to work as he becomes a doormat. His
socialization is confined to the limits of his cubicle with the only exception
being when he is on business trips. During flights he develops relationships
with the passengers around him. This is not done out of a real honesty for a
conversation, but out of a need to fill a void, a loneliness, a lack of
self-worth. His life is full of “single serving friends”, car crashes, and
wishes of an eventful death because the monotony of his life gives him strict
boundaries to live by. His job is to go around and examine horrible car wrecks
and determine if the vehicle needs to be recalled. He observes the aftermath of
vehicular violence with as much dispassion as another inter-office memo passing
across his desk. Death and violence are trivialized by the brutal nature of his
job. He subconsciously yearns for death and violence to be tangible, not
something he witnesses after the fact. One sleepless night, he decides to go into
a support group for testicular cancer survivors. He has never had cancer but
finds release by pretending to sob on the shoulders of other recovering men.
The ultimate "letting go" permitted in the support group clues us in
to the mental illness we are about to watch unravel amid the violence and
desperation of Fight Club. Eventually, he starts attending other support
groups; he becomes addicted to addiction recovery from his lack of a social
life.
On a plane during one of his business flights, Jack for once has an empty seat
next to him. He is so used to discussing life's unimportant matters with
“single-serving” friends in the neighboring seat that, on this occasion, he
invents the perfect one to fill the void. Enter Tyler Durden, a mysterious man
who is apparently full of information. Subliminal images of him are present
early the film. He flashes onto the screen in four split-second appearances
before they actually encounter each other. This is to show how Tyler has always
been inside Jack’s mind, just waiting for his chance to come out. Tyler also
briefly appears in a television ad for an upscale restaurant that Jack watches
from his hotel room. He lives in a rundown house that looks like it should have
fallen to pieces years ago. Almost every window is boarded up, there is no lock
on the front door, and it has the stench of a fart. Tyler is America’s
quintessential rebel. He shows no obvious care for other people, he splices
pornographic footage into family films while working in a projection booth and
urinates into a bowl of soup as a banquet waiter. To Tyler, happiness is pain.
Away from his support groups, Jack’s insomnia returned without him realizing
it, and he creates Tyler. Tyler states, “I look like you want to look, I fuck
like you want to fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly free in all
the ways you are not.” Tyler is everything that Jack wants to be. When
comparing the two you can begin to notice how opposite of each other they
really are. Tyler dresses crazy, always wearing bright exciting clothes, while
Jack is always dressed in a white, button down shirt, tucked into his khakis.
Jack has a somewhat out of shape body, and on the other hand Tyler has an
8-pack and is well toned. Jack’s former condo was the epitome of perfection, while
Tyler’s house was by far unlivable. And most importantly Jack is the conformist
as Tyler is the rebel. They are the antithesis of one another, but for a very
good reason. Together, Tyler and Jack found Fight Club.
They begin Fight Club, which is essentially a view of a contemporary man
behaving primal, in effect freeing themselves from the surplus of things that
people value most. Stripped down with just muscle and instinct to help you, a
millionaire and a homeless man are the same. It is the release from who you are
and what society deems you, what you own is of no consequence all that matters
is the fight. With the no social constraints everyone is their own person and
no boundaries to be focused upon by your peers. Tyler tried to take fight club to
a global level as well. His master plan was to blow up major bank buildings so
that everyone’s debt would revert back to zero. If nobody had any bank records
or debt they would have nothing, and a sense be equal to every other man. A
rebel’s instincts always point to creating chaos, and what better chaos could
there be than no social status. With no social status Tyler could bring his
fight to a whole new worldwide stage.
Jack symbolizes the everyday workingman, as Tyler is the man everyone wants to
be. Fight Club shows a man that everyone wants to be but can’t because of laws
and in most cases common courtesy. The movie states that there is basically a
Tyler in all of us, wanting and waiting to come out. None of us will let him
out though because we don’t have the courage, or maybe stupidity to do it,
although Jack does. For a while in the movie Jack did get everything he wanted.
He had no care in the world and couldn’t have felt better about himself as a
whole. Not until later does the final message come in, without any control
there is chaos. When Tyler ran rampant and did what he pleased things began to
get out of hand. For instance his final act of defiance towards society was the
blowing up of credit card companies in order to erase the debt record so that
everyone’s debt would go back to zero. This is only to create total chaos and
embody Tyler’s world without rules. Tyler sums up the movie in his own terms,
“You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not
the contents of your wallet. You are not your khakis. You are not a beautiful
and unique snowflake. The things you own end up owning you.”