I am Rob's questions of "what did I just watch"?

I watched a very interesting movie the other day. I needed to unwind after a day of studying so Kaleb and I rented and watched "Fight Club." This is, by far, the strangest movie I've ever seen and my thoughts on it are not solidified yet. As a result, I'm going to treat you to my thoughts on the matter and I simply ask you to bear with me.

I am going to summarize the movie's themes a little for those of you who haven't yet had the pleasure of subjecting yourselves to "Fight Club."

The movie seems to be about the shaky personal identity of modern consumers. The modern media and the ethics of consumerism have trivialized life to such a degree that no one truly knows who they are anymore. A name is not good enough, a name is simply an identifier; it's not an identity. My parents could have named me something different and it is conceivable that I would still be the same person overall. Even if I can trace my family name to two or three hundred years back, I have not truly learned anything about me. There most be something else, something more basic that defines me as a person.

It seems to me that people tend to define themselves by their religion. If someone asked me "What are you?" I could answer in a number of ways but I would probably answer with "I am a Christian. I am a child of God, born in sin but redeemed by God's grace - the blood of Christ." My identity as a Christian is the most meaningful and the most identifiable thing that I can point to illustrate to others what I am.

Consumerism is essentially a religion in disguise. For quite some time people have been inadvertently turning Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness into a very redundant list. This is, perhaps, a strange way of saying that people are slowly equating these three terms. And sadly, many people equate "the pursuit of happiness" with "getting as much stuff as we can." Therefore, these people believe that life (and the job of the government) is about being free to acquire as many possessions as possible.

Since, consumerism is a sort of religion it follows that people would tend to define themselves using its terms. However, consumerism only manifests itself in people's material possessions. So, in the same way that I identify myself as a Christian many people inadvertently identify themselves with their possessions. But because this identity is hard to illustrate to others they simply decorate their lives with a myriad of possessions and people will slowly start to figure out what kind of people they are. So the movie asks: "What if you lose everything?"

Spoiler warning: I might not be able to resist telling you the ending

The movie is a psychological drama. The film makers invite the audience to enter into the mind of a man who goes for days without sleeping. He is a recall coordinator who has to travel all over the country doing inspections. He describes himself as being a compulsive buyer of household items. He tries to solve his problems of identity with the kinds of things he uses to decorate his house. After trying to solve his problem of identity with his possessions he tries going to numerous support groups to get a high off of sympathy and crying. This fails when he realizes that there is a woman attending all of his support groups that obviously does not have the diseases the support groups are for. He ends up going four days again without sleep and this is when some part of him rebels. He begins to develop an alter-ego named "Tyler Durden" who personifies rebellion against established consumerism, radical existentialism, and charisma. Since we are seeing everthing through his eyes, the film makers very successfully make the audience think that Tyler Durden is a real person. Tyler Durden blows up our hero's condo and forces him to redefine his life. He has imaginary fights with this person (while really simply beating himself up) and sets up clubs all around the country called "Fight Club." This is where all the men who are sick and tired of their normal consumerish lives go to beat themselves up. Eventually, these clubs form into a terrorist organization called "project mayhem." Project Mayhem's main goal is to destroy everything that makes a modern consumer's life possible. Although, our hero remains involved with "Fight Club" project mayhem evolves without the knowledge of the first personality (the one who imagines Tyler Durden) and thus his alter-ego does things which he cannot control. He rigs up all the buildings of credit-card companies with demolition explosives and manages to get all civilians out of the buildings through the extensive "Project Mayhem" network.

As the story progresses, our hero becomes more and more like Tyler Durden (as personified by Brad Pitt). Even though the two characters stay separate (in a mix between Multiple-personality Disorder and schizophrenia) he begins to act more like his alter-ego, the man he wants to be. When he no longer needs his alter-ego, he shoots his alter-ego through the head (don't ask me how this works) and becomes an authentic human being, defined only through his actions - the marks he made on the world.


That's just what I think about it. This by no means exhausts the subject. I could be completely wrong and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about it (especially the part where he shoots himself in the head and he manages to survive, but Tyler Durden disappears; that was weird).