Fight Club and the annihilation of the mind
Original painting by Anne LeClair
Fight Club maintains cultural relevance because it has a kind of power which quite few films have. This is the power to not just make people think, but rearrange how their minds work. Because as I’ll examine, it does more than present an argument, this being that men and others must break free from their false consumerist reality while finding balance within their psyches. It presents this argument using psychological techniques that aren’t consciously detectible, yet have made all the difference in inspiring generations of men (though perhaps not exclusively men) with an overwhelming eagerness to take action. Through a particular combination of visuals, sound design, and music, it depicts a journey to break free from the spiritual lacking which characterizes our capitalist reality.
Because we’re a society with ultra-violence, misogyny, and racism, this agitational function of the film has in many cases prompted men to further these preexisting impulses. It’s taken on dark associations as a consequence, being beloved by skinheads, pick-up artists, and other breeds of hypermasculine reactionaries. In reaction, liberal commentators have made it into a scapegoat for capitalism’s crises, going so far as to blame it for electing Donald Trump. In parallel, conspiracy enthusiasts have been suggesting that the film itself is a psyop, designed by its Mossad-connected producer to manufacture consent for the Great Reset.
This mythical quality that it’s gained, being seen as a campfire bogeyman that’s behind the mischief and mayhem our world is seeing, is the logical conclusion of these psychological tools it employs. Tools which activate a set of reactions among minds that resemble the one of the film’s main character.
The journey’s start: something’s amiss
This character, a nameless stand-in for the masses of men who share his problems, is someone who’s finding no fulfillment whatsoever from living under capitalism. He’s materially in a privileged state, free from the destitution, social discrimination, and imperialist violence which were impacting the vast majority of the planet during the era the film took place in. Yet he shows how even the well-paid labor aristocrats in the core of imperialism are unable to live up to their full potential as human beings because of the system they’re tied into. And as the film repeatedly indicates, his sterile environment exists on top of a grim social reality, one where poverty is normal despite there officially being no great depression, the world is passively allowing corporations to run it, and the relatively stable environment of 1990s America surely can’t last due to the system’s innate lack of sustainability. As Tyler Durden says, the believers in the consumerist lifestyle are “polishing the brass on the Titanic. It’s all going down.”
Personally the film’s visual worldbuilding gives me anemoia, the feeling of nostalgia for a time you’ve never known. And as the 30-year nostalgia cycle shifts towards the 90s, many others may now feel similarly. But the truth is, the seeds for our grim present reality were laid down during that time, which was similar to now except less people were then feeling the strain from rising neoliberal inequality and global warming was less far along. What the film does is present a dreamlike vision for how this capitalist nightmare can be escaped, and for how the system can be torn down.
Due to the perfectionism and style of director David Fincher, this depiction had a kind of vividness that wasn’t present in the era’s other most notable workplace commentary film Office Space. Its visual quality resembles the kind of intensely photo-realistic imagery that would only become ubiquitous in moving pictures at least a decade after it came out, and this allowed its color stylization—which Fincher described as being designed to resemble a convenience store at night—grip the senses. The darkly comic experiences Edward Norton’s character goes through, where he assists in coverups for mass corporate manslaughter, gets depressed to the point of fantasizing about his plane crashing, and becomes addicted to pretending to be sick in support groups, create the sense that this world’s reality is a heightened version of our own. The Narrator’s psyche, and the world around him, are stagnating within a state that can’t be kept up, and at some point they’ll have to break out of it.
In this environment, the idea of suddenly deciding to start throw punches makes as much sense as anything else. The world is absurd, so any method for reclaiming one’s primal sense of humanity appears justifiable. At this point in the film, the Narrator’s condo has been blown up, which doesn’t even feel like any real kind of loss because of how empty his life has been. Then the catalyst for his psyche’s shakeup challenges him to a fight, and while the sound of a rushing train rises in the background, he clumsily punches Tyler in the ear.
The journey’s middle: something must be done
This is where those key factors of visual and sound design come in. I believe the subconscious reason behind why so many minds have been impacted by this film, for better or for worse, is that it tells its story through not just plot beats and acting but a powerfully crafted sensory stimulus package. The rushing train noise during the buildup to the first punch was not coincidental; it was included to represent the inexorable path that the Narrator sets himself on when he chooses Tyler’s path of cathartic violence. And the environment in which the fight takes place has the same kind of role in conveying what kind of journey this character is on.
It’s a parking lot at the back of a bar at night, the perfect kind of setting to emphasize Fincher’s color palette. What’s this choice in the visual filter supposed to communicate? The film’s subtextual narrative, which is that of someone navigating the distorted reality modern capitalism has created. All the lighting looks uncanny and artificial because that’s what our consumerist dystopia is. And during the first scenes where the Narrator journeys into his new environment, transitioning towards the call to action stage within the hero’s journey, this lighting style helps add to the text. He’s ushered into a nighttime wonderland that feels alien to the dry world he used to inhabit, a rundown old house on the peripheries of the decaying capitalist industrial and urban centers. He enters the edge of society, and gives up his luxuries to embrace a monk-like lifestyle. Or rather a warrior-monk lifestyle, since fighting then becomes routine for him.
In today’s online culture, where synthwave and the doomer nightwalk meme have become part of the collective consciousness, the film’s new visual norm of isolated urban ruins and sparsely lit-up lots especially resonates. The faint sounds of distant trains and car honks within these locations complete the atmosphere, and are right kinds for a synthwave-esque video. This is an environment that beckons for other disillusioned men to join the Narrator in his quest for meaning, to become members of Fight Club. As the boxing group grows, we get the sense that a mass base exists for whatever Tyler is trying to do. People want to find freedom from the existing order, and they’re able to find a quasi-religious release from that order in this magical place Tyler has found for them. In a potentially intentional juxtaposition to the thought the Narrator had earlier about being the “warm little center” of the room in therapy meetings, Tyler has become the conduit through which these men gain happiness. As the Narrator asks at one point during this slower-paced middle of the film, “why does a weaker person need to latch on to a stronger person?” The answer is hinted at in how the crowd of lost people get a sense that they’ve found what they’re looking for by following Tyler.
As Fight Club grows, we get the impression that this whole thing is just getting started, because society’s spiritual deficiency has created a vast vacuum which groups like Fight Club can fill. When Fight Club eventually migrates to the dilapidated house itself, and its members grow a prepper garden in the formerly desolate backyard, it feels like a new world is growing within the cracks of the decaying old order. These kinds of images and concepts, wherein the obsolete capitalist structure gets torn down and replaced with something new, are why Fight Club has been called an anarchist epic.
But anarchism has fundamental flaws in its analysis, namely that it assumes the state can be made nonexistent right after the revolution despite history not yet being at the stage where that’s feasible. The state is a tool for one class to exercise domination over another, and until society has evolved beyond the existence of class as a whole, either the proletariat will use the state as a tool for exercising power, or the bourgeoisie will maintain its rule. That’s the material reality which Tyler’s theoretically underdeveloped model for revolution ignores, and that’s at the root of why Fight Club morphs into a cult.
The journey’s end: is this what you wanted?
When Tyler develops Fight Club into a militant organization called Project Mayhem, he seeks to bypass this reality. His solution is to make it so that there’s no more industrialism, and no more proletariat. Only a fully collapsed landscape where everyone is suddenly thrown into a hunter-gatherer or agrarian lifestyle. The humanitarian crisis that would come from such an event, as well as the needless death and suffering that would be brought about from sacrificing modern medical advances, weren’t considered within this moral calculus. The first rule of Project Mayhem is that you don’t ask questions, so this half-conceived plan could proceed unchallenged.
The way that Tyler got his men to go keep following him, despite the unscientific nature of his ideas, was by annihilating their minds and then building them back up in his own image. This required more than providing them with therapy and rousing speeches. Now he had to physically torture them by burning their hands with acid, and use this pain as a tool to coerce them into fundamentally restructuring the way their minds worked. He didn’t stop applying this procedure, or the other disciplinary measures he worked into Project Mayhem, until they agreed to give up the mental patterns that got in the way of their devotion to the cause.
What were these patterns? Any way of thinking that kept them holding onto earthly attachments, that stopped them from recognizing their roles as impermanent and insignificant pieces of matter whose lives weren’t as important as the cause. The thing about this concept is that from a revolutionary perspective, it’s correct. We should put our individual bodies at risk if this is necessary for liberating the collective, and we should give up selfishness in general. What made Tyler need to drill in these ideas through mind control tactics was that without this mind control, the contradictions within his concept of what revolution means would be too easy for them to reject. There could be no critical or intellectual thought, only robotic repetition of the Project’s slogans.
What kept all of these men in this absurd situation, where they had converted a rotting house into a cramped military bunker in which they plotted random acts of counterproductive adventurism, was the feeling that they were part of something bigger than themselves. It was an intensified version of the allure which had brought them into Fight Club, a perception that all the clownish and degrading things Project Mayhem demanded them to do were necessary for the world’s deliverance from evil.
This combination of anti-intellectual dogmatism and militant fanaticism is what produces Project Mayhem’s equivalents, which are invariably pathetic first world imitations of actual revolutionary organizations that compensate for their members’ contradictions by acting like violent movement wreckers. When people try to play revolution, without rigorously investigating their conditions or learning from successful liberation efforts, they tend to do what Project Mayhem’s members did: join a cult which lets them feel like they’re in the middle of an actual revolutionary war.
As ridiculous as the substance of Tyler’s plan is, the film’s framing still keeps us immersed within the mindset that causes someone to uncritically devote themselves to a grandiose mission. When the Narrator becomes disillusioned with Tyler, and frantically chases after him across the country to try to reason with him, he looks like the weak one—the Beta male, you could say—compared to the mysterious and powerful presence of Tyler. Tyler remains in control, the world seeming to be working in his favor like clockwork as Project Mayhem keeps growing. As the soundtrack picks up to an urgent, trombone-accentuated pace, there’s a montage of the Narrator scrambling from airport to ariport, encountering other spaces on society’s peripheries where Tyler has replicated his initial franchise-building strategy.
When it’s revealed that all of Tyler’s deeds have been made possible by the Narrator, and that the Narrator therefore may as well be the one who’s done them, it provides a sense of hope for all the men who relate to the character’s pathetic side. The weakness and fragility that he’s demonstrated throughout the film hasn’t ultimately mattered, because he’s still carried out feats so massive that they’re about to lead to civilization’s upheaval. From a certain perspective, the acceleration of capitalism’s collapse that he’s engineered is his manliest accomplishment, since the men of Project Mayhem have concluded that industrial civilization’s existence is the source of all their masculine insecurities. The truth is that Fight Club and Project Mayhem are coping mechanisms. They only provide an emotional release for one group of people, not a scientifically informed program for what society as a collective needs. When the Narrator reached the breaking point that led him to him rallying these men, an unstoppable spark was lit within his being. But without the right theoretical knowledge, this spark would lead to disaster.
That’s the tragedy which befalls the people who become disillusioned with capitalism, but take action without knowing what they need to do to fight capitalism. They had potential to help in creating an actual vanguard, then ended up bringing society even further away from progressing. Yet Fight Club ends with a hopeful framing of such a tragedy. It has the Narrator, after being burnt with acid, worn down to emotional exhaustion, and bleeding from a self-inflicted gunshot, emerge with a new mind. His unhealthy old mind had been annihilated, Tyler had been neutralized by getting integrated into his psyche, and he was able to start taking accountability for his mistakes.
The imagery and music used to reflect this was like a soothing lullaby after a thunderstorm. Those in the audience, at least those receptive to what the film had to say, had gone along with him on this journey, and they were changed too. It seems like the way in which it’s altered people has depended on the ideas which were already in their minds; it’s like a tool for blowing out the parts of one’s psyche that conflict with what goes against one’s goals. What those goals are is up to the individual.
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