Ecstasy Through Agony: "Fight Club" and Its Enduring Schizophrenia

Few classic films are at greater odds with themselves than Fight Club, and on its fifteenth anniversary, it remains a work of wholesale schizophrenia.

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Complex Original

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Few classic films are at greater odds with themselves than Fight Club, and on its 15th anniversary, it remains a work of wholesale schizophrenia.

David Fincher’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel is awash in near-constant dualities, filtering its rip-roaring satire about masculinity, consumerism, and self-help improvement—not to mention its investigation of pain, liberation, and mortality—through a story that’s akin to a narrative and thematic battlefield. At nearly every turn, Fight Club is of two minds, and not just because of its central twist involving the relationship between the nameless Narrator (Edward Norton) and his BFF-cum-alter-ego Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), with whom he rebels against modern materialistic culture by starting underground fight clubs. Their bond is merely the most obvious example of the many ways in which Fincher’s bleak buddy comedy is, at heart, a movie about opposing forces engaged in an endless, and irreconcilable, war with each other.



No matter where you look in Fight Club, people, institutions, and the culture at large are splitting into disparate sides, and finding it increasingly difficult to remedy that separation.


On the surface, Fight Club’s schizophrenia is embodied by the Narrator and Durden, partners in pugilistic therapy and terrorist anarchy who eventually turn out to be conjoined—Durden the imaginary-friend manifestation of all the insurgent beliefs the wimpy Narrator can’t express on his own. Durden’s “existence” represents the split in the Narrator’s mind between conformity and revolt. That division functions as the material’s big surprise, and it’s reflected in numerous other aspects of the story, which presents a vision of the world as hopelessly fractured. No matter where you look in Fight Club, people, institutions and the culture at large are splitting into disparate sides, and finding it increasingly difficult to remedy that separation. It’s a portrait of turn-of-the-millennium modernity—and manhood—as fundamentally fragmented beyond repair.

Rifts run deep throughout Fight Club, and not just within the Narrator. At a testicular cancer support group, the Narrator attains solace through others’ misery. It's a recurring theme of locating happiness in unhappiness that’s epitomized by the Narrator's comments, like, “You always hurt the one you love.” The testicular cancer gathering is populated by men who’ve been emasculated by disease to the point of becoming pseudo-women, as is made clear by the Narrator’s friend Bob (Meat Loaf), whose treatment has cost him his testicles and given him “bitch tits.” In other words, it’s an environment full of people who are both men and women, or, not quite either. They’re individuals with splintered identities, caught between the man-of-the-house roles that society supposedly expects of them, and the neutered-and-powerless single losers that cancer has rendered them. They’re just as schizophrenic as the Narrator, and thus cast his dual-personality condition as not unique, but symptomatic of a larger 21st century macho malaise.

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The Narrator finds his true calling via Tyler Durden, whom he initially meets in a plane-seat sequence that suggests the Narrator is simultaneously asleep and awake. When, right before this encounter, the Narrator muses, “This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time,” he highlights how living is, inherently, a process of slowly dying—a notion that’s then flipped on its head when he finally gives birth to Tyler after a slumbering fantasy about his plane-crash demise. Life is death, and death brings life, and the fight clubs that the duo create turn out to be places where men discover peace in pain, camaraderie in conflict, and salvation in suffering—a backwards vision of violence as a vehicle for euphoric unity, and further evidence of the film’s cracked nature.



Life is death, and death brings life, and the fight clubs that the [Tyler and the narrator] create turn out to be places where men discover peace in pain, camaraderie in conflict, and salvation in suffering—a backwards vision of violence as a vehicle for euphoric unity, and further evidence of the film’s cracked nature.


Fight Club is the story of a man who’s reborn through physical punishment, and then forced to maintain life by killing a part of himself, and the world as well. As such, it’s a snapshot of the human condition as hopelessly tangled up in contradictions about mortality and the self. Those only escalate once the fight clubs transform into Project Mayhem. It's organization in which men establish their identities through the negation of their identities (by shaving their heads to look alike), and in which they only gain/reclaim their rightful names (and thus life) through death. Project Mayhem is the extreme manifestation of the fight club’s ideals, and it soon turns all of society schizophrenic, as the Narrator learns when he attempts to thwart the outfit’s terrorist plans and discovers that now everyone seems to have a secret radical identity, and all of them are intent on blowing up the metropolis in order to save it.

The film is saturated with such schisms: filthy human liposuction fat is used to make luxury cleaning agents; the Narrator’s sorta-kinda-girlfriend Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) attempts a “death rattle” suicide that leads to cathartic sex; and the Narrator and Tyler’s censure of fashion-model beauty is juxtaposed with Pitt’s own on-display-to-drool-over physique. That last facet is part and parcel of Fight Club’s own schizophrenia, slamming superficial consumerism while selling itself as a work of brash, stylish, sexy chaos and carnage. His characters may rise up against the “IKEA nesting instinct” in order to achieve a more pure, visceral experience, but there’s no escaping the fact that Fincher (despite emulating Tyler’s subversive subliminal-imagery pranksterism by sticking dirty images into his action) has made a commercial mainstream work full of movie stars looking as tough, attractive, and manly as possible. Fincher’s film slams the system in which it operates—a hypocrisy that doesn’t undermine its arguments so much as bolster its overarching portrayal of modern madness and disorder.

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Form mirrors content throughout Fight Club, whose hard-to-pinpoint tone is pitched somewhere between nihilistic drama and pitch-black comedy, and whose sleek cinematography repeatedly employs pans and two-shots that highlight the narrative’s shifting dualities. Moreover, Fincher’s alluring aesthetics turn Tyler’s down-and-dirty ugliness—his rundown home, his thrift-store attire, his unshaved scruffiness—into the height of grungy stylishness, just as it imagines Marla’s cigarette-smoking messiness as unbearably enticing. Even its most famous lines of dialogue, all of them rallying-cry articulations of discontent with social structures and roles, have now become ubiquitous catchphrases, hardly the fate Tyler would have wanted for them. The result is a pervasive friction between the message and the means.

Fight Club proves to be a gaping wound of a film. Just like the contemporary culture it depicts, it’s literally and figuratively torn apart by opposing ideas—about life and death, happiness and desolation, harmony and disarray—that, no mater its protagonists’ choices, are bound to leave them feeling incomplete, unfinished. It's schizophrenic down to its very marrow, and doesn’t try to offer neat-and-tidy solutions to its problems. Rather, with a ferocious wit that’s as prickly as it was 15 years ago, it pinpoints how, in a world so rife with contradictions, there’s no such thing as true closure, or contentment. It only offers the hope that, after enduring enough self-annihilating agony, you can find a small measure of personal and romantic ecstasy.

Nick Schager is a film critic who's contributed to The Dissolve, Esquire, and The Atlantic, among numerous other publications. He tweets here.

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