Fight Club - the explanation for the most misunderstood film of all time. The meaning behind Fight Club.
If you think I'm wrong, please read at the end of my explanation, that there's a paper/article released by the University of Nebraska on the true meaning of Fight Club.
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- DirectorDavid FincherStarsBrad PittEdward NortonMeat LoafAn insomniac office worker and a devil-may-care soap maker form an underground fight club that evolves into much more.
Explanation:
No, Fight Club is NOT about toxic masculinity, and it is NOT about any of the nonsense that Wikipedia and YouTube influencers claim.
A lot of people don't even understand the main story because they only analyse parts of the film. That is like overlooking the sinking ship in Titanic but analysing the love story between Rose and Jack.
The main storyline in Fight Club is about the process of spiritual awakening (enlightenment), caused by unbearable mental suffering. The suffering is a consequence of identification with the ego, the things we own and the roles we play in a society of hypocrites. These are big mistakes and the protagonist is making all of them. Nobody knows the reason for his suffering, not even the doctor. Then, the narrator's subconscious mind creates a hallucination: Tyler Durden. It is a self-healing process, a psychosis.
Hallucinations are a self-protection mechanism of the human mind when mental and physical pain becomes more than a person can stand.
Tyler shows him what he needs to change in life to end the suffering. And it works.
The narrator doesn't know this, he thinks, Tyler is a real person.
Tyler is telling the narrator:- Let go of attachment.
- stop identifying with your ego
- stop identifying the things you own
- stop identifying with the roles you play in society.
You are not your job, not your car, not your credit card. (It is the nature of an ego to feel incomplete. it is unsatiable. therefore, buying new things will make the ego happy momentarily, but the feeling of incompleteness will return in the long run. All these things are teachings of ZEN Buddhism, by the way).
Tyler says: ".... never be complete, stop being perfect". Why do we want to impress people we don't even like?
Tyler teaches us to be who we are instead.
You are a man first and foremost. Fighting is in a man's nature. (And it is the stop-thinking/meditation aspect in terms of enlightenment).
There are countless more references in the movie to the process of enlightenment:
Destroying the egos of new Project Mayhem members. Losing fights on purpose.
Tyler and Ed Norton destroy fancy cars with baseball bats but they stop at the ordinary car and move on to the next ego-feeding car.
Enlightenment is mentioned several times in the film, for example in the chemical burn scene, which teaches us: not to run away from suffering and sacrifice, but to develop and grow through it. (He also tells him that God might not like him and that he'd better take his life into his own hands...).
At the end of the film, the narrator realises that Tyler is a hallucination and shoots himself to stop Tyler. badly injured he is telling Marla: "I am ok, I am really ok, trust me. everything is gonna be fine"
The injury doesn't matter, because the narrator's suffering has ended.
He killed Tyler because he wanted to stop him (himself) from destroying buildings and harming other people. Tyler is his ideal self, but he can't let him (himself) do that, even if he feels like it. Tyler didn't care because he was created from his subconscious mind, where emotions and beliefs take precedence.
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one word to the billion times quoted rule "Don't talk about Fight Club". for whatever reason these people think it is funny to quote it....
The point of the rule is: The narrator is the ONLY person with no idea that Tyler and he are the same person.
And Tyler wants to keep it that way.... that's all.
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One quote from the author Chuck Palahniuk:
"I've always felt the story was about fixing one person rather than fixing society."
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I am not the only one with that "weird" ZEN Buddhism explanation. read that article:
Fight Club: An Exploration of Buddhism
Charley Reed
University of Nebraska at Omaha