"I want you to hit me as hard as you can."
There will be some spoilers here and I honestly would not want any of this movie to be ruined for one who has not seen it so I urge you to see this first before you read on.
Have you heard of Tyler Durden?
Duality establishes itself early on as one of the primary themes of Fight Club. Edward Norton's Narrator is living a double life. He can't sleep, so he finds that going to group therapy, posing as a cancer survivor or a blood parasite victim, is the only way he can get some rest. Or so it seems..
Then Marla Singer comes along. She's a tourist like him, only more obviously so. And Narrator must find other ways to deal with his sleeping disorder: Such as sabotaging his dreary middle-class existence, forming an underground boxing club, and starting a revolution. All with his new best friend, Tyler Durden.
There are two sides to everything in this film. Tyler makes you promise things 2 times (three, technically, but stick with me here), there are two phases of Project Mayhem once it gets going; Fight Club occurs in a basement, i.e. a secondary room hidden underneath the public bar; when Tyler Durden gives the rules of Fight Club, the first rule is given twice (and yes I realize I am breaking the first two rules by talking about it). There are also a number of dualities behind the scenes, such as the fact that they had a bunch of corporate tie-ins, yet the script is decidedly anti-corporate.
The really fantastic thing about this movie is the editing and sound design, both of which are top-flight, especially when played on a proper surround sound speaker system. Fight Club is one of my favorite movies of all time. I put it up there with the likes of The Godfather and Casablanca. It shaped my cinematic outlook and sensibilities just as it shaped some of my personal ideals and sensibilities.
True, an examination of Tyler Durden's modus operandi is to find the narcissistic, manipulative, and emotionally and physically abusive qualities of the character. But the thing is, he is doing this all in order to change people for the positive.
Yes, he destroys property. Yes, he may push the Space Monkeys of Project Mayhem far beyond the bounds of human decency. Yes, he may be out to destroy several city blocks in order to reset the populace's credit history and give us all a clean slate.
But Tyler Durden is doing it all for us, man!
There is a scene about halfway into the film where Tyler Durden enters a bodega and takes the clerk out back at gunpoint. He then instructs this clerk to go back to school and become a veterinarian, and lets him go. In other words, he just mugged a guy into following his life's dream.
And that is Tyler Durden in a nutshell: mugging people and threatening them into changing their lives for the better. In 1999 (that vaunted year of great filmmaking to which I keep returning), this was a refreshing outlook, somehow filtering all the feel-good pseudo-psychological catch-phrases and homogenized pop culture of the '90s through a testosterone wash to try and help men stay masculine and strong in the face of the seeming feminization of the world.
Obviously, by now, we see where that path has led with the rise of Trumper-ism and the American way of embracing a right to be wrong and have alternative facts.
Even Tyler Durden's creator, Chuck Palahniuk never intended Tyler to be a cultural icon. Though his ultimate goal was to positively better the people within his sphere of influence, he was conceived as a metaphor for fascistic systems and how they can seem to have a positive effect even when doing negative things. Which is why our Narrator character is so desperate to stop Tyler's plans when he learns that he is himself Tyler Durden.
For a brief, shining moment, before 9/11, before Bush, before Trump and all the insanity to which the first two and a half decades of the new millennium have borne witness, there was a time when it seemed like Tyler's way was the good way forward.
Like so many things that were once thought good or acceptable, his philosophies have been soured by the realization that they may actually be harmful to society at large, if not individual participants. But we will always have the memories. And the soap.
No comments:
Post a Comment