The Truth of Tyler Durden
In modern life advertising is impossible to avoid. On the street there are billboards and posters and buses plastered with ads. Online we have to watch ads before watching YouTube videos, navigate around the sponsored content on news and entertainment websites, and suffer celebrities ‘incidentally’ endorsing products on their social media accounts. The advertisements on TV are frustrating, insulting and obtuse — I’ve seen some at least fifty times and I still can’t tell what they’re meant to be selling. Pop stars selling shampoos and conditioners, orangutans selling electricity, technology giants selling better lifestyles: companies will use any and all means to appeal to prospective consumers. They use marketing tactics and psychology to make us think that we either want or need their products to make us happier or more successful. And it works.
In 1999 David Fincher’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club was released. Although it was an initial failure with audiences and critics the film later gained recognition for its subversive style and resonant themes about failed masculinity and the loss of individualism in consumerist culture.
In Fight Club the unnamed protagonist and narrator, played by Ed Norton, is suffering from existential ennui. He is disconnected from people and turns to emotional support groups for comfort. He lives in an absurdist world shaped by cultural anxiety and social conformity, when on a business flight he meets Tyler Durden, a man who is independent, care-free, and unburdened by the pressures of modern life. Together they form a club where men fight bare-knuckled in dingy basements for entertainment and affirmation. Quickly, Tyler’s ambitions grow beyond the confines of the fighting circle and he uses their followers to disrupt corporate and social institutions before transforming Fight Club into a nationwide, underground terrorist group. In a third act twist the Narrator discovers Tyler is himself — that he created a persona who could act out his anarchistic designs against a capitalist system.
The majority of analysis regarding Fight Club has focused on it’s social, philosophical, and political overtones voiced by the Narrator and embodied in Tyler Durden. But there are holes and contradictions in the characters’ ideologies regarding culture and consumerism that are worth closer examination.
The film shows us Tyler Durden morphing from a man into a myth. He is respected and idolized by men who have never met him; who circulate wild stories about his origins and undoubted genius. To the members of Fight Club and later Project Mayhem, Tyler represents manhood, liberation and purpose.
But Tyler Durden doesn’t exist. The Narrator invented him, and despite his disgust for the materialist hell we inhabit Tyler’s image and methods are the by-product of consumer culture. The Narrator’s vision of masculinity and self-worth has been fashioned by mass media and entertainment, which manifests into his vision of the perfect man, played by Hollywood actor Brad Pitt. Tyler Durden is the Narrator’s idealized self, influenced by the images seen in advertising media.
“I talk like you want to talk. I f**k like you want to f**k,” Tyler says. Why does the Narrator want to look and talk and f**k like Tyler? Because advertising and media has conditioned him to want to look and talk and f**k that way. When Tyler and Marla, a woman the Narrator meets at the support groups earlier in the film, supposedly begin a relationship we infer that the Narrator is envious of Tyler’s physical shape and sexual prowess. We see the dispensed condoms floating in the toilet. We hear with the Narrator the seemingly endless sex Tyler and Marla have while he exercises, brushes his teeth, washes his clothes, and eats breakfast. When Tyler catches him sneaking at his bedroom door we see Brad Pitt’s naked, chiselled, oiled body; he is being fetishized by another man. He provokes feelings of inadequacy in the Narrator the same way real world advertising is designed to make us feel insecure and ugly about ourselves. When they board a bus the Narrator asks Tyler, referring to a men’s underwear ad overhead, “Is that what a real man is supposed to look like?” Although the Narrator believes he is above the ad’s marketing ploy, his creation of Tyler proves otherwise; he desires to be a ‘real man’ with zero fat and chiselled abs; he wants to physically be Tyler.
In addition the Narrator/Tyler Durden imitates the corporate figures he seeks to undermine by utilizing the same marketing techniques and psychology they have at their disposal.
The language Tyler Durden uses at Fight Club to persuade his followers is not dissimilar from the platitudes used by advertisers to persuade people into becoming customers. Tyler appeals to their lack of fulfillment, of providing answers and solutions to problems they can’t. He promises them direction and a sense of accomplishment the same way that ads for Apple and Samsung smartphones promise to make your professional, personal and social life better, on the proviso that you buy their products. The Narrator retools a motivational speech he heard in a support group and uses it — through his Tyler persona — to make the men of Fight Club belong to a community. “I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential.” Tyler is a marketing strategist selling them a lifestyle choice. His product is control over their lives.
Like advertising, Tyler exploits peoples’ weaknesses for personal gain — to see his anarchist plans come to fruition he needs consumers to buy his rhetoric.
When the Fight Club members are given missions to vandalize stores, buildings, and works of modern art the media attention they’re given is akin to a publicity stunt meant to raise brand awareness. Their missions are designed to promote the growing influence of Fight Club and Project Mayhem among their established group. Working together they cheer their media coverage like an advertising team celebrating a successful marketing campaign.
At the end of the office scene where the Narrator blackmails his boss (by viciously beating himself), he leaves his work but retains his salary, saying Fight Club now has a corporate sponsor. He and Tyler’s anti-capitalist, anarchist organization is funded by a corporation operating under the capitalist system. The hypocrisy present in this scene highlights their clandestine dependency on the system they claim to detest. The expansion and planning of Project Mayhem is made possible by the function of capitalism, and its members are shown to be employed in jobs as waiters, chefs, bartenders, and even police officers. What happens once their mission is complete and the financial institutions are in ruins? Have they considered how many people will suffer without the structures of government and the free market? While they may despise the society they live in, Tyler’s alternative vision is no better. They’ve been sold an illusion.
Tyler’s followers/acolytes/soldiers are promoted a lifestyle which they’re told will improve their lives and give them purpose. Tyler tells them not to conform to the society that treats them as commodities, but in truth they’re exchanging one kind of conformity for another, and which robs them of personal identity. They all have the same matching shaved heads. They all wear the same black clothes. They all bear the same chemical burn on their hands — Tyler has literally branded them like property. They are fashioned to look and act identical. Fight Club’s leader, however, remains separate.
This leads to the Narrator/Tyler’s privileged status, which is antithetical to his ‘teachings’; they enjoy the luxuries that power provides. They dress however they want, they’re given complimentary cars, free meals at restaurants, and they have their own personal bedrooms. They enjoy a life not afforded to those beneath them but whom they claim to be helping. In the Narrator’s mind Tyler indulges in consumer culture. When Tyler makes a sudden return his attire doesn’t represent his anti-materialist sentiment — the Narrator can’t let go of his own desire for material possessions as sold to him through advertising, which is communicated through Tyler’s wardrobe. He is torn between his consumer and anarchist sympathies.
People may be inclined to see propaganda and advertising as distinct from each other — with the former politically motivated and the latter business driven — but the means they use to sway and convince us of their virtues are the same. The way they present information as truthful disguises their agenda: to win our favour and support — to commit ourselves to them. Where people view the Narrator/Tyler as propagandists, I see more evidence of them being salesmen with a product. They’re not leading a political revolution, they’re selling a half-baked dream, and what happens after they’ve made their sale isn’t Tyler’s concern.
However you choose to view Tyler Durden the underlying implication Fight Club makes remains the same: even the brightest of people can be manipulated via their unhappiness and self-doubt. And so long as they’re ready to pay the price for answers or a cause to follow, there will always be people — businessmen, politicians, cult leaders — ready to profit from our weaknesses as human beings.
Coming soon: I Think I’m Falling Out of Love with Star Wars
