A Review of “Fight Club”
by JP
I just saw ‘Fight Club’ on video. I didn’t find it shocking. I thought it was pretty natural and obvious. I took as its main original feature as being an allegory or metaphor. In this way it was a lot like ‘The Matrix.’
This movie seems to be popular with the kids. I’ll try to figure out why. Well, I can kind of see where it has its main interior magnetism, but I’ll need to think a little more about what the literal angle is that they’re into.
Tired Guy
Here we have a very tired guy who needs help, who’s caught up in modern values. He can’t sleep, so his realities are blending. He can’t keep things separate anymore. He needs help because his modern values of shop-shop-shop and obey-the-boss aren’t rewarding but are blinding and manipulative. This creates inner conflict for him which at first is only relieved by exposure to great suffering at Support Meetings.
A combination of macho man and blubbering woman is who shows him how to get his first level of release, when he cries and then can sleep again.
This relief stops working when a girl shows up and starts doing what he’s doing and makes him self-conscious, in more ways than one.
Unbeknownst to him, he needs to go further out to find relief.
The next stage of his stress relief results in a surprising and refreshing cinematic split and the creation of a dynamic duo.
Dynamic Duo
The side of the ego that our unnamed anti-hero uses in daily life is his Passive side, which consumes but does nothing for the larger needs of the ego much less that of an integrated personality which includes ego, essence and more. He can’t ‘do’ because doing is against the values of the system he lives in. The repressed Active side of his ego emerges as the perfect Doer, Tyler Durden, and changes life in the only way it knows how to meet its needs. Of course, the unnamed null cipher character is also Tyler, except that for his side of the duo a name doesn’t matter since he doesn’t matter.
It’s interesting that the Fight Club starts out with the man fighting himself (although we don’t know this until later). When the Active side emerges, it sees things as they are, and it wants to fight…itself. It wants to prove itself, its language and worldview to its Passive side.
Thru the Active side the Passive side finds out that fighting and pain help them to grow. What grows? -Their power, influence and determination to fight ever bigger enemies. The world splits when looked at in this split sort of way and the split sides ‘together’ declare war on the material world which is keeping them down.
[[NOTE: I was just talking with some folks who helped me see another side to this. Both of these guys are active, strong and effective in their own way. The tired guy simply represents Conventional Goodness while the clear-thinking know-it-all guy represents Rebel Goodness which has broken away from convention and finds liberation and clarity. The main point of the movie then is that both guys are good, but their definitions of goodness are fixed and so are dead-ends that bring about their own demise. Any time we think we finally HAVE what’s really good, finally, for sure, in our lives, that’s asking for trouble. We’re not staying open to further refinement and development. We cut something off, which festers. Then splits…. The hope for redemption then comes from seeing that both kinds of good are good, but aren’t the whole good. Both need to keep searching. So, maybe add this notion of Quality to the notion of Aspect which I’ll tend to focus on.]]
Dreams
Oppression and fear keep people from realizing their dreams, so these guys encourage people to break out of this fear and go for the fulfillment of their dreams. However, what they end up making their new dream is fighting and war. Their old dreams are dropped for the pursuit of ultimate fulfillment. The rush of life that the Active side lives for can’t be satisfied by the normal, balanced process of actually fulfilling a normal goal *in* life. The Active side steps out of life to do its effective, tempting work.
To break away from fear and cast aside old humane dreams for the new dream of fight, they see that one needs to hit rock bottom, to realize the despair of their current situation and then give up. And then give up some more. It’s the lesson of Alcoholics Anonymous. -Only when a drunk gives up can he stop drinking.
The Active side has known this all along and only needed to be set free to put all he knows into action. Perhaps his view from outside life keeps his perspective so sharp.
Soap
The soap figures in strongly. First off, it’s a common thing that no one normally understands. We use it and take it for granted. Tyler shows us what it really is and how it can be used, how we can use it instead of it using us. This is thrilling stuff, learning such effective, inside knowledge. So, soap is made from what we reject in ourselves, what we hate—our ugly fat, literally, or the things we hate, spiritually. Then it’s sold back to us to make us superficially clean and smug—maybe this means that the hating motive is the same as the self-righteous motive. Then the soap is used to destroy us, as an explosive. Maybe this means that self-righteousness doesn’t work, it implodes and self-destructs.
Knowledge
The role of knowledge is interesting in this movie. The Active side knows how things in the world is connected and how they work and are manipulated in ways which normal people are blind to. Just by revealing the truth of these facts and connections to our unnamed hero, he wakes him up. However, he never shows him anything higher, in fact he says there’s nothing higher. But in showing him the truth about simple things, such as soap or emergency airplane procedures, he shows that there is higher-level knowledge-the truth about things which is normally hidden-but he cuts it off illogically. Maybe there are also different levels to truth itself. Maybe there’s the truth of plain facts, then there’s the higher truth of how facts can be used, then there might be the yet-higher truth of WHY one would use those facts: you could use them for better or worse. And is there any limit to betterness? Sure, screwing over those who screw you is higher than being screwed. But wouldn’t improving life be even higher than revenge? And isn’t there also something higher than wearing leather and swinging from vines and fighting? (Tyler’s dream goal.) Possibly one could find out as one was ready. Or maybe the Active side of the ego is not the right teacher for the next step up from facts about the material world. Maybe it needs to submit in its turn to the next teacher.
Initiation & Car Crash
The Active side shows that learning about reality is a step by step process and that there are strict rules. They are the typical rules of initiation: don’t talk, don’t ask questions, everyone is involved to their natural extent, forget what you know, don’t try to predict or control, know thyself.
There are other examples of organized work against the forces that keep us from developing.
There’s the idea about losing in order to win, as shown when everyone is assigned the task of going out and intentionally losing a fight. By working so pointedly against ones own natural temptation, it shows that one has attained mastery and brings you to the other side. It also recruits others. By revealing a miracle, it starts a snowball rolling.
In the car crash scene our unnamed hero is shown that he limited his own access rather than that anyone has left him out of the loop. He made it so that he couldn’t be in the loop, given the ‘need to know’ basis. You’re in as far as you’re in. The limit on his willingness to face up to the facts of his life is exposed. He hadn’t thought about himself yet. He didn’t know what he’d regret if he were to die, etc. He finally saw how he was attempting to distort the outcome of the project, by controlling, by holding back, by thinking he’d already got what he needed and wanted. He got new strength after being able to let go even more, in the scene where no one was steering the car. Only then could he be pushed farther. Tyler then says that such desperate behavior is only the first taste of real life. These are all techniques of inner growth.
Different Paths
As in classic inner work of integration, the Fight Club method has a guide for one’s descent, but in integration, this descent is guided differently. One gets training in the good fight to find the way back up and out in a transformed state. One does have to see that there’s no way out before one can see the way. But it is also good to see that the doing side of oneself is just a tool. The truths that the ego can show us are vital to see. But we can’t let them take us over. The ego needs restraint. It is only concerned about itself and has no way of contacting anything greater or higher or even of contacting the whole range of rational truth. It makes a good taskmaster, but it too needs to submit to an ultimate guide, to the integrated personality which uses it, but which refuses to be used by it.
Sure, there’s no God as in an old man who’s your pal, but neither is there this personalized animosity that the ego seems to see. The ego sees through illusions about God, but it can’t see what God might be like. But the movie gave the higher parts of ourselves some clues as to what God is like. The movie did show that One was better than Two. -And a main definition of God is Unity. In everything we do we can find contradiction and impurity, but as we see and face up to these splits, we can move toward Unity. We can’t stop anywhere. (Just seeing the splits, seeing thru the illusions and lies is not enough!) To be strong enough to keep doing this requires serious training and the result is that it helps us approach just one of the many aspects of God we can’t imagine until we’re there.
Tension Increases
The violence increases after the car crash. One reason why might be due to the frustration of not being able to love in a wholesome, integrated way. Since love isn’t dealt with, but it still has a strong, confusing pull, the split grows stronger and the urge to fight increases.
Actually, it isn’t so much love that our Passive-Tyler can’t deal with as it is human relationship, per se. He doesn’t fit with any side of himself nor can he relate to others. Simply being able to relate to others is a big foundation for love.
It might be worth noting that if one had a normal, needs-based relationship to people and possessions and wasn’t in debt so that one didn’t have fear at work keeping one cowtowing to unreasonable demands, and if passions and desires weren’t leading us around by the nose, then one could maybe face up to dealing with another person; there’d be less stress, no need to fight, no split.
But if one lives from the basis of one’s ego and knows nothing else, knows no other way to connect to reality, and if one then starts to see the absurdity of life, one cannot be prepared for the stresses that result. In a normal culture, much training and initiation goes into preparing citizens for this stage of life. Life includes quite a few normal stages of breakthrough and crisis. Our modern culture only expects perhaps one big stage, in the teen years. It laughs about others at mid-life and old age. And it covers up and abuses them all. None of our methods of dealing with growth in life are designed to help us better deal with reality.
More or Less Crazy
The movie is probably quite a realistic picture of what it’s like to live with mental illness. But when we live as moderns the stresses presented afflict us all, more or less. We’re able to hide from them up better or worse. We may have even dealt with some of them in a healthy way, but to the extent that we let the ego remain in control, as it wakes up to its situation, there will be this tendency to split. Different parts of oneself are set aside to behave in mutually exclusive ways. We acquire our job personalities, our home-life personality, our hanging-out-with-our-buddies personality. They’re disconnected so that they can deal with the conflicting needs of each situation. In a harmonious culture based on continuous growth, there’s less tendency to such splits and there are good ways of dealing with them as they rise up.
The ego knows only crudeness. To forget its troubles it needs ever cruder escapes. Thus the hope of the ego is nothing further developed than wearing leather, eating meat and climbing vines. The ego should be our servant. Its function is fight or flight. A minor part of life.
The fight in life isn’t against physical enemies or things which have hold over us. It’s about our relationships to other people and things.
The Challenge of Relationship
Just before the final scenes, the stress of not admitting that love comes from submission to values above us causes the deepest split and provokes the waking up as our unnamed hero starts to accidently unveil his powerful cohort Tyler. The shroud won’t stay down over the lie any longer. But the fight accelerates to keep the illusion going. The fight takes on a life of its own. But the essence of the personality, roused by the risk of relationship and by love, begins subconsciously to suspect something is wrong. It starts waking up.
The time when the split is weakest and thinnest is when our unnamed hero is around the human who he has hidden feelings for. Then he can’t see his split side. And the split needs the most careful protection (which is why Tyler says to never mention him when he’s with the girl). But the contradictions can’t be hidden when we actually start relating to others (caring provokes doing in an integrated way), so the split starts being exposed. It’s interesting that Passive-Tyler remembers that his parents were the same way: he never saw them in the same room together. Now, this was meant to be a sad joke in the movie (and maybe to also keep up the illusion for us viewers about what was really happening), but maybe it also pointed to the psychic truth of men and women: that they’re sides of the same self. If you focus on one, you can’t see the other.
Killing Resolution
In the end there’s a final collapse of all attachment to the material world. The person sees how to reintegrate. He has to give up and die to himself to kill this powerful side. Then he can finally get the girl. But of course the girl herself only represents the female side of personality, which has its own truths to reveal and which are sometimes reflected to us in relationships.
But a big problem is continued in the way that the tensions are resolved. You don’t kill your enemy: everyone knows that’s how an enemy wins and lives on. You don’t rise above a fragmented Active Ego by killing it. That’s not how you re-integrate. That just makes the split permanent. You don’t use the Active side then retreat back to the Passive with your effective new information. You don’t kill the Active because it’s a troublemaker and out of control. You instead find and develop a Master over both sides. It’s true that one needs to hit rock bottom to see thru the Active Ego. Willingness to die to what one thought that one needed, at the deepest levels, is vital. But one needs to tame the Active Ego by confronting it with its limits from a higher place. Then it’s like showing the cross to a vampire. It suddenly loses its power and submits to the higher Good it couldn’t see before. It’s presented as such a know-it-all that we’re never allowed to see that it needs to learn as well. Each side has something to learn. In this movie the Passive side was shown life it couldn’t imagine before. But the Active side also needed to be elevated. This seems to expose a bias of the movie in that it thought more highly of Active Ego than it should. This would be natural for movie-makers to be in thrall of the power of Action. Anything we idolize we think we have to kill to get beyond. That’s what is meant by turning something into a monster. It’s never the monster’s fault. That’s why this is an American movie: the coolness of learning Tyler’s tricks about action and reality is celebrated above the kind of normal life that more artistic movie-makers seem to see better (e.g., ‘Wings of Desire’). It’s less easy for me to imagine a foreign movie resolving a conflict by wising up and killing off one half of reality.
However, maybe it’s possible that something splits off of you as a result of wrong living then you learn from it. In the meantime it takes on a life of its own, but if it only knows war and fighting, maybe it can only be tamed by its own weapons. Maybe this is what is meant by Evil. Sometimes we need to use force to put a part of us that has split off back in its place. Maybe not a killing force, but who knows..
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Teen Interest
So how is the public reacting to this movie? What might teenagers be thinking who watch it? It seems popular among the younger generation, so I’d like to know what they think about it. Some adults I’ve spoken to say that the violence and degeneracy are signs of despair or maybe exploitation, as in typical cynical Hollywood movies. I don’t know what the director’s intentions were, but I think this movie can be read more hopefully.
I suspect kids might end up in the situation where they see that everything sucks and that destruction is the only reasonable response. Kids have a need to rebel which our misguided culture always takes advantage of, and it’s the kids’ own loss of a good opportunity.
It’s good to see thru the illusions of life. But one must not yield to the temptations of the ego which says there can be no redemption and which launches a tough process of training the rest of the personality for destruction, effectiveness and ‘facing facts.’ This discipline should be redirected to something that is demonstrably higher, something which is boundless by definition.
The movie shows the guy learn the truth from his dark side, then kill it and live happily ever after. You shouldn’t turn off either side of yourself, but instead transcend them. The movie seems to teach that the trick is about learning and effectiveness, rather than integration.
To learn from then wise up to the demands of the Action side of ego, then set it aside, would seem to set up a person to be cynical. Such a person then goes with the flow in a more clever way. If the movie is taken just as it is, it seems to promote the modern corporate method that it purports to criticize. Wild power is something to be learned then put away, to use its secrets as you need them. For what? Since we killed the power side, that’s probably most what we’d like to achieve. We’re most envious of it, so we’ll try to get it by sneaky means. We see through craven culture, but we don’t see through the weakness of Active Ego, see how it needs help, how it needs to be accepted then lifted up. The compulsion for continuing to strive to the unknown might be lost otherwise. If every side is shown to be respectible and to need effort your whole life long, then you might be more humble in the face of the need for training, and more inspired to face up to doing it your whole life long.
Everyone Wants to Train
Youth is a great time to train basic skills. Anything we do can be used. There is a great urgency in life. There’s an ongoing battle for our souls. So we need to learn the methods for uplifting ourselves. This doesn’t have much to do with learning about what our rights are, or about our identity, etc., but more to do with steady training.
Time can’t be killed. We only think we’re doing nothing when we’re hanging out. Sure, we might be bored, but we are doing something and there are definite results. Fun isn’t as simple as it looks. We’re all being used all the time. Everyone gets used by someone else and everything we do has an effect. We don’t have a say over whether we’re used but only WHO uses us. Will it be our friends? Will it be our passions? Entertainment, clothes, car and paving companies? Will it be a “young man’s outdoor and civics skills training group” hierarchy such as the Boy Scouts? Who will use us? Sometimes we have an illusion of independence, but how far can we get on our own or by working with those who are at our own level? What is our goal? How far have we got using the methods of independence and “I’ll do it my own way”? I think that Chairman Mao said the key to guerilla war and revolution is that every action can be subject to an order, or maybe it was the famous old Chinese guy who wrote “Art of War.” Anyway, the whole idea of getting anything done is that the steps aren’t random or disconnected. If you want to do something bigger than yourself or something that might expand your present idea of who you are and what you want, then you have to submit to order. There’s a time and place for everything. Getting beyond the blind, self-defeating limits of “do what you want” (as defined by who you think you are now, which is likely inaccurate, based at best on hindsight) is what movies like Fight Club can help us do. -Or, even better, what classic inner questing has helped people do more thoroughly for a jillion years already.
What’s the best way to set ourselves up to learn basic skills and to learn how to be used? How much of ourselves should we give over to any project? Probably not so much that, say, we really think we ‘are’ a sports team and that we’re against other teams in a personal way. Or if we have a small job, like bag-boy, we don’t have to feel lowly or inferior to whoever is our boss but instead we can see we’re a necessary part of a community and we can take satisfaction in doing our small tasks properly. There may be silly or lowly aspects of what we get involved with, but those don’t have to be the parts we are using. We can use each aspect for what it’s worth. Likewise, learning to fit into a hierarchy doesn’t have to make us feel trapped.
Basic Training
I suspect we should make sure we master the easiest and most basic skills first. We need to revive and use our whole life for life. So that teens can work thru any task under the loose supervision of adults who keep them on the track of continuing to face and work through inevitable conflicts rather than to cover it up.
Examples of easy, basic skills might be general body skills and raw intellectual power-these areas fit well with the big energy of kids. Training bodily energy might involve learning to get up early, go to bed early. They can learn to work hard and endure bodily suffering in an atmosphere of uplift with their peers, so that they’re tired at the end of the day. They can learn such basic skills as getting along and around in the world, household chores, and schoolwork which includes all the facts and techniques of grammar, math, history, logic, languages. (School isn’t a waste of time.) They can travel. They can be members of work crews. They can be on sports teams. All these things train body and raw mental skill.
As teens get older they can apply these basic skills to ever greater challenges. All aspects of their body, personality, essence, nature are developing. Much groundwork needs to be layed for them to be ready for each surprising next step. The next steps can’t ever be seen or imagined from the previous, lower position. This is why one needs to be prepared. This is also where some of the stress and boredom of preparation comes in: you can’t see what it’s for. It’s also why one needs to trust the guidance of someone who is on the higher step which cannot yet be comprehended. One thing which can comfort a teen is that it never gets any easier. Everyone is obliged to develop their whole life long. As we get older it gets riskier, there’s more at stake and it never ends. The idea that after school life begins and that we ‘are’ then some thing that just does its thing is a modern lie that a rough yet sensitive teacher helps us to see through.
