In today’s society, more and more, you see people trying to find themselves, in pursuit of happiness. The movie, “Fight Club” deals with this inner search of happiness, which has dangerous reactions.
Edward Norton stars as a bored office worker named jack. An insomniac who lives by himself in an apartment filled bursting with consumer furniture and appliances, he starts to spend evenings going to self help groups for everything from testicular cancer to tuberculosis because he finds becoming a person other than himself each night adds comfort to his life. As he attends them more and more, he discovers that someone else has been doing the same thing as him. Her name is Marla Singer. He confronts her about this, and they decide to split the help groups up amongst each other.
Now enters Tyler Durden. Tyler is a soap salesmen who Jack meets on a flight back home. They become friends after Jack’s apartment blows up in some kind of freak explosion. He moves in with Tyler, and they start something called fight club. In this club they basically beat the snot out of each other, in response to the dissatisfaction of their pathetic, working class lives. The club surprisingly grows larger and larger with each night, and eventually develops into some sort of urban terrorist group. Then one day Tyler was gone. Jack begins to worry where he went, and at the same time begins to realize all that was going on, and how it has all gotten out of hand. He begins a search for Tyler, but in reality it is a search of self actualization. In this search he realizes that Tyler is just an alter ego of himself.
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He had created Tyler, a man that was everything that he wanted to be, and it began to take a major role in his life. He begins to realize that everything that Tyler had done, was in reality him. The movie shows the gradual breakdown of a person, who had felt lost, and nothing around him seemed to fulfill his life. With this alter-ego he created, it turned his life around, making everything more enjoyable. This also however took a bad downward spiral, when Tyler, his imaginary presence, began doing extreme things that were harmful to other people.
At this point Jack realized the insanity that he had created in his head, and how it effected his body, and actions. He attempted to resolve the problems that he created, but they were to large to fix. His fight club that he had created, was so large, that wherever he went, there were members. The only way he knew how to end the madness was to physically destroy his alter ego. He figures out that by placing a gun to his head, he was also placing a gun to Tyler’s head. So he basically shoots himself in the head, thus symbolizing the destruction of his alter ego, and the end to the madness.
Fight Club was an excellent representation of what can go on in the head. They demonstrated clearly the effects of an alter ego which can create temporary happiness but in the long run, do more damage then good. Although somewhat unrealistic and confusing at points, Fight club was a great psychological thriller, worth seeing.
