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Statement of Intent:

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, released as a novel in 1996 and adapted to film in 1999, is a story awash with social criticism and violence. It is a story of millennial fears, tension and apocalyptic fury. It is a story of contemporary American society and the death of old, formerly sustaining mythologies that have been replaced with myths of consumerism and salvation through self-help and cosmetics. It is a story of life in a postmodern world where technological paranoia and nihilism are the only outlets of creative expression and aggression. Controversy surrounding Fight Club’s surface, however, has blurred the roots of the social significance of the story. The mythologies this story addresses, the competing philosophies fighting for dominance over vanishing ideological battlegrounds, and the socio-cultural implications of this work have been largely ignored by the academic world. Literally hundreds of reviews of the novel and the book are available in numerous magazines and internet publications, but despite Fight Club’s rising popularity among undergraduate and graduate students, few scholarly studies of it exist. The following study on human relationships to technology in Fight Club, therefore, is by no means comprehensive. This study draws heavily on primary sources from a variety of disciplines because there are few, if any, sources available outside of editorialized reviews. The purpose of this study is to lay a general framework and outline some of the issues in the story that, hopefully, will be addressed by future research.

Introduction / Thesis: Among Western and Occidental societies in the late twentieth century, the term “technoculture” has entered both corporate and cultural lexicons. In an age of monumental expansion of the internet, in an age of globalization where other terms such as “information technology” and “knowledge economy” are common in locales as far distant from Western culture as China (Avishai 84-88), the fusion of technology and culture seems, certainly, an appropriate addition to language. “Technoculture,” however, despite the novelty of the word, is a misnomer. All human societies, even the most ancient, are technocultures in the sense that members utilize and work with technology and subsequent tools to alter the natural condition of their environments. Technology by itself is nothing but an abstract, an idea until someone attempts to apply it in a casual relationship in the material world. Epistemological questions of the material or natural world aside, the distinction between the abstract and the application of technology is crucial to understanding human relationships to it. For the purposes of this study, a working redefinition can be found in Richard Merelman’s article on postmodernism and liberalism. Merelman, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, states, “The culture of technology is simply the structure of feeling that technology helps to create between society and the self” (par. 2). Human beings, then, have ideas of technology, some of which are applied materially and thus casually alter the natural world. The alteration of the natural world influences not only cultural values, as Arnold Pacey notes in his book, The Culture of Technology, but also the conceptualization of new technology (3-5). The result is a circular process of abstraction, application, and interaction.

Humanity’s circular interaction with technology is an integral theme of Fight Club, both in Palahniuk’s 1996 novel and the 1999 film adaptation by screenwriter Jim Uhls and director David Fincher. Though the film adaptation and the novel are at points markedly different in terms of plot; the narrative structures, protagonist characterizations, and driving impetus behind both stories are utterly parallel. As such, Fight Club relates the development of an unnamed narrator from a desperate, young American professional who feels trapped in a world of work and consumerism to a self-styled messianic figure and demagogue of apocalyptic proportions. The protagonists of both stories, furthermore, develop a fanatical hatred of Westernized cultural values and the perceptions of technology produced by postmodern American society. In the protagonists’ view, postmodern American society is dominated by what can be referred to as the “salvation myth.” The members of American society, in other words, strive to find comfort, happiness and ultimately redemption simply by accruing new and fashionable applied technologies. The result is a world with no meaning where, as one character says in the film, “everything is falling apart.” The protagonists, therefore, work diligently to destroy American consumer and corporate culture with extreme pranks and acts of terrorism in an attempt to reset both ethical and material values to hunter-gather levels. Such regression, in the protagonists’ view, is the only means of escaping the faulty, culture-wide mythology of salvation through technology. Rather than save humanity, technology has already destroyed it by warping its cultural priorities while simultaneously rendering the Earth increasingly uninhabitable. Implicit, therefore, in the driving philosophy behind the protagonists, who form an army of anti-culture warriors known as “Project Mayhem,” is the idea that applied technology is only valid and fit for human use if it is accompanied by a value-equivalent sacrifice. An analysis of the novel and the film will demonstrate how the clash between the concepts of salvation and heroic sacrifice relate as a conflict of diametric ideologies symbolized by human interaction with technology and the culture that results from it.

Summary / Analysis of Fight Club:

In both versions of Fight Club, the narrator (played by Edward Norton in the film) is an insomniac who becomes addicted to joining support groups for terminal or crippling diseases he does not have in order to experience life at its worst and escape the fake holism of material success. Realizing that life “comes down to nothing” and crying at support groups actually cures his insomnia. The act of pretending to be dying liberates the narrator from the emptiness of his job as a recall coordinator at a major automobile corporation and from the cold sterility of his fashionably furnished condo, which in turn allows him to sleep. The narrator’s sense of life is renewed after each meeting, and consequently he says of the experience in the novel:

Walking home after a support group, I felt more alive than I’d ever felt. I wasn’t host to cancer or blood parasites; I was the little warm center that the life of the world crowded around.
And I slept. Babies don’t sleep this well.
Every evening, I died, and every evening, I was born.
Ressurrected. (22)

The narrator is eventually forced to divvy up his support groups with Marla Singer (played by Helena Bonham Carter in the film), a fellow disease-faking “tourist” who attends the meetings out of a bored, morbid fascination with suffering that is combined with her own desperate search for empathy. The presence of another tourist, however, prevents the narrator from crying and hence negates the “cure” for his insomnia. Not being able to cry, the narrator says, keeps him from “hitting bottom,” which the narrator believes is a requisite for salvation.

The intrusion of Singer into his world of support groups refuels the narrator’s sense of material entrapment that explodes into terrorist action later in the story. In both the novel and the film, the narrator accuses Singer of ruining everything. The narrator, furthermore, first expresses his sense of entrapment when he outlines the circumstances of his job and the furnishings of his home, a condo he describes as a “filing cabinet for widows and young professionals.” As for his domestic life, the narrator says, “Like so many others, I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct” (emphasis added). “We used to read pornography.” The narrator continues, “Now it was the Horchi collection.” In a sequence that Jonathan Romney, in New Statesmen, describes as one of the most brilliant parts of the film, the narrator’s condo becomes a walk-through IKEA catalog as descriptions, prices, and ordering information appear on the screen next to the narrator’s furniture (par. 4). The narrator also asks, with no small amount of sincerity, “I’d flip through catalogs and wonder, ‘What kind of dining set defines me as a person?’” The narrator’s early obsession with garnering the material symbols of wealth and success triggers a deep-seated sense of frustration and self-hatred that ultimately mushrooms into the main psychological thrust of the film.

The narrator, who is now addicted to support groups and is growing increasingly disillusioned with his old lifestyle, meets Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt in the film), a charismatic waiter, film projectionist and soap manufacturer while on a plane flight home from a business trip in the film adaptation and while on vacation in the novel. In Durden the narrator immediately discovers the living embodiment of every physical and mental characteristic he has ever lacked. Durden’s maniacal pranks (he splices single frames of pornography into family films and urinates in the food he serves) appeals to the narrator’s own hatred of culturally expected safety and convenience. For example, the narrator prays for a crash every time he’s on a plane to finally find some meaning in his life in the face of death. The narrator is drawn to Durden’s athletic build, witty intelligence, and scathing sense of humor, and Durden quickly becomes the narrator’s friend, guide and father figure.

The narrator moves in with Durden after his condo mysteriously explodes while he is on a business trip. He calls Durden from a payphone as he watches the fire department root through the smoldering debris of his old home and the two agree to meet at a bar, where the narrator tells Durden he was close to being “complete” while mournfully listing the contents of his devastated condo. Durden, after listening to the narrator’s plight, explains his personal Weltanschauung and initiates the first explicit anti-consumerist dialogue in the story. In the film, Durden asks the narrator:

“What are we, then?”
“I don’t know, consumers?”
“Right. We are consumers. We are byproducts of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me. What concerns me is celebrity magazines, television with five hundred channels, some guy’s name on my underwear, Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra...I say, ‘Never be complete.’ I say, ‘Let’s evolve and let the chips fall where they may’...The things you own, end up owning you.”

After moving into Durden’s home, a massive abandoned house the narrator describes as being in “the toxic waste part of town,” Durden and the narrator start fight club, a male-only organization where men fight each other one-on-one simply for the intense physical rush of hand-to-hand combat and for the experience of pain to circumvent the emotional numbness of their day-to-day lives. The obsession with fight club develops into an all-consuming passion for its members, as the narrator says in the film, “Fight club became the reason to cut your hair short or trim your fingernails.”

The narrator’s initial euphoria in fight club and his idealized father-son relationship with Durden, however, is compromised when Durden saves Marla Singer’s life after she overdoses on the popular anti-anxiety drug Xanax. Durden and Singer, drawn by each other’s nihilistic sense of self-destruction, start an intensely violent sexual relationship that leaves the narrator feeling rejected and reminiscent of his childhood relationship with his parents.

Durden’s third job, soap manufacturing, involves stealing liposuctioned human fat--which Durden explains has an ideal salt balance for soap--from medical waste dumps and boiling it for the tallow. Durden also describes, in considerable detail, how the layer of glycerin that develops on the surface of the tallow can be mixed with other chemicals to create nitroglycerin and dynamite. “With enough soap,” Durden says, “you could blow up just about anything.” True to form, Durden sells his soap at twenty dollars a bar to upscale department stores, causing the narrator to remark, “We were selling rich women’s fat asses back to them.”

The narrator’s sense of rejection, meanwhile, is worsened when Durden forms “Project Mayhem,” a quasi-militaristic prankster and misinformation front comprised of the more ardent members of fight club. The members of Project Mayhem move in with the narrator and Durden, turning their house into a self-sustaining headquarters where they plot the downfall of Western civilization. While the subsequent terrorist activities of Project Mayhem are concerned with material icons and not “traditional” terrorist targets such as political or popular figures, slain members of Project Mayhem are nonetheless regarded as martyrs and Durden murders several enemies of Project Mayhem in the novel.

The story is supercharged with total rebellion when the members of Project Mayhem start a massive campaign that involves spray-painting and setting fire to the facades of office buildings, destroying coffee bars and corporate art, blowing up retail store displays, erasing cassettes at video rentals with an electromagnet, vandalizing cars, rigging tire spikes in parking lots, defacing billboards, trashing television antennas, replacing airline safety cards with fake ones that depict people fighting for oxygen masks and planes crashing in flames, excrement catapults and more.

Durden’s role, meanwhile, is increasingly that of a demagogue. At the start of each session of fight club he rouses member support with inspirational speeches that now seethe with disillusionment aimed directly at the salvation myth. A primary example of is when Durden says in the film:

Man, I’ve seen in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars...We’re the middle children of history, man; no purpose or place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression...is our lives. We’ve all been raised by television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won’t, and we’re slowly learning that fact, and we’re very, very pissed off.

As Project Mayhem approaches its climax and final actualization, tensions worsen between Durden and the narrator, and eventually sparking several confrontations. The narrator accuses Durden of neglecting him and taking Project Mayhem too far. Durden tells the narrator to forget what he knows about their friendship, and after the narrator is nearly killed when Durden crashes a car he is driving with the narrator inside (in the novel, a mechanic almost crashes it), Durden leaves to set up chapters of Project Mayhem and fight club in other major cities. While Durden finds recruits for his spiritual war, the narrator wanders ghost-like around his house, drunk and largely ignored by cadres of an increasingly regimented Project Mayhem. Senior members take up Durden’s role in his absence, spouting bits of Durden’s dogma while running new fight clubs and training incoming cadets.

Project Mayhem culminates in the film with the controlled demolition of the headquarters of major credit card companies across America, an act that will supposedly erase the debt record and create economic chaos. In the novel, the plan is to blow up a skyscraper so that it crashes on and demolishes the museum of natural history across the street in order to destroy the relics of civilization. The narrator, meanwhile, slowly rises from a confused haze and recovers enough from the car crash to catch wind of Durden’s plans, and races across the country to stop him. While chasing Durden, however, the narrator discovers that he and Durden are in reality the same person. Durden is actually a manifestation of the narrator’s personality that takes control while the narrator is sleeping. When the narrator is awake, Durden is a hallucination that the narrator invents of himself. The impact of this realization devastates the narrator, who attempts to turn himself into the police to protect the world from the other side of his personality. The police who question him, however, are also members of Project Mayhem and have already been given instructions by Durden for them to stop the narrator / himself if he interferes with his plans. The narrator manages to escape from the police station and runs to one of the targeted buildings to disarm the bomb, but is stopped by Durden, who beats the narrator senseless then forces him to the top of the building at gunpoint.

The final confrontation between Durden and the narrator occurs in both stories just moments before the explosions are set to begin. The narrator, who finally comes to grips with the horrific realization that Durden is a manifestation of his own self-destructive urges, mentally weans the gun away from Durden and says in the film, “I want you to really listen to me. My eyes are open,” just before shooting himself in the face. The narrator survives with his left cheek reduced to a ragged hole. Durden disappears, and the narrator’s personality is unified. The narrator, who tried to reconcile with Signer just before turning himself into the police, completes the process by taking her hand just as office towers start exploding in the distance.

Technology, the Salvation Myth and Heroic Sacrifice:

The anti-technological philosophies of Durden and his cohorts are explicit in the story during its anti-capitalist dialogue, but the importance of humanity’s relationship to technology is a deeper underpinning that forms the impetus of Project Mayhem. Durden’s spiritual war, in this sense, is a confrontation between the ideals of heroic sacrifice and the salvation myth.

For example, in what is perhaps the most telling and most important sequence of the entire story, Durden explains how soap was discovered when an ancient culture found that their clothes got cleaner if they washed them at a specific point in the river. On a hill above that spot, Durden explains, the same people burned human sacrifices. The melted fat of the sacrifices mixed with lye that was formed from a solution of rain water and wood ash from the pyres. The combination created a thick discharge that made its way down the river in the form of soap. Durden is so enamored by this historical association of pain and human sacrifice with the act of cleansing that he says of the discovery of soap, “It was right to kill all those people” (77). During this sequence, Durden deliberately burns the narrator’s hand with a solution of lye. The narrator, in agony, attempts to utilize guided meditation techniques he learned in his support groups to control the pain. Durden recognizes what the narrator is doing and chides him, “This is the greatest moment of your life...and you’re off somewhere missing it” (77). The importance of the recognition of the uplifting value of sacrifice is even more explicit in the film when Durden says, “The first soap was made from the ashes of heroes, like the first monkey shot into space. Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing.”

The theme of heroic sacrifice is hardly new. Indeed, as famed mythologist Joseph Campbell asserts, the idea of heroic sacrifice is one of the oldest, most universal myths of human culture (3-24). What is novel about Fight Club, however, is the myth-destroying nature of postmodern society. Prior to the development of postmodern technology--which Merelman identifies as starting with the proliferation of nuclear weapons and genetic science in the 1950s--Merelman argues that modernist technologies fostered myths that replaced “ideological fanaticism” with an interactive, “scientifically calculated application of power” (par. 41). Postmodern society, however, has bastardized the interactive element to the point where most Americans do not relate to technology on an intrapersonal level. Members of Western society are forced to interact with technology to the point of utter dependence, but few understand how technology actually works (par. 57-64). The closest relationship most humans in a postmodern society can achieve with the technological products they use are those that are vaguely defined as “user friendly.”

In such an environment, humanity appears to have lost control of its ability to direct its own development and discover or deal with the concept of salvation. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, in their seminal work, The Social Construction of Reality, define this sense of loss as “reification,” the perception of human-based phenomena as objective things outside of human control (89). In other words, reification is a description of the postmodern phenomenon of technology being viewed, not as a tool for human use, but as a distinct entity that one must reconcile with or face destruction. People who have difficulties with understanding and using computers, for example, will frequently ascribe all computers with malicious human personalities and will mutter phrases like, “Computer are taking over the world.” One only has to look to the “insane” computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey or the robots of the Terminator series and The Matrix to see reification in film. Reification in postmodern society is engendered when most people find themselves at the mercy of machines they cannot fix, food they cannot grow or raise, clothes they cannot make, and so on. Survival in such circumstances is possible only when one learns to operate the countless and complex tools now required just to live. The effect of this scenario is twofold. In one respect, postmodern society has unhinged most cultural understanding of the individual human’s place in the universe. Humans are no longer the children of God (or any gods), nor are they the directors of their own fates as the thinkers of the Enlightment once believed. Rather, they are individual entities loosely bonded by disintegrating concepts of family, church and society. The myths that once defined cultures and sustained societies for millennia, in other words, are so shattered that they no longer apply. In another respect, the de-socializing nature of postmodern society prevents groups of people from coming together and understanding, on a cultural level, the nature, mechanics, and values of the tools and ideas they use to survive. Rather than a cooperative effort to imbue technological applications with any localized morality, capitalist-driven competition rules the day. To put it another way, the emphasis is not on the significance of the water well to the town, but rather on who can use it the most efficiently and extract the most water. In colloquial terms, the situation is analogous to close-knit communities versus an “every man for himself” mentality.

In this vision of postmodern society, the only group organizations that survive are primarily corporate and governmental. However, Jerry Mander, a director of the Public Media Center organization and ardent opponent of corporate globalization, notes that while corporations are comprised of humans they are inherently amoral (“Eleven...” par. 8-12). As such, culture is defined by entities driven by profit growth through homogenization but not by cultural advancement (par. 1-4). The temporal result of the dominance of corporate culture, Mander claims, is a world where “soon, everyplace will look and feel like every place else...there’ll scarcely be a reason ever to leave home” (“Dark Side...” par. 6). Even proponents of globalization admit its homogenizing tendencies. Robert Holton, a sociology professor at Flinders University of South Australia, claims that the complexities of regional cultures will successfully prevent the bleak vision of a homogenized world, but nonetheless recognizes that globalized culture “exhibits high levels of convergence around market-driven capitalism” (par. 34). The mythology that results from a largely homogenized corporate culture is one that holds that consumerist, medical and military technologies are the only means of spiritual fulfillment. The “truly happy” person, under this view, is the one who achieves upward mobility and garners the most material possessions. Fight Club’s narrator, for instance, was the precise model of this image before his insomnia and the explosion of his condo. While lip service is still paid to deeper spiritual and cultural values, the wild success and popularity of “self-manipulation” through self-help programs and “cosmetic alteration of the self” through plastic surgery and tattooing suggests otherwise (Merelman par. 58). Cultural introspection, however, is incapable of generating a viable society. In the film, Durden adroitly captures the postmodern sense of introversion and inverts it when he asserts, “Self-improvement is masturbation.”

In a postmodern society where cultural myths are replaced with corporate-sponsored messages and mass communication, the individual is split and torn between a social, public vision of the self and a private, intrapersonal vision. Pacey elaborates on this concept and notes that the absence of unified values creates the paradox of postmodern distrust of technology and the concurrent total dependence upon it (120). In Fight Club, this dichotomy is echoed on all levels of self-awareness, especially in terms of disjointed social values. While Berger and Luckmann argue for the psychological necessity of “habitualization” that can be found in the institution (53), Palahniuk argues that current societal modes of habitualization are inherently dangerous. In this respect, Palahniuk says he was influenced by the power-relationship theories of Michel Foucault. Of Fight Club, Palahniuk says:

We really have no freedom about creating our identities, because we are trained to want what we want. What is it going to take to break out and establish some modicum of freedom, despite all the cultural training that’s been our entire existence? It’s about doing the things that are completely forbidden, that we are trained to not want to do (qtd. in Jenkins par.11).

The resulting contradiction of Durden’s personality is best seen in terms of political constructs. At one end of the spectrum, Durden is an extreme neo-Marxist working to bring about complete and utter parity among the working class to the point where members of Project Mayhem are referred to only as “space monkeys” and have no identity outside of the collective. On the other extreme, Durden is an anarchist who is constantly working against, as Palahniuk notes, every cultivated value in corporate society. Durden is fascinated with and revels in the forbidden. In the film, Durden constantly reminds his “space monkeys” that they are “not a beautiful or unique snowflake,” while simultaneously trumping the power of the individual will and heroic sacrifice. The contradiction, however, is resolved through the way in which Durden’s philosophy is applied. According to Steven Marcus, nineteenth-century author Matthew Arnold defines two types of anarchy in his work Culture and Anarchy (par. 1-2). The first, “spiritual anarchy,” is the result of laissez-faire economic forms and rampant religious sectarianism through the rise of the Protestant church. The second, “social anarchy,” is regarded as the teleological end of modern democracy. Durden, then, can be viewed as a spiritual Marxist and a social anarchist.

In his role as a spiritual Marxist, Durden looks to mostly extinct traditions of the heroic, which is in turn found in the symbols of passage from one world to the next. As such, both fight club and Project Mayhem are full of initiation rites (Leach 77). Fight club, for example, requires first-time members to fight, while to be initiated into Project Mayhem, members must prove their dedication by waiting on the front porch of Durden’s house for three days without food, shelter or encouragement. Furthermore, new Project Mayhem members shed their possessions and clothing, shave off their hair, burn group leaders’ hands with lye, and so on. The result is that members are freed from associations with the old social order and brought wholly under Durden’s dominion. In the film, the narrator also identifies the power of Durden’s presence when he refers to Project Mayhem as “Planet Tyler.”

What fuels Durden’s obsession with the heroic is ultimately the sort of communal structure that is believed to have existed before the establishment of private property and government. In the film, Durden makes a remark to the narrator that is a veiled confession to blowing up his condo, “The liberator who has destroyed my property has realigned my perception.” Durden goes on to encourage the narrator to “reject the basic assumption of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.” Durden, therefore, dreams of a pastoral utopia where small, independent communities share a complete and total mythological and value system that is centralized around the development and use of technology that all members can understand. This is a throwback to Merelman’s argument that modernist society allowed for individual creative expression through the understanding and tinkering with technological inventions. In the novel, Durden describes this vision in messianic terms, “It’s Project Mayhem that’s going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover” (125). Durden’s final goal is further explicated when Durden says:

Like fight club does with clerks and box boys, Project Mayhem will break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world.
Imagine...stalking elk past department store windows...you’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you’ll climb up...and the air will be so clean you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles (125).

The key to achieving Durden’s dream is not just simple revolution, but rather total social anarchy. Durden rejects the Hobbesian view that humans are dependent on government and seeks to abolish the state through the destruction of corporate culture and private property (Rutten par.2). Durden believes that social order will be reestablished through small, independent communities. Durden, therefore, would argue with liberal philosophers like John Locke, who believed that the state was a better alternative than anarchy. When viewed from a latter-day post-apocalyptic scenario, Locke’s fears are rooted in visions of neo-Darwinian conflict for physical supremacy among roving gangs of warring tribes (par. 16-18). Although not explicitly stated in the novel or the film, Durden would likely counter the liberal view by pointing out that what is considered anarchy today functioned perfectly well for humans for millennia before the development of government. Liberalism, therefore, is still derived in part from the Hobbesian view of humanity. In this sense, Durden has completely reversed Hobbes’ theory of humankind. Rather than the “brutish” nature of humans necessitating government, government actually causes humans to be brutish. The true aim of Durden’s apocalyptic fantasies, then, is not the final destruction of technology but rather the eradication of “civilized” history. Note that in the novel Durden’s real target of destruction is a museum across the street from the building he plans to blow up. Durden’s plan in the novel, in many respects, is misguided and simplistic. Vast amounts of recorded history will still exist no matter how many museums Durden destroys, but the symbolic significance of the museum reveals Durden’s understanding that his vision cannot be achieved unless history is erased. It is within this reversal of the Hobbesian dynamic that Durden’s contradictions are fully unified. The triumph of social anarchy, in other words, would automatically generate spiritual Marxism and hence unify both the self and humanity’s relationship to the natural world.

Project Mayhem, as a social movement, is ultimately born from the schizophrenic dichotomy of the narrator’s personality and his sense of self-loathing and frustration. As Eric Hoffer, author of The True Believer, notes, “The estrangement from the self, which is a precondition for both plasticity and conversion, almost always proceeds in an atmosphere of intense passion” (84). The narrator, if he is nothing else, is the quintessential figure of intrapersonal estrangement. Hoffer also argues that a fanatic is one with a “single-minded dedication” that actually represents someone who is “holding on for dear life” (85). This is readily palpable in both the novel and the film in the narrator’s desperate search for a father figure. Throughout the story the narrator obsesses on the absence of father figures in his life to the point where he invents a father in the form of Tyler Durden. Durden, however, is a father figure only to the extent that he guides the narrator towards the discovery of characteristics in his personality he has always possessed but has never been able to actualize. The narrator, unable to fully realize his whole personality for most of the story, temporarily aborts the process when he rebels against Project Mayhem. The narrator’s simultaneous adoration and revulsion of the Durden-half of his personality only serves to stoke his self-hatred even further, which is evident in his scapegoating of Marla Singer as a despoiler. The narrator, whose parents divorced when he was six, has shifted his own sense of guilt for the dissolution of his family by blaming his mother, a process which he reenacts with Durden and Singer. The fact that the narrator actually is Durden, futhermore, would be regarded by both Campbell and Sigmund Freud as a postmodern retelling of the Oedipus myth (7). The narrator harbors feelings for Singer, but is unable to fully realize those feelings until he is prepared to destroy Durden. When the characters of the narrator and Durden are viewed as one person, therefore, the narrator’s self-hatred is born from his inability to maintain a stable family and his subsequent quest for meaning through the salvation myth. Durden’s formation of Project Mayhem, then, is an extension of the narrator’s own fury, a culture-wide reenactment of the struggle within himself.

The psychological impetus behind the narrator’s construction of Durden and the formation of Project Mayhem is important to understanding why the protagonists of Fight Club vent most of their rage on technology. At one point in the story the narrator describes how his biological father would marry a woman, sire children with her, then divorce and move onto another woman with whom he would repeat the process. Durden follows a similar pattern when he abandons the narrator to start new chapters of fight club and Project Mayhem. The narrator finally begins to make the connection when he says in the film, “I’m all alone. My father dumped me. Tyler dumped me.” The “space monkeys” that Durden leaves behind can be viewed, therefore, as the spiritual equivalent of the real-life half brothers he will never see. It is also important to note here that while fight club is open to any males, the members are predominately drawn from the same social pool where the narrator existed at the beginning of the film. Durden refers to them as “a generation of men raised by women,” and describes them again as “slaves with white collars.” The members of fight club and Project Mayhem, furthermore, once believed in the salvation myth as the narrator did, and, as Hoffer would argue, joined both organizations out similar feelings of intense disillusionment.

The narrator’s search for a father figure ultimately results in the creation of Tyler Durden, but within Durden is the narrator’s ability to transcend the need for a father, a fact which results in the existentialist nature of Durden’s Weltanschauung. In the soap-making sequence of the film, Durden exclaims as lye melts the skin on the narrator’s hand:

Our fathers were our models for god. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God? Listen to me. You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you; he never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen. We don’t need him. Fuck damnation, man. Fuck redemption. We are God’s unwanted children? So be it!

The denial of the father, the denial of God, and the symbolic brotherhood of Project Mayhem relate to the salvation myth of technology because in a postmodern society, technology has replaced the traditional standard of the family. Postmodern technology is the new god, the new brotherhood, the new standard of safety and security, and consequently the new myth of society. The new myth, however, is a catastrophic cultural development, the duplicity of which the narrator has been trapped in for most of his adult life. In the film, for example, Durden refers to an airline safety card as “the illusion of safety,” while the narrator’s job as a recall coordinator forces him to evaluate the monetary value of human lives when products his company manufactures fail to work and result in car crashes. Furthermore, as the narrator learns, no tools or conveniences, however interactive, can truly mimic the real value of human interaction. The final, subconscious aim of the narrator is actually a quest to return to the realm of familial interaction where he believes he once failed. Once there, he can abandon the salvation myth forever. Project Mayhem, therefore, is not only an extension of the narrator’s rage but also a messianic need to save everyone in the world from the salvation myth.

The narrator’s quest, in mythological terms, is a heroic one. Throughout much of history, the advancement of technological knowledge has been a process of pain and sacrifice. The heroes were not necessarily those who invented the technology, but rather those, like the human sacrifices of a long forgotten civilization, who made the technology possible. The narrator’s decent into the darkest self-destructive realms of his psyche is, as Campbell notes, a heroic journey into a mythological hell to save humanity. The narrator’s quest, meanwhile, is novel due to its postmodern context. In Fight Club, the true salvation of humanity can only be achieved when current society’s salvation myth is destroyed. To destroy the salvation myth, the history of the culture that produced it must first be eradicated. The protagonists’ obsession with “hitting bottom” is the liberating sacrifice, the antithesis of the salvation myth that will make it possible to erase history. Campbell notes that all heroic quests feature some boon that the hero will bring back from the depths to save society (173-92). In the postmodern world of Fight Club, however, the boon is the cataclysmic collapse of society in order to save humanity itself. The personal sacrifice of the narrator to achieve this end occurs when he embraces both his self-destructive urges and his father figure with a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. It is at the moment when the narrator pulls the trigger that his reconciliation with his father is complete. In Project Mayhem, the amoral fathers and false gods of postmodern technology are the literal enemies. The sacrifices of the members of Project Mayhem are sacrifices made for us all. In sum, the protagonists of Fight Club are truly anti-Christ figures in that they seek to redeem the world on a temporal scale; there is no salvation in the afterlife of Durden’s vision of the universe. The only salvation is to found here and now, in the world we live in, and the boons Project Mayhem brings are the very seeds of society’s destruction. As the narrator says, early in the film, “Fight club was mine and Tyler’s gift to the world.”

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Copyright © 2000 - Christian McKinney