Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia

"Fight Club", Self-Definition, and the Fragility of Authenticity

Author(s): WILLIAM IRWIN
Source: Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, T. 69, Fasc. 3/4 (2013), pp. 673-684
Published by: Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia
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 Fight Club, Self-Definition,
and the Fragility of Authenticity
WILLIAM IRWIN*

Resumo

Visto por urna lente existencial, o filme Fight Club impele-nos a criar um auténtico
Porém, também nos adverte que a criaçâo de um auténtico self é algo que só podemos
por nós mesmos. A definitiva ironía no filme Fight Club é que, num esforço por rej
sociedade e cultivar a individualidade, as pessoas acabam por se conformar a um cu
aos seus ditames. A liçâo é que a autenticidade é frágil, fácilmente esmagada e fácilm
rendida. No final do filme, o protagonista, oferece-nos esperança, ainda que seja para
tornarmos auto-conscientes e lutar contra as forças que nos procuram subjugar.

Palavras-chave : autenticidade, consumismo, existencialismo, Fight Club, Nietzsche, vi

Abstract

Viewed through an existential lens, Fight Club urges us to create an authentic self, but it also
cautions us that the creation of an authentic self is something we can only do for ourselves.
The ultimate irony in Fight Club is that in an effort to reject society and cultivate individuality,
people end up conforming to a cult and its dictates. The clear lesson is that authenticity is
fragile, easily crushed and easily surrendered. By the end of the movie, the protagonist at
least offers us hope, though, that we can become self-aware and fight back against the forces
that seek to subjugate us.

Keywords : addiction, authenticity, consumerism, existentialism, Fight Club, Nietzsche

m T ight Club depicts an existential crisis, its cause, a unique solution,

ri and a misguided development. The story deals with broken
JL promises, or at least implicit promises, from God, from fathers,
indeed from anyone who tells us he or she has the answers we need.
Viewed through an existential lens, Fight Club cautions us that the création
of an authentic self is something we can only do for ourselves. Beware the
person who says he or she can do it for you.

King's College, williamirwin@kings.edu

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674 William Irwin

The dead God and the absent Father

In The Gay Science Nietzsche's madman declares to a crowd in

marketplace that God is dead. Frustrated by their lack of appréciation
compréhension, he throws down his lantern and concludes that his
has not yet come, that his message was not for these ears.1 The madma
déclaration is not a statement of Gods nonexistence, but rather Gods
obsolescence. God is dead. He may or may not exist, but he is certainly
irrelevant. He cannot solve our problems; we need a new solution.
In his bestseller, Iron John: A Book About Men, the poet Robert Bly
renewed interest in the Iron John fairytale in which the prince must steal
the key from his mother to free Iron John. The prince needs the iron man,
the wild man covered in rust-colored hair, to encourage him to take the
bold action. Fight Club, though, does not feature a confrontation with a
mother figure for freedom. Instead, fathers are blamed. It is his father who
Tyler Durden says he would like to fight if given the chance. The following
dialogue ensues:

Jack :2 I didn't know my dad. Well, I knew him, till I was six. He went
and married another woman, had more kids. Every six years
or so he'd do it. Again - new city, new family.
Tyler : He was setting up franchises. My father never went to college,
so it was really important that I go.
t...]
Tyler: After I graduated, I called him long distance and asked,
"Now what?" He said, "Get a job." When I turned twenty-five,
I called him and asked "Now what?" He said, "I don't know.
Get married."

Jack: Samehere.

Tyler: A génération of men raised by women. I'm wond

another woman is the answer we really need.

If their mothers, despite their best efforts, made th

domesticated, then a wife would likely just complete the job.
"I can't get married - I'm a thirty-year-old boy." The dra

1. Nietzsche, Friedrich - The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New

1974, pp. 181-182, section 125.
2. Though technically the character remains nameless, it has become c
call him Jack.

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 Fight Club, Self-Definition, and the Fragility of Authenticity 675

parental, though, it is cosmic. We are God's forgotten children. God is

depicted as an uncaring, absentee father, like Jacks father who starts a
new family franchise every six years in a new city. In that sense God is
dead. Tyler makes it explicit in Freudian terms, saying, "Our fathers were
our models for God. And, if our fathers bailed, what does that tell us about
God?" Like the pronouncement of Nietzsches madman, this realization
is awful, ugly, and shocking, but it also contains the seeds of good news:
we are free. Tyler says, "Listen to me. You have to consider the possibility
that God doesn't like you, he never wanted you. In all probability, he hates
you. This is not the worst thing that can happen." In more vulgar and
blasphemous language, Tyler echoes his own sentiment, saying, "Fuck
damnation. Fuck rédemption. We are God's unwanted children, with no
special place and no special attention, and so be it."
The title of Nietzsches book The Gay Science, Die Fröhliche Wissen
schaft, is sometimes translated less literally as The Joyful Wisdom.
This translation reflects the hope that the madman offers, namely that the
death of God is a great opportunity in which we can rejoice in the power
of our own responsibility and creativity. The concern, though, is that we
will not have that bold reaction, but will instead sink into nihilism, filling
the void in dubious ways, much as Jack does with his catalogue purchases.
Of course Jacks catalogue purchases predate his realization of the death
of God, but this is very much like the people in the town that the madman
visits, who are living in the wake of the death of God though they do not
realize it.

Consumerism as the opium of the people

When Marx called religion the opium of the people he was saying that
it is not surprising that in the misery of a capitalist world people would
turn to religion for comfort.3 It is no more surprising that they would find
comfort in religion than that other people find comfort in a drug. Opium
works; it takes away the pain, at least for a time. Likewise, religion works,
telling people that the suffering of this world ultimately does not matter
because there is a better world to corne. In fact, those who suffer in this
world will be rewarded in the world to come.
A key existentialist insight is that meaning is not given from above,
not from God, and not from a father. It is created. But if it is not self
created, then someone else will be all too glad to supply it. When we meet

3. Marx, Karl -Early Writings, trans. T.B. Bottomore. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963,
p. 43.

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676 William Irwin

Jack he is not going to church services, though he is going to

meetings in church basements. He has not become addicted to
of the people, nor has he become addicted to actual opiates. He has
become addicted to recovery meetings. This is his strange way
with the emptiness resulting from the failure of his primary
consumerism, to fill the void.
Comically, Jack tells us in deadpan voiceover, "Like everyo
I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct." and "I flipped
catalogs and wondered: What kind of dining set defines me as
Jack is pathetic. He is not a man, and Tyler helps him to realize i
exchange:

Tyler : Do you know what a duvet is?

Jack : It s a comforter ...

Tyler: It s a blanket. Just a blanket. Now why do guys like you and
me know what a duvet is? Is this essential to our survival, in
the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then?
Jack: ... Consumers?

Tyler : Right. We are consumers. We're the bi-products of a lifesty

obsession.

Jacks consumerism is so complete that it has him buying stuff that

man should care about. He is not buying sports cars and electronics an
power tools, but instead duvets and sofas and dinettes. Tyler sums it u
saying, "The things you own, they end up owning you." Like any addictio
consumerism demands more and more while it succeeds in filling the void
less and less. Tyler diagnoses their condition in the following way:

Tyler: Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs

we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle
children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no
Great War. No Great Dépression. Our Great Wars a spiritual
war... our Great Dépression is our lives. We've ail been raised
on televisión to believe that one day we'd ail 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.

Tyler's prescribed treatment for the affliction of meaninglessness an

consumerism is straightforward: "Reject the basic assumptions of
civilization, especially the importance of material possessions."

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 Fight Club, Self-Définition, and the Fragility of Authenticity 677

Freedom and hitting bottom

Conventional wisdom has it that people must hit bottom before they
are willing to take the actions necessary for recovery from addiction.
The twelve steps go against natural inclinations; they require a sense of
desperation, a sense that this is one's last chance. There is hope, though,
because it is only by hitting bottom, by completely burning out, that the
phoenix can rise from the ashes.
But what about people who don't have a drug addiction or a fatal
disease? What about people who have simply realized that the life they have
been living is a meaningless lie? Where can they go? Quite fortuitously,
Jack goes to a cancer survivors meeting at his doctors jesting suggestion,
and he finds that he gets relief. Jack experiences catharsis vicariously, not
through movies or plays as Aristotle would suggest, but through witnessing
real human drama. Humorously, Jack tells us "I became addicted." But Jack
is, as he calis Maria, "a tourist". Really, he needs a cure for what ails him
personally, a meaningless life of consumerism and conformism. And so,
with his alter ego, Tyler, Jack ups the ante by putting himself in the conflict,
by experiencing conflict and struggle firsthand in the form of the fight.
Jack encapsulâtes Tyler's philosophy as aimed at developing "the
ability to let that which does not matter truly slide". Jack had glimpsed
that kind of freedom at his first testicular cancer meeting, saying, "I found
freedom. Losing ail hope was freedom." The appeal of this approach is
reflected in Jacks power animal, the penguin who says "slide" as he slips
down the ice. In the midst of the rat race and the struggle to keep up with
the Joneses, there is something highly attractive about this conception of
freedom. The old song has it that "freedom's just another word for nothin'
left to lose" ("Me and Bobby McGee"). Addicts and alcoholics find that
they cannot do what it takes to get sober and stay sober until they have
hit bottom - until they have virtually "nothin' left to lose". As Fight Club
depicts it, we are trapped by our possessions - we don't own them, they
own us. We work to pay for them; we work jobs that we do not like, jobs
in which we put up with crap, because things own us. There is some real
attraction to dropping out and living off the grid, in saying "I will no longer
be a slave to consumer desires." But it is not an easy solution. As Tyler
says, "Hitting bottom isn't a weekend retreat! It 's not a seminar! You have
to forget everything you know, everything you think you know - about life,
about friendship, about you and me."
In the context of the movie, the last phrase, "about you and me" is
crucial. It turns out that Tyler is Jack, and he/they had set the fire that

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578 William Irwin

burned down the condominium

improvement is masturbatio
as confirmed by the text of
answer".
The desired alternative to masturbation is actual sex, which is not its
opposite. By contrast, self-improvement and self-destruction are nearly
opposites. Masturbation is a substitute for sex, but self-improvement is not
obviously a substitute for self-destruction. Maybe self-improvement is a
denial of death, an attempt to put off death, to experience oneself as making
something of life, of improving and extending life, whereas self-destruction
brings one into close proximity with death. Paradoxically, a brush with
death is, as Tyler describes it, "a near-life experience". The self-destructive
behaviors of addicts may bring them into close contact with death, and
sometimes they actually die. This is part of what is attractive to Jack and
Maria about the recovery meetings. Many of the people at the meetings are
looking at death or have looked at death and are reacting to it. Though it is
never stressed, there is a real possibility of death in fight club. The losing
fighter can tap out and surrender, but there is no guarantee that he will
do so before the damage is done. It is a "near-life experience" every time.

Self-defrnition

A number of great singers and musicians died at 27 : Jimi Hendrix,

Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Robert Johnson, Kurt Cobain,
and Amy Winehouse among them. Most were drug addicts and/or
alcoholics who attempted to ease their pain through their chosen forms
of self-medication. Though he enjoys a beer and a cigarette, Jack does not
appear to have the prédisposition for substance abuse. He has survived
the 27-trap, but at 30, the age when Jésus began his ministry, Jack is still a
boy in most ways, without a clear sense of what it means to be a man. His
father was largely absent from his life and the culture has defined a "man"
in some weak, domesticated, metrosexual way that he adopted for a time
but which he has now come to reject. His self-searching is precipitated
by his insomnia, a sign that something is nagging at him deep-down and
will not let him rest. Like Neo in The Matrix, he has a splinter in his mind
driving him mad, a sense that something is not quite right about the
world. There is no happiness or fulfillment to be found in just mindlessly
following the prescribed path of college, career, marriage, kids...
The recovery meetings relieve Jack's insomnia for a time, but then
Maria shows up. She ruins Jack's self-deception at the meetings, and so he

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 Fight Club, Self-Définition, and the Fragility of Authenticity 679

expériences insomnia again. As he says, "Maria - the big tourist. Her lie
reflected my lie." Thanks to Maria, Jack engages in an even more intricate
self-deception, inventing Tyler Durden. Jacks job is cold and calculating,
assessing the risks involved with manufacturing flaws in his company's
cars. What is the risk, the percentage of cars that will have the problem?
What is the cost of the average out of court settlement in case of a problem?
What would be the cost of doing a recall on the car? He does not enjoy his
work but it does seem to pay well, as it finances his condo and furniture
and clothes, all of which he is inordinately fond of.
People are conspicuously absent from Jack s life - there is no mention
of friends or relatives. He is always on the go, always flying from one city
to the next for his company. We can imagine that he liked the lifestyle
when he started his job. As a young man just out of college, he likely feit
important being sent by his company to fly to different cities and stay
in nice hotels. He has grown weary and jaded, though, remarking how
everything is single-serving: single-serving butter, single-serving cream,
plastic-wrapped little soaps and shampoo bottles. He calis the people he
meets on his plane trips single-serving friends. When Tyler impresses him
with his oddity and freshness, Jack remarks that he is the most interesting
single-serving friend he has ever had. Getting no reaction, Jack begins
to explain what he means. Tyler stops him, saying that he gets it, it's
very clever, and asks "how's that working out for you?" The truth is that
being clever is not working out so well for Jack. It may have provided a
buffer and a sense of superiority at one point, but it does not seem to any
longer. The irony and hyper-irony that let him feel superior to his job and
possessions really are not doing the trick any longer. So he has now met
Tyler, his alter ego, who will offer him an alternative. Getting up to leave
Jack, Tyler remarks that "We are defined by the choices we make." Tyler
then seats himself in first class while Jack just watches.
With nowhere to go after his condo burns down, Jack calis Tyler to
meet for a drink. After three pitchers of beer, prompted by Tyler, Jack finally
asks Tyler if he can stay with him for the night. Tyler assents but counters
with a strange request. He wants Jack to hit him. Incredulous, Jack refuses
at first, but Tyler explains "I dont want to die without any scars. How
much can you really know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?"
This theme of knowing yourself and defining yourself through struggle and
opposition echoes through the rest of the film. Later, in a rousing speech,
Tyler tells the men of fight club, "You're not your job. You're not how
much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're
not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the
all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world." Unfortunately, though, Jack

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680 William Irwin

does not really come to know himself. He doesn't even know th

Tyler. And what begins as a quest for individual identity leads to th
individual identity in Project Mayhem.
The reason for fighting is not personal animus. One s opponent i
club is never a man against whom one has a grudge or with whom o
a problem. It is just someone randomly assigned. There is no trash t
no sense of the other as a rival or opponent, as in professional
The value of the fight seems to come in the risk that each man is t
He is exposing himself to bodily harm, pushing himself in a kind o
experience. It is better to win than to lose, but there is no shame in
and no great glory in winning. There is, though, a bond and cam
among the men, and perhaps especially between two men who h
fought, but there is no special friendship. Jack explains that "fi
wasn't about winning or losing. It wasn't about words. The hy
shouting was in tongues, like at a Pentecostal Church".
Everyone wants to win, but losing seems to be just as valuable.
purposely loses the fight to the bar owner, Lou, and just Iets Lou p
him. Then he gets in Lou's face, dripping and spitting blood on
runs away scared and Iets them continue using the basement of his
fight. Tyler gives the rest of fight club a homework assignment: go
start a fight with a stranger and lose. This turns out to be comical,
the funniest scenes in the movie. No one wants to fight - most me
anything to avoid being drawn into a physical confrontation. Of co
mission would be self-defeating if the men started fights and then t
their opponents - that would just reinforce their opponents' ave
fighting. By losing, though, presumably they give their opponents t
of the fight, perhaps getting them in touch with their primal selves
In civilization we are obliged to repress our violent impulses
as we are obliged to repress our sexual impulses. We are thus walkin
bombs of repression. The homework assignment of starting and
fight can help the targets feel the relief of giving in to their violent
But is that really a good thing? Do we really want people to give in
violent impulses? By way of comparison, consider that even th
might want people to be freer in expressing their sexuality, we do n
people to feel free to grope others. Fight club literally provides an a
the expression of violent impulses. It is cathartic. While the men
bruised and scarred physically, they feel better emotionally. Since
of violence occur between consenting adults, who could object? L
we might applaud free acts of sexual expression between conse
adults, including Tyler and Maria. And we might say that the more

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 Fight Club, Self-Définition, and the Fragility of Authenticity 681

expression we have, the better. People in general will be happier and there
will be a spillover effect that benefits society.
Increasing sexual freedom leads to a flourishing of different forms
of sexual expression. Likewise, we would hope and imagine that the
increased freedom of self-definition in fight club would lead to a flourishing
of different forms of personal expression. But, sadly, such is not the case,
because Tyler turns megalomaniacal. His initial impulse seems noble
and understandable, reject consumerism and consumer society. As he
says, "Fuck off with your sofa units and strine green stripe patterns, I say
never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let... let's evolve, Íet
the chips fall where they may." Tyler calis for a return to the primitive,
both psychologically for the individual and culturally for the group - a
call to resist the civilizing tendency of consumerism. Jack has rejected
consumerism and the soulless job that he worked in order to fund his
consumerist lifestyle, moving in with Tyler. Remarking on life in the house
on Paper Street, Jack says, "By the end of the first month, I didn't care
about TV. I didn't mind the warm, stale refrigerator." And Tyler introduces
him to a way of funding a life off the grid by stealing human fat from a
liposuction clinic and making soap out of it, thus selling rich women their
asses back to them. Likewise Maria pretty much lives outside respectable
society, stealing clothes from a laundromat to sell to a thrift store. They ail
cultívate an aesthetic of voluntary simplicity, coming to appreciate the
squalor of their dwellings and the shabbiness of their possessions.
Tyler's vision becomes extreme, though. He doesn't just want voluntaiy
simplicity, he wants enforced simplicity, indeed primitivism. As he tells
Jack,

In the world I see - you're stalking elk through the damp canyon forests
around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You will wear leather clothes
that last you the rest of your life. You will climb the wrist-thick kudzu
vines that wrap the Sears Tower. You will see tiny figures pounding corn
and laying-strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of the ruins of a
superhighway.

Tyler goes wrong in forcing his vision on others, rather than letting others
define themselves - no matter how misguided they may be. The first and
second rules of fight club are that you do not talk about fight club. This calis
to mind the policy of 12-step programs to spread through attraction, not
promotion. 12-step programs do not advertise through TV or newspapers.
Instead, they count on their members to be walking billboards for what
their programs have to offer, such that people are attracted to them and

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682 William Irwin

want the peace and serenity

that, at first, the members
gospel according to Tyler.
different about them, not
attitude, and they want to k
This changes, though, when
enforcing his vision and his

Power corrupts and

Tyler calis for men to se

leader who strips them of t
solution, but he becomes t
with authenticity. We each
mimicking someone else w
first move in going to figh
and combat, and in coming
make a good move in reje
définition. But what they f
what they have thrown ou
madman asked "What fest
we have to invent?"4 Destru
must follow.
Tyler has engaged in creative replacement, but he has not encouraged
his followers to do the same. By contrast, Nietzsche's Zarathustra
encourages his followers to doubt, deny, and reject him. Indeed, he says,
"One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil."5
In Tyler's/Jacks case, his students become so entranced and blindly
obedient to him, that even when he wakes up to who he is and what he
has been doing he cannot convince them that he has changed his mind.
Of course, the temptation is there to take advantage of these men who
follow. They are so grateful for his showing them a new life in fight club
that they become ready to follow him further, though in a contrary way,
into Project Mayhem.
Fight club becomes a way of life rather than just an occasional escape.
Taken to its extreme, it morphs into Project Mayhem. As so often happens,

4. Nietzsche, Friedrich - The Gay Science, ed. cit., p. 181, section 125.
5. Nietzsche, Friedrich - Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York:
Penguin, 1966, p. 78.

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 Fight Club, Self-Definition, and the Fragility of Authenticity 683

the rejection of conformity becomes its own conformity, as the men

become nameless "space monkeys", skin-headed, unquestioning, drones.
As The Who sang, "Meet the new boss, same as the oíd boss." The balance
between authenticity and inauthenticity is difficult to strike. As Jack says,
"Sooner or later, we all became what Tyler wanted us to be." Tyler goes
from making rules for fight club and yet claiming no one is in charge,
to making rules for Project Mayhem and very clearly putting himself in
charge. Power corrupts. Whereas fight club has a "question everything"
mentality, the first rule of Project Mayhem is "you do not ask questions".
Reliance upon God, or a higher power, is an integral part of 12-step
recovery, but it is absent from fight club. Instead, the men of Project
Mayhem come to rely on Tyler Durden, a deeply flawed human being.
"In Tyler we trust", as Jack says. They revere him, take his word as gospel,
and follow his orders without question. Contrast this with the convenience
store clerk who Tyler threatens at gunpoint and instructs to pursue his
dream of becoming a veterinarian. Though messed up, this is the kind of
inspiration one would hope for from Tyler, the encouragement that each
person should discover his (or her?) unique talent and goal to develop and
pursue. Instead, Tyler becomes megalomaniacal and makes each man the
same. Whereas he had enough respect for the wimpy convenience store
clerk to make him pursue his own dream, Tyler comes to have no real
respect for the bold men who come to fight club and want more. He learns
the store clerk's name, Raymond K. Hessell, whereas men in Project
Mayhem have no name (except in death when they all come to be called
Robert Paulson). Tyler breaks down their ego and sense of self in the
worst military fashion, telling them "You are not a beautiful and unique
snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
We are all part of the same compost heap." Instead of offering them true
libération, he offers them opium, the opium of belonging to a group in
which one does not have to think. He has swapped one cuit for another.

Conclusion

The ultimate aim of Project Mayhem is to destroy the credit record

so that people can start over. Tyler Durden envisions a post-apocalyptic
primitive scenario in which we live among the ruins of the towers of high
finance. But why that? Why not just continue to be the bad conscience of
society by wearing a black eye and a bloody shirt to work? Tyler is fond
of telling men "We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."
Project Mayhem is destructive without being creative. Nietzsche, by

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684 William Irwin

contrast, recognizes that we must create something to put in the

God and traditional morality. That new création must be indiv
just another enforced conformity. So the ultimate irony in Fig
that in an effort to reject society and cultívate individuality, peop
conforming to a cuit and its dictâtes. The clear lesson is that auth
is fragile, easily crushed and easily surrendered. By the end of th
Jack at least offers us hope, though, that we can become self-
fight back against the forces that seek to subjugate us.6

6. For helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article, I wish to thank Mark
Ed Costas, Kyle Johnson, Megan Lloyd, and Joe Zeccardi.

Vol. 69

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