Tyler Durden is all around – but are there two identities, or three? Unpacking the chaos, carnage and misdirection in iconic 90s thriller, Fight Club.
Edward Norton plays a guy who can’t sleep, feels nothing, and struggles to tell reality from fantasy. Scratch that: he knows when he’s awake because life is meaningless, no matter how much stuff he buys.
When he stumbles into the hidden world of trauma support, he joins every group going: brain parasites, sickle cell and testicular cancer (for starters). Being around people with a reason to cry means he can cry – and, finally, sleep.
Then Marla (Helena Bonham-Carter) steals his groove. And his apartment explodes. By the time soap salesman Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) shows up, things couldn’t get much worse.
… of course, they get worse.
Soon the two men have created an underground bare-knuckle fight club – the fight club. But their brutally liberating therapy group spirals out of control … and into anarchy.
This page explores storytelling structures and social parallels in 1999 film Fight Club, rather than Chuck Palahniuk’s source novel. Either way, I am Jack’s insatiable lust for spoilers.
What could Fight Club possibly have in common with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 romantic thriller, Rebecca? Surprisingly, quite a bit. Both are book adaptations. Each offers a twisted take on the conventional love story. And both end with the destruction of significant buildings.
Not convinced? Well, neither story fully names or reveals its protagonist, cueing up a sophisticated game of identity. Hitchcock’s film has multiples of Rebecca. In Fight Club, Tyler Durden is all around.
The three twists in Fight Club’s big reveal
Fight Club’s big reveal is that our sleepless narrator and Tyler Durden are the same person. We’ve been watching two guys bond with and beat each other up, but they’re a single, time-share character.
Like Split’s Kevin Wendell Crumb, he has dissociative identity disorder, i.e., identities that act independently of each other.
This shock reversal comes in three waves:
- The narrator learns he is Tyler Durden
- The other Tyler is a figment of his imagination
- Each personality wants very different things – and, common to stories of mirrored characters, only one of them can survive.
What’s really fascinating, though, is how this deception happens in plain sight, right in front of us. The story even signposts it several times over:
- Depending on which identity has control, no one else addresses or looks at the other personality
- Marla asks who the narrator’s talking to because she can’t see or hear the other Tyler
- Both men share the same childhood stories (“sounds familiar”)
- While beating himself up in front of his boss, the narrator remembers his first fight with Tyler. He’s telling us how to read the earlier scene
- Tyler wants him to let go of the car’s steering wheel – i.e., to give up control of their shared body.
Of course, then there’s the film’s opening scene. The narrator, with a gun in his mouth, tells us “you always hurt the one you love” and, some 120 minutes later, shoots himself.
Achievements aside, Fight Club dines out on psychosis porn, a genre which turns mental illness into a punchline for thrills and twists. Is it problematic? Hell, yeah. See Shutter Island.
The art of misdirection
“I already knew the story before he told me”
Fight Club delights in playing both sides of the record at the same time. We don’t hear the dissonance because, like the changeover of cinema reels, it happens seamlessly.
The cinema metaphor is particularly fitting, by the way. It parallels the story’s invisible changeover each time an identity takes control. It’s also a potent example of the film’s magic-by-misdirection.
Consider the mundane details that ground Tyler’ in physical reality. For instance, when the narrator needs a place to stay, but Tyler phones him back. He says he screens his calls, but it’s also impossible for an imaginary friend to answer a real phone.
Elaborate visual gags, such as the narrator’s face imprinted on Bob’s t-shirt, are pure distraction and disguise. Incidentally, like a lot of black comedy, the humour is conspiratorial. Making others the butt of the joke (Bob, fat rich women) draws us into the circle of trust.
The film is endlessly self-referential, too. There’s the “flashback humour” that connects the beginning and end, for instance, along with deliberately un-subliminal (and technically unsolicited) dick pics.
The blink-and-miss-it penis in the final scene is one of many meta moments when the movie breaks the fourth wall. It repeatedly acknowledges its own fictionality, announcing that this story is being manipulated.
When Tyler points to the corner of the screen while changing a reel, it’s an equally ‘explicit’ misdirection. We’re so busy watching the glamorous assistant that we don’t notice the magician palming the cards.
Like Shutter Island, the grand deception is a staged version of reality. The narrative’s subliminal track repeatedly flaunts the lie by showing us the literal similarities between Tyler’s personalities. But the more pertinent question is: why are they so different?
Why does Tyler show up?
“When you have insomnia, you’re never really asleep, and you’re never really awake”
Tyler’s first appearances – in ghostly, subliminal flashes – illustrate the narrator’s chronic sleep deprivation and tenuous grasp of reality.
With hindsight, it’s a rampant clue Tyler isn’t real, and the narrator can’t be trusted. After all, how often do you know what someone looks like before you see them for the first time?
Crucially, once he shows up, Tyler’s in charge. That’s the point. The narrator’s alter ego is the person he wishes he was. Hence these men aren’t just different; they’re mirror opposites:
- The narrator is beige, brand-loyal, forgettable. Tyler is king of indie cool
- Tyler gets the girl; the narrator can’t even admit he likes her
- The narrator works for a system he hates. Tyler does what he wants
- The narrator enforces rules (about product recall, and how to treat Bob after death). Tyler embraces anarchy.
In fact, these differences are one more distraction; a disguise that shields the narrator – and us – from tell-tale similarities.
As an inverted character, Tyler is both blueprint and trigger. He’s there to push the narrator out of his comfort zone (with shades of Christopher Logue’s poem, Come to the Edge).
Tyler blows up his apartment – and presumably stages the vibrating suitcase – to destroy the security (and chains) of ownership. Later, he brings him to the brink of death to make him take responsibility for his life.
When “Tyler” crashes the car, it’s a do-or-die moment … yet the narrator still can’t commit to living. It’s only when this repeats on the grandest scale in the film’s final moments that the narrator takes control of his life – by embracing death.
The first rule of fight club
“You do not talk about Tyler Durden”
When Marla boots the narrator from his freebie therapy sessions, Tyler Durden shows up to forge a replacement.
That’s what fight club is: a men-only safe space that resolves the angst of the testicular cancer group. Marla can’t worm her way in. There’s no question members are real men. And there’s no shortage of testosterone, because having balls is a state of mind.
In The Matrix, Neo ‘wakes up’ when he rejects simulated reality (in fiction, also a way of describing capitalism, consumerism and group think). Behind this beguiling, hollow world lies a grim but authentic state of existence: ‘true’ reality. Of course, the irony of Fight Club is that this is a false awakening – it’s all dream and delusion.
Still, it’s interesting how often these rebellion stories extol Puritan or pastoral ideals of hard work and subsistence, and embrace primitive danger as a sharpening tool. So it is with Project Mayhem.
As its prophet and Messiah, Tyler preaches a bare bones kind of communism. His disciples embrace simplicity, routine, arable labour … and ass-kicking. This isn’t as contradictory as it sounds; it’s one of several parallels with Shaolin monks, for instance.
Like any successful religion, recruitment is key. “You do not talk about fight club” is catchy reverse psychology – a marketing mantra for the film as much as its fictional franchise.
Similarly, new members arriving at the squat are immediately told to leave – but by staying, gain acceptance.
Crucially, like the club’s first (and second) rule, you do not talk about Tyler Durden either. Why? Because doing so breaks the illusion of anarchy and identity.
His underground organisation solves the woes of modern masculinity. In fact, the whole enterprise is stuffed with double-think.
The cult of self-help
The fight club franchise starts out as blood-soaked therapy group, but greater purpose is baked into the name. Members fight each other, then strangers and the system itself, all in pursuit of self and self-esteem.
The escalation mirrors the narrator’s battle against brain-numbing conformity and the acquisition of things. And, most of all, against himself.
The more he denies Tyler full control, the higher the stakes. What starts as solidarity with the common man spirals into a bombing campaign against credit card companies.
Tyler dresses this as noble savagery: erase the debt record, and we all go back to zero. Like destroying the narrator’s apartment, it forces a fresh start.
Capitalism strips men of rage, reason and even their testicles; fight club turns them into gods.
… or does it?
For all its counterculture credentials, this cathartic release only happens underground and in the dark. The men are gods, but can’t have names. Anarchy resembles the army. Members reject the group think of consumerism, but talk in mantras.
When Bob dies, they still don’t know how to feel. Instead, they parrot the narrator’s grief as religious precept:
“In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name: his name is Robert Paulsen. His name is Robert Paulsen. His name is Robert Paulsen.”
Eventually, things come full circle. The narrator’s job – balancing the books between profit and life – is so sickening, it paves the way for Project Mayhem. Yet when Bob dies, Tyler shrugs: “You wanna make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise a cult of extreme self-help resembles the kind of conservative politics that deifies personal action over state support. But in breaking the bonds of capitalism, fight club sure comes to look like the system it despises.
Trauma tourists and pain junkies
“We’re the middle children of history … No purpose or place. We have no Great War”
Fight club is displacement therapy for those with no war to fight. That isn’t to say systems built on exploitation and inequality are worth keeping – but Tyler’s manifesto punches down as much as up. Either way, it reframes the characters as morally vacant.
The narrator, like Marla, is a trauma tourist. Both feed on the emotions of others because it’s easier than emotional authenticity. They steal from ordinary folk and long for annihilation. Collateral damage, plane crashes? Too bad. It’s suicide chic, and utterly self-involved.
The masculinity of fight club isn’t the kind you buy in a gym (God forbid). It’s carved from hard knocks, and is always ‘on’ – as though hyper-aggression is a badge of honour:
“We all started seeing things differently. Everywhere we went, we were sizing things up.”
As it morphs into Project Mayhem, it remains single-sex. For lower members, that apparently also means sex-free.
Only Tyler is exempt from celibacy – and that means the narrator can have his cake and eat it. As Tyler, he gets wild sex. As the narrator, he doesn’t even have to talk to Marla afterwards.
Misogyny is baked into the narrator’s world view and, by extension, fight club.
Women don’t register on this scale. Note, too, the glee at selling rich women’s fat asses back to them, as though it’s justice rather than the circle of body fascism. Meanwhile, Tyler rails against the exploitation and denigration of male service workers … yet the industry is dominated by women.
Both personalities resent the father who walked out, but it’s almost no surprise women come off worst:
“We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.”
Choose life. Right?
“Self-improvement is masturbation. Now self-destruction…”
Fight Club is non-committal about women, and that ambiguity is quite the rabbit hole.
Tyler is the narrator’s inverse: all punk and no politeness. So is Marla. She dresses for the gutter and does what she wants. Tyler steals a car; Marla takes clothes and meals.
But Marla mirrors the narrator, too. Both are emotionally empty; both exploit suicide for different ends. Tyler won’t talk to Marla; later, he isolates the narrator in much the same way.
Is Marla one more identity of Tyler Durden? Well, if nothing else, she’s a narrative echo of both men – and it’s most apparent in their toxic relationships.
Our narrator is seduced by the man he could be. In reality, the myth of Tyler Durden is a siren song of destruction. The narrator only emerges as his own man when he swaps self-obsession for Other love. He has to reject Tyler, but as they’re the same person, that means destroying them both.
In almost losing life, the narrator realises the one thing that makes it bearable: Marla. Convincing? Let’s call it 50/50. As Tyler, he trashes Marla. As himself, he wishes her dead and says he’d rather paint the walls with his brains than be with her. Which is how the film ends.
In the end … well, there is no end. The story runs in a loop, and loops have no closure. The narrator shoots himself to stop the voice in his head. Does he succeed? Hell, we don’t even know if he survives. But in the film’s final ghost image – a penis, of course – Tyler Durden has the last laugh.
Fight Club (1999), directed by David Fincher
What to read or watch next
- Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk’s source novel)
- Se7en (David Fincher, Brad Pitt)
- Primal Fear (Edward Norton, identity)
- Shutter Island, Unknown (identity)
- Split, Hereditary (dissociative identity disorder)
- The Fly (waking up, false awakening)
- A Kiss Before Dying (nameless characters)
- Trainspotting (counterculture, meta, 1990s)
- Mr Robot (counterculture, capitalism … and more)
- Memento (identity, narrative loops)
- Insomnia (sleeplessness, psychosis)
- The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (self invention)
Picture credit: Markus Spiske, Christian Richter (composite)
