Fight Club (1999)

So this movie actually wasn't originally on my watch list for this blog, but after I watched it as an assignment I just felt like I had to make a post about it. Let me just say that I wasn't particularly excited about this movie. Fight Club always seemed like a lame, violent "dude movie" to me, and I always lumped it in with other lame movies like The Fast and the Furious and assumed that it would never interest me. But after I watched Fight Club, I realized that it is nothing like I thought it was. (You might even say that a "double" of this film existed in my perception, but that's beside the point.) What I thought was a superficial movie about boxing actually turned out to be a psychological thriller with some pretty profound commentary on society. In Fight Club, an unnamed man becomes depressed and bored with his mundane life. He meets an eclectic character who introduces himself as Tyler Durden, and the two of them end up living together in a squalid house after the narrator's "IKEA apartment" is destroyed. The two men start up an underground "fight club" in which men beat each other up to escape their own mundane lives. This club eventually devolves into an anti-consumer terrorist organization, with Tyler Durden as its leader. The big twist at the end of the movie, however, reveals that Tyler Durden was never a separate person, but was in fact the narrator's alter ego. There were never two men, only one Tyler Durden, and Brad Pitt's character represented Edward Norton's character's ideal double. The narrator (or Jack) is a bland, average man working at a dead-end job. He quietly goes about his job without questioning the ethics of his company. He then returns to his cookie-cutter apartment furnished with all IKEA furniture. Jack has accepted his place in society without objection. Tyler Durden represents the exact opposite of Jack -- Tyler is a carefree nihilist who strives to break the bonds of establishment, and he refuses to follow the rules of society. Durden is the man that Jack and the men of Fight Club want to be. He is the alpha male who calls for the men to take control of their lives rather than submit to a consumerist, capitalist society. Tyler represents the freedom that Jack and the other men wish that they could achieve.