You Have to Die
Fighting for life and dying to self in Fight Club
It’s taken me a while to make myself write lately. I could say I’ve been busy, but the truth is, I haven’t felt that I have anything to say and have been experiencing a bit of a creative block. Normally writing helps me sort out the thoughts that are always swirling around in chaotic eddies, but I’ve felt that there was mostly mud in there and nothing really worth organizing or exploring or even saying out loud. I’m still feeling a bit of that, but something I heard recently made me want to at least try, so that’s what this essay will be: an effort. A woman who shared at a meeting I go to most weekends said, “I didn’t have a voice when I was drinking.” That statement hit me as true of both my life while in active addiction and when I let myself slip into these dark places when I just stop communicating effectively.
So I’m picking up one that’s been waiting in my idea list for a while now: Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and the 1999 movie adaptation, directed by David Fincher. The first rule of fight club is that you don’t talk about fight club, but I think it’s OK to write about it. I’ll be writing about both works - book and film - and will differentiate if it helps, but the central concept and storyline are pretty consistent between the two works so I won’t go crazy with the distinctions.
I’d always felt there was something to analyze in Fight Club, mainly because of the anonymity factor. The first rule of Fight Club and the principle of anonymity in AA create a space that serves as an extension of the outside world while operating on its own in a way. In the halls of AA, just as in Fight Club, we have an understanding that each person can show up and share something of his life with the assurance that whatever is said there stays there. What happens in Fight Club stays in Fight Club. The AA principle of anonymity serves several purposes: it unifies the members in attendance, qualifying them as people willing to recover rather than persons defined by the factors in their lives that bear so much weight in their identity outside the halls. It maintains the group integrity and fosters a spirit of unity and equality amongst members. Traditionally, it also serves as a safeguard for members who prefer their affiliation with AA to remain unknown to their other communities, such as work and family.
These same effects are present in Fight Club, where our narrator tells us, “a month ago you saw this kid who can’t remember to three-hole punch an order or put colored slip sheets between the copy packets, but this kid was a god for ten minutes when you saw him kick the air out of an account representative twice his size then land on the man and pound him limp until the kid had to stop.” In Fight Club, men can shed the skins of their selves at the door and engage in combat with another man whose personal life and social standing means nothing and holds no sway over the outcome of the fight. Anonymity in Fight Club has the added effect of creating a situation in which each man fights against a man with no name of any significance. He knows only his own name and his own reasons for showing up, and therefore his fight becomes more than a struggle between two men. He shows up for himself and for the other man, in the sense that he provides the opposing physical force of the other man’s fight. But the fight is each man’s and his alone. At its heart, Fight Club is a space for each man to fight a personal battle against forces within himself. And he does so in the company and with the encouragement and assistance of like minded men.
This thing about names is a little different in AA, where we do use our first names before qualifying ourselves as alcoholics. While anonymous, stating our first name grants us some sense of the identity we’re recovering. In Fight Club; the narrator never claims his own name, and names play no role in the ongoings of the club until much later in the action when a key member dies. We’ll get to that development later. But for now, it’s worth mention that Fight Club, in which the members lack a name but have a common struggle, is dissimilar to AA meetings in more than just the action taking place. The absence of a name suggests that the action in Fight Club has more in common with the internal struggle most attendees of AA meetings grapple with even before entering the doors of a meeting or beginning the work of recovery.
When the fighting’s not taking place, we get a front row seat to these internal forces through our narrator, who remains anonymous despite affiliations with the named Tyler Durden. Played by Edward Norton in the movie, this narrator gives us his story, his journey with Fight Club, and his relationship with Tyler, all of which reveal the deeply rooted issues with which he grapples. Fight Club opens with our narrator facing death. The movie presents a close up of Edward Norton with a gun in his mouth. He narrates the voiceover as Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, holds it in place with the threat of pulling the trigger. It’s an intense opening visual tinged with an unsettling lack of urgency on the narrator’s part. The book opens with the same detached nonchalance: “Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.” This unemotional current continues in the narrator’s matter of fact description and his indulgence in the pertinent side notes of his history with Tyler, the features of the gun in his mouth, and various tidbits about the creation of explosives. He’s either accepted the circumstances, completely given up, or both.
This in-your-face (and very much in the narrator’s face) idea of death as an inevitable necessity plays a central role in the mission of Fight Club and in the work’s message. It’s a club that promotes men pummeling each other within inches of their lives, sending many to the hospital as protocol, and destroys their physical bodies in ways that a normal athletic practice doesn’t achieve. It’s not something I’d voluntarily partake in or recommend to a friend, but it conveys a valuable message. This belief in death as a means to eternal life isn’t anything new. It’s the age-old cycle of death and resurrection that is central to religious dogma, mythological tradition and spiritual practices spanning time and space. We need to die to self in order to truly live. Rather than a physical death, we need a death of the part of ourselves that holds us back from recovering our true selves. This lesser self is the one that rules our minds in addiction and in turn usurps our bodies. This self can grow in power as a result of trauma or continued use, and though it constitutes a large part of us and can even seem to be our only self, it’s an imposter and shadow of our true self.
When we begin our journey in recovery, really when any of us gives up something that has been dictating our lives, we experience a loss of sorts akin to that experienced in death. We lose familiar habits and solutions, we may lose associations and relationships if they were rooted mainly in our substance of choice, and we lose our known ways of being in the world and connecting with ourselves and others. Before the conception of Fight Club, our narrator is miserable and insomniac. He seeks comfort by filling his condo with furniture and other items purchased from IKEA catalogs in an attempt to create a sense of home and feel a sense of belonging in a space curated to suit his ideal. A self declared “slave to [his] nesting instinct”, he genuinely believes that he loves the cutlery, coffee table, paper lamps and other specially selected home decor that ends up blown to bits by a bomb in his absence. This material construction of his identity is the main casualty in the explosion of his condo, which kills his curated life and catalyzes his cohabitation with Tyler Durden.
Our narrator spends a lot of time in an insomniac daze of travel for his job assessing car accidents for an auto company to determine eligibility of recalling specific models. He meets Tyler Durden on one of these trips, which mostly consist of what he calls “single-serving” friends, a cute but sort of fitting description of the people he meets who, like the single serving soaps and meals he receives on planes or in hotels, serve a brief, single use for him. A life of single serving friends is a life of disconnection. These kinds of relationships, based in utility, are shallow connections that go no further than the singular use we see in them: someone to talk to on a three-hour flight, someone to serve us a meal, someone to drive the bus for us, someone to fill a space in our lives that needs filling. We see these people for what they can do for us for a limited time and nothing more. Our narrator’s description honestly presents his perception of them as in the same camp as the single serving shampoo bottle: useful until it’s done what it can for him and empty to him once he’s used it. There’s something lonely about this single serving life he lives, and it’s not unlike the way many of us find ourselves going through the motions of life in active addiction or with an addicted mindset. When we’re so concerned with pain or lacking in our lives, we look for anything or anyone who can fill that space or cure that wound. Without realizing it, we can turn people and possessions into solutions that have no use once we feel that they’ve done what they can to temporarily relieve our issue.
When we choose to adopt things instead of people into our lives to fill more than a single use space, the result is a cluttered space of spiritual emptiness. The narrator has carefully curated his space to mimic what he sees in the IKEA catalogs’ representations of homes, believing that he can make a good life for himself if he can only create the kind of living space that appears to be a home. He sees his condo as a reflection of himself and has a strong attachment to the space because he invests the energy that he doesn’t spend on cultivating true connections into building a construct of happiness. It doesn’t cure his depression or insomnia. and he comments on this kind of life: “trapped in your lovely nest…the things you used to own, now they own you.” That’s the power we give material things when we mistake accumulating possessions for a means to achieving fulfillment of self. We make them a defining measure of our own worth, and in this sense, they own us because their worth becomes our perception of our own worth. This materialistic part of ourselves needs to die if we want to recover our true selves, and it does die in a way for our narrator. After meeting Tyler, with whom the narrator feels more of a bond than with any other single serving friend thus far, the narrator returns home to find his condo in flames and all his precious objects blown to smoldering confetti in the night air. He calls Tyler.
Tyler functions as an alter ego of the narrator, embodying the kind of man the narrator wants to be but can’t reach from the confines of his depression. Until Tyler, the narrator sought an escape from himself in catalog-bought possessions and regular attendance at support groups for people whose illnesses or struggles he’d pretend to share in order to solve his insomnia problem. Somehow his experience with these groups of people, who have a name for their pain and shared struggle, loosens a bit of the emotional barrier in him and lets him feel. He may be phony in the sense that he doesn’t have the cancerous, physical ailments that unite the members of these support groups, but the narrator has his own pain that he has not yet been able or ready to name. In witnessing the stories of others and pretending to suffer similarly, he establishes a kind of connection that he hasn’t found otherwise. It may be shallow and based in deceit, but it’s a taste of the real thing and in that way eases some of the pain and discontent that rule his life.
However, at the time when Tyler comes onto the scene, something shifts to suggest these other means are no longer sufficient temporary solutions for the narrator. Possibly because his internal distress has become too much, but more likely because another solution presents itself. This solution enters his life along with Tyler.
These are my thoughts on Tyler Durden. By the end of the story’s timeline, it becomes clear that Tyler, although presented as a separate character by the narration, functions as the alter ego of the narrator. To the narrator, Tyler is this dynamic, interesting, bold character with whom he feels a strong bond in the time of their single serving allotment of plane ride conversation. Tyler is designed to embody everything the narrator feels he isn’t and wants to be: energetic, charismatic, driven and respected. People listen to Tyler, and Tyler listens to no one but himself. The narrator presents Tyler as his own person rather than an extension of himself, because he’s the one telling the story and he perceives a distinction between his real self and his Tyler self. This parallels how we can view ourselves when drinking or using. We see another self in the mix. When I first began drinking, the draw for me was the illusion of feeling happy. I felt that alcohol transformed me from this anxious, depressed shell into an attractive, confident and engaging member of society. I wanted to be this version all the time, but when the alcohol wore off so did that self. Other people may have seen the same self present in both my modes of being, but the distinction was clear to me, and I preferred the other self. My real self was sad, broken and not worth listening to, and the self that alcohol seemed to free up was someone who deserved the love and acceptance of her peers. That’s like what we see with the narrator and the conjuring of Tyler. To others in Fight Club, it becomes more apparent that Tyler and the narrator are one and the same. Members address the narrator as Mr. Durden, and at one point Marla Singer tells the narrator that he’s Tyler Durden. We might feel as though a substance frees us to be a better version of ourselves, but to the people in our lives we remain the same.
We can consider Tyler as an alter ego who represents the addiction mindset or addiction itself. The narrator describes him as this larger than life authority as well as his best friend, and that’s unfortunately what our addiction mindset is to us. It’s our perceived best friend in this mindset because it’s our only friend whose survival we put above all else. We choose this false friend over every other person in our lives simply by keeping him in our lives, and when we listen to this friend, he’s the only one we can trust to accept us despite all the bad. Without realizing this, I chose this false friend over my true friends over and over by returning to it at the cost of hurting the true ones.
Tyler’s arrival in the narrator’s life coincides with the explosion of his condo, and both events lead to a new solution for the narrator’s wrecked life: fight club and a life with Tyler. Nothing out of the ordinary seems to happen to produce this change, just as nothing huge needs to happen for our addiction to suddenly become undeniably present in our lives. It’s a progression that reaches a point when normalcy is out of the question, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when that moment is. But I think a lot of us in recovery from alcoholism or other addictions remember times when we started to recognize the otherness of our addicted self, when we started to become unrecognizable to ourselves, even if only in hindsight. We see a new self appear: Tyler; and our people see us begin to destroy our lives: condo explosion.
When the narrator calls Tyler after the destruction of his home, they meet in a bar. Many beers later, Tyler agrees to let him move in if he grants him one request: “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.” The movie presents their first fight as a brawl in the parking lot of the bar, each man taking his turn hitting the other until they’re grappling on the pavement, just the two of them in the night sealing their deal to live together by giving each other the first real fist fight of his life. This fight is the first and only time we see the two of them face off against each other until the final scene of the movie. They never pair up in Fight Club, though each of them has fights against other members. The parking lot fight represents the beginning of the narrator’s active struggle with the forces inside him. Whereas complacency, passive suffering and indulgence in distractions have defined the part of his adult life we have seen thus far, his fight with Tyler represents his beginning to struggle against the forces that the addiction mindset encompasses.
The narrator’s description of Tyler as well as his perception of his relationship with Tyler reveals a lot about his unnamed self. He never identifies himself by name, even when others address him as Mr. Durden; rather, the narrator gives the name that should be his to Tyler. He gives Tyler the name and vibrancy that he lacks, and he often identifies himself by his relationship to Tyler: “I live with Tyler” or “I’m best buddies with Tyler.” He has a strong sense of Tyler’s identity, but his own is unclear. I felt a similar emptiness in my own sense of identity for a long time before I engaged in the work of recovery. Even before drinking took over in my life, I let my perception of others’ expectations of me dictate my identity. I defined myself as a daughter, a sister, a girlfriend, a friend, a student, a teacher, etc.; and all these identities depended on who I was in relation to some other person and what I thought that person wanted me to be. I don’t think I was completely untrue to myself, but I let certain parts of myself fade into invisibility when I sensed they might be unwelcome or misunderstood. I didn’t take the time to figure out who I wanted to or was meant to be because I was busy trying to be the person I thought everyone needed me to be, and sometimes it seemed that alcohol could help me be that person. Like Tyler Durden though, that person I became with alcohol was a delusion of an idea I created.
Tyler is the person we think we become when we drink. He’s initially captivating and seems pretty much the ideal man to our narrator, but as Tyler becomes more active in his fight club and Project Mayhem schemes without the narrator’s knowledge, we see the reality: we’re putting our real selves to sleep and letting someone not ourselves take over the operation of our faculties and set us on a chaotic path of destruction. Though a sort of offshoot of Fight Club, Project Mayhem is another beast entirely.
Men come to Fight Club “because they can’t fight the other things in their lives.” Fight Club offers space for each man to fight his demons through conflict with another man. However, Project Mayhem, Tylers’s new development, aims for total destruction of civilization through acts of sabotage and violence. Unlike in Fight Club, which fosters violence but engages mainly in each man’s personal reckoning, Project Mayhem pits its members against society. Project Mayhem represents the takeover of our addiction mindset in our lives. While using, we might have felt at times that we were united in something with people who shared our same practices, but in giving ourselves over to the authority of our Tyler Durden persona, we’re sacrificing our true selves. Tyler tells the space monkey recruits of Project Mayhem, “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.” He’s not telling them this to promote unity and connection; he’s tearing down the lingering influence of their true selves.
The narrator doesn’t follow Tyler’s lead with Project Mayhem though. He doesn’t engage with the project from the start, and following the death of Big Bob - a man he knew from one of the support groups he used to attend and who later joined Fight Club - the narrator even attempts to shut down the operation. Bob’s death seems to awaken some sense of duty in the narrator. He sees that although Fight Club gave Bob a way of fighting the effects of cancer in his life, Project Mayhem took that struggle and misdirected it to pit Bob against society, thereby disconnecting him and resulting in his death at the hands of an officer who thought he was armed with a gun.
After Bob’s death, fight clubs take up the chant of his name - Robert Paulson - when they convene, and the narrator grimly observes: “Only in death will we have our own names since only in death are we no longer part of the effort. In death we become heroes.” His words echo Tyler’s from the opening: “the first step to eternal life is you have to die.” There’s something here that the members of Project Mayhem misconstrue. Project Mayhem chants Robert Paulson’s name not because he died a heroic death but because his death is exactly the result that Project Mayhem seeks. This death may finally give Big Bob the freedom from his physical pain by separating soul from body, but it does so at the cost of a life that could have been lived well. Bob does not die to self by choosing to surrender his self will; he dies because he stops fighting the force of chaos and chooses to let it rule him. He has completely lost his sense of self to the cause of Project Mayhem, and his death, an accidental byproduct of a mission gone wrong, mirrors the tragic death of those who lose themselves to addiction.
Recovery of ourselves is the other side of this death coin. When we can die to our self in life by surrendering our self will and accepting that only faith in a Higher Power can save us, we do recover and we regain our names. We don’t see this recovery in fulfillment at the end of Fight Club, but we see hope of a beginning in both the movie and the book, which offer slightly different endings. After trying to shut down Fight Club, the narrator comments: “For years now I’ve wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.” He finally wants to fight, even outside Fight Club, rather than letting himself sleep while chaos holds the reins in his life. He recognizes that he loves Marla, with whom he’s had a complicated relationship since their meeting in the support groups.
Marla, who attended the groups for the same phony reasons as the narrator, is a kindred spirit to the narrator, and they seem to have an instinctive hatred for each other. Their mutual dislike stems from the fact that each reflects the worst parts of the other. They see themselves in each other, and their self hatred translates into hatred of the other person. They comprise a way to share the support groups without having to see each other, but when Marla begins sleeping with Tyler, the narrator experiences his own resentful attraction to her, which he tries to hide behind a mask of disdain. The ways in which Tyler and the narrator treat Marla reflect the ways in which we fail to connect in active addiction. Tyler uses her then dismisses her when she’s served a purpose to him. The narrator, aware of Tyler’s relationship with her and hating himself for bringing her into their lives in this way, treats her with rude dismissal when she’s in the Paper Street house. He cares for her, but cannot bear to interact with her because of the hold Tyler has on him. Mostly, she reminds him of himself: someone desperate for connection who accepts a relationship in which he is used and dismissed. We’re similarly blocked from connection by our own versions of Tyler. His recognition of his love for Marla comes sometime in the aftermath of Bob’s death when the spell of Tyler’s mayhem over him breaks. He sees the inane nature of the fighting, the tragedy in Bob’s death, and the feelings he has for Marla. He tells her he might like her, and he admits to himself that he loves her. These recognitions mark his willingness to open himself to connection, and he sees the major issue in the way of cultivating that connection: his relationship with Tyler. Similarly, we need to step out of our relationship with a substance or addictive habit if we want to find real connection in life and recover the selves capable of that connection.
The narrator tells Marla, “I have to take care of Tyler Durden.” Of course, Tyler comes to him, dragging him out of bed to the top of the Parker-Morris Building. This is their first face off since their fight in the parking lot, and it’s their last. While the first one inspired the birth of Fight Club, this one intends to end it all. The movie depicts Tyler holding the gun until the narrator realizes that he is the one giving Tyler life and power, and the gun appears in his hand instead. He tells Tyler his intention to “kill us” by pulling the trigger to end his life. He pulls the trigger, and the movie and book give us different outcomes. In the movie, Tyler collapses and the narrator, though covered in blood from the gunshot wound that’s gone through his cheek, tells Marla (who arrived minutes before the shooting) that he’s OK. The two of them hold hands as they watch explosions go off from their view at the top of the building to the soundtrack of “Where is My Mind” by the Pixies. The scene cuts out on them looking into each other’s eyes amidst the chaos. On the other hand, there are no explosions in the book. The bombs didn’t go off, and the penultimate chapter closes with the ominous line: “And I pull the trigger.” The final chapter opens with a vision of the narrator’s perceived life after death. He’s in an institute he likens to heaven. He recalls the events that have led him there, and even though he wants to return to “Earth” to be with Marla, he says he’s not ready yet. He’s not ready because he still sees men with beaten up faces in this institute calling him Mr. Durden and assuring him that things are going to plan in his absence. They tell him, “We look forward to getting you back.”
The movie and the book present us with two visions of the death that we need to experience to recover. The movie gives us the visual of total destruction surrounding the narrator and Marla. The narrator embraces death, but he doesn’t want Tyler to pull the trigger to summon it. He knows he has to do it himself, because to give Tyler the gun would be to surrender to addiction rather than surrendering his addiction and his will to something greater. He succeeds in defeating Tyler, but at great cost. We’re left with hope though, because the shot of him holding Marla’s hand and looking into her eyes amidst this chaos shows the connection he has finally achieved that is crucial to recovery. In the book, the narrator’s attempt at death lands him in an institute that reflects the rehabilitation of early recovery in many ways. Removed from the influence of Tyler, he begins to see clearly the events that have led him here and to engage in the kind of work that will help him move forward. The narrator still sees and hears men from Fight Club in this place because the threat of relapsing into the life he had with Tyler is still very real. We can live with that same fear in recovery no matter how well our lives are going or how much sober time we have. Our substance may be removed from our lives, but it’s still a real presence in the world, and our familiar habits from addiction are even more of a threat. We need to continue the upward work of recovery and be honest with ourselves and others when these fears creep into our minds. Tyler may be gone, but the narrator who lived with him and as him for so long knows that he can bring him back in some form by listening to these voices. He’s still got a long way to go before he’s able to walk freely as his own person, but the narrator’s ending gives us an idea of how we can make it through even the hardest of experiences, whether it’s the decision to begin the path to recovery or the many struggles we encounter throughout that path.
Fight Club gives us a visual of the ugly struggle of both addiction and recovery, but it also presents the hopeful outcome of coming through this hard fight. The narrator demonstrates the need for connection and complete abandonment of self if we are to recover, and his experience gives us an honest depiction of the difficulty with which that process develops. Sometimes recovery requires us to put our lives on hold for a bit to relearn the structure and communication practices we need to survive on our own. It’s not what everyone does, but when we’ve destroyed our lives so completely in the mayhem of addiction, we don’t always have a choice. We may fight connection and the mental discomfort of waking up our true selves, but when we find the willingness to live and to be open to these connections, we can learn what it takes to really live. The narrator says just before the final face-off scene when he finally encounters Tyler again: “My will to live amazes me.” He may not trust that he’ll survive his encounter with Tyler, but he finally recognizes that the life he’s known is not life at all, but death. And he knows that Tyler’s death - and his own, in a way - is the only way he can begin the work of recovering the life he’s been born to live.
I love what he says about his thoughts of Marla while in this institute: “And if there were a telephone in Heaven, I would call Marla from Heaven and the moment she says, “Hello,” I wouldn’t hang up. I’d say, “Hi. What’s happening? Tell me every little thing.” That’s how we get through it. We reach for the connections in our life, the real ones, and we deepen them. We tell them every little thing, and we listen to what they tell us.
