This week--you need to compose one more blog entry on Fight Club, by Friday at the start of the class. Here are the topics I gave you in class on Monday, but please feel free to write about whatever may move you as an artist, person, bystander, punching bag--
1.) Marla—what is the role/function of Marla? Is she real, and how does her lie reflect the narrators lie? How is Marla the problem that will not heal, will our narrator not let it heal?
2.) Tyler muses, “the things we own end up owning us…I say lets evolve.” Is Tyler suggesting that evolution take place by society taking a step back? Is this similar to Thoreau’s notion of “simplify, simplify, simplify” or Dostoevsky’s arithmetic that 2 X 2 =5?
3.) “One can make all sorts of explosive items with simple household things.” Like what? Again, why soap? An obvious question but an answer that may be hard to articulate.
4.) Why have pornography, why have fantasy, is this necessary—is it a good thing? Burgess in the introduction to A Clockwork Orange writes, “I enjoyed ripping and raping by proxy.” Thus, are we all clockwork oranges composed of good and evil, grinding opposition, do we all have impish and evil desires and should we find a way to act on them in healthy ways?
Let me know if you have any questions.
1.) Marla—what is the role/function of Marla? Is she real, and how does her lie reflect the narrators lie? How is Marla the problem that will not heal, will our narrator not let it heal?
2.) Tyler muses, “the things we own end up owning us…I say lets evolve.” Is Tyler suggesting that evolution take place by society taking a step back? Is this similar to Thoreau’s notion of “simplify, simplify, simplify” or Dostoevsky’s arithmetic that 2 X 2 =5?
3.) “One can make all sorts of explosive items with simple household things.” Like what? Again, why soap? An obvious question but an answer that may be hard to articulate.
4.) Why have pornography, why have fantasy, is this necessary—is it a good thing? Burgess in the introduction to A Clockwork Orange writes, “I enjoyed ripping and raping by proxy.” Thus, are we all clockwork oranges composed of good and evil, grinding opposition, do we all have impish and evil desires and should we find a way to act on them in healthy ways?
Let me know if you have any questions.
Lastly, let me echo the words of Tyler--"..I say let's evolve." So with these blog entries let us evolve--as a teacher, I am not going to give you word limits or guidelines, I am not going to tell you what I expect or what is expected of you...all I will say is evolve into the students, into the thinkers, you are capable (you want to) of becoming.
Happy feeling or should I say happy fighting,
Jack's Terrible Sense of Humor
16 comments:
I would argue that the entire story of Fight Club revolves around Marla Singer. I'm not sure that I can confirm whether she is real or exists only in the narrator's mind, like Tyler, as you've asked. What I am certain of, however, is what she symbolizes: someone who has really "hit bottom." A major theme in the movie is letting go of society's values, especially materialism. As Tyler puts it: "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything." The first time this idea comes into play is when we meet Marla: a woman in poverty, who goes to 12-step meetings because "it's cheaper than a movie, and there's free coffee," steals and sells other people's laundry, and smokes like a chimney. Everything about her screams that she's given up- but in a good way. She's given up on trying to better herself through society's formula. Before the narrator meets Marla, he defines himself by his material possessions. I think he subconsciously acknowledges something might be wrong, dissatisfying, with this way of life, because of his insomnia. My theory is that it rips him open when he encounters Marla. He describes her as, "the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you could stop tonguing it- but you can't." Marla is a little scratch because her presence constantly reminds him to try and hit bottom. Her way of life clashes so profoundly with his "Ikea-boy" one that he realizes he must change. The way he does this, is Tyler Durden. Tyler Durden rejects materialism and 'the system' in a way that the narrator could not have done on his own (and when I say on his own, I mean as that persona.) Tyler Durden is intense and attractive. Tyler Durden is great in bed. Tyler Durden is everything Marla could ever want, and everything the narrator wants to be. Therefore, the creation of Tyler Durden is a direct result of the narrator's encounter with Marla. Everything that he does with Tyler brings him closer to hitting bottom, closer to her way of living. When Tyler gives the narrator his kiss, the chemical burn, the narrator tries to meditate. His power animal in the cave is now Marla- Marla encourages him to keep going. The end of the movie, the death of Tyler, happens when the narrator does not need him anymore. He's just turned himself into the police, run across town in his underwear, and shot himself in the face. He has hit bottom. It makes sense then, that Fight Club ends with the narrator and Marla watching everything come down too.
Tyler Durden is the anti-materialist. He lives in a run down, dilapidated house that is barely holding itself up with barely any amenities. Tyler says “It is only after we have lost everything can we do anything.” The idea of the things we own defining us has become so ingrained in our society that it takes someone as radical as Tyler to break down this idea. He says again “the things we own end up owning us”. We must abandon these physical ties and own ourselves, our rock, to go back to Camus and Sisyphus. Only once we have abandoned these filled ballasts can we be free. This is Tyler's plan for Project Mayhem. He wants to obliterate the credit system so that everyone is set back to the way it was before. Everyone will have lost everything and now they can all start anew. According to Tyler we have taken the wrong path down the roads of evolution and we must find a way to turn ourselves about and right the ships course. The idea of materialism has skewed our beliefs, and instead of worrying about how we think we are instead preoccupied with “what dining set defines me as a person”. When the narrator's condo is destroyed he is distraught over the fact that what he thought was his last sofa, and last bed are now destroyed. But Tyler Durden would argue that the event has set the narrator free. He is no longer bound by his dining set, but is instead only bound by what he will allow himself to do. Like with Dostoyevky's statement 2X2 = 5, we do not need to be bound in the physical world. We can allow our minds to be free and roam through the stratosphere. We do not have to abide by what is considered “right” in society. We can make our own rules, but if we allow the things we own and live by to control us they will do it with impunity. We do not need all of these things to define us. We only need ourselves. Instead of doing something that should be second nature to us, we leave the definition of ourselves to the clothes we wear, the car we drive, the house we live in. We must stop placing so much value in these worthless items and must instead buy stock in our own minds.
Tyler’s thought that “the things we own end up owning us” means that owning something allows ourselves to be consumed in what we want. By allowing something to define who we are through ownership, it’s us who really become owned because through our desires of wanting to fit in we come to represent it. The narrator states “we all became what Tyler wanted us to be.” This is an example of how the members of the Fight Club wanted to belong to something and wanted to “own” a spot in the club. Tyler creates an army out of his clubbers though to use for his own benefit and the members then fall into the role of being owned.
Tyler also says “let’s evolve.” Evolution is something that occurs over a period of time and has an impact on not only one person but a mass of people. The Fight Club was created to satisfy Tyler and the narrator, but over the course of time was franchised across the nation because of its impact on others who were searching for enlightenment and a reason to be. Tyler tries to point out that we don’t need anything else in order to find who we are. One thought or idea posed was: how much can you know about yourself if you don’t fight? The homework Tyler assigns to the club members was to start a fight with a stranger but make sure to lose. No one was successful at this except for the narrator who lost because he ended up fighting himself instead of another.
I believe that Thoreau’s notion of simplification and Tyler’s notion of letting go of all else can go hand in hand. Both notions force people to step back from society and form their own world in order to find themselves and escape from the disorder they came from. Thoreau had to isolate himself in the woods and Tyler formed an underground Fight Club in order to find the answers others seem to be searching for.
Organs.
Why do they matter so much, anyway? What is the liver, the kidney, the brain, really? And the organs that wrote in first person…Tyler Durdan, anyone?
I know that I pose a lot of questions here (and sort of meaningless ones at that). But I have one more: is a person his/her body or is a body a mere dwelling place for a person? Simply put, I think that a body is only a temporary resting place. Take Tyler, for example one. He is not real. He is merely a character that lives in the body of the narrator. Is it any wonder that the narrator was never given a name, for what does it matter who the narrator is if his body is not what is taking the action?
Second, there is Bob. When he died and the men started chanting his name, one of the men in project mayhem said, (and I am paraphrasing) “Oh, I get it, when you die, you get a name.” So a body is not a person until they die? I don’t know how to address that subject at all, but I know remember how the narrator was worked up over the death of Bob because he knew Bob.
The third thing that I noticed was the men in Project Mayhem. “You aren’t given a name in project mayhem.” By taking their name, Tyler was also able to force them to do whatever he asked. When you do not have an identity, you are forced to latch onto others. That is what Marla was talking about when the narrator asked her why she came to see Tyler then said that weak personalities attach to strong ones. Weak individuals or bodies without names, without identities, latch onto those who appear to be strong.
“Only one fight at a time.” That was one of the rules of the fight club—sorry I don’t remember which one. I really like that. At first, I thought that Tyler meant that you could only face one of your problems at a time, but towards the end of the movie, I changed my perspective quite a bit. Inside of the narrator, there were two entirely different people. One was the narrator as himself, the uptight, materialistic personality. His uptight personality was challenged by that of Tyler Durdan, a man who existed only in the narrator’s imagination. Their constant battle does not seem like a contradiction to the rule, but in the end, they are both fighting the same body. I am not certain, but that seemed like a contradiction to me.
I feel as though I have only repeated myself about one hundred times and made very little sense in the process of writing this blog. If anyone has anything that they could clear up or make more sense of, feel free.
Towey
“Soon we shall invent a method of being born from an idea…
…I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”
So ends Notes from Underground and so begins Fight Club with Tyler Durden picking up where Dostoyevsky leaves off. Tyler takes that unidentified idea and invents it, transforming it into a bold and violent action.
Tyler says, “Let’s evolve.”
Dostoyevsky says that “2 x 2 = 5.”
The things we own undeniable do end up owning us. As Thoreau suggested, that railroad we built isn’t a means of transportation or even something that we ride upon. In fact, the railroad actually rides upon us. Dostoyevsky echoes a similar sentiment with his belief that all we do as a society is build roads for the sake of getting somewhere, anywhere. We want to control our situation, our reputation, our destination, and in the midst of all of trying to control our way to success, we completely lose. We lose ourselves, we grow numb, too focused on the ends rather than the means, and we eventually get too busy to live. It’s almost as if we have come too far and have complicated things too much to fix our lifestyle, saturated with designer labels and regimented schedules. Our society’s empty existence is dominated by consumerism and shallow happiness, but so many people don’t mind. Perhaps I shouldn’t say that…maybe they would mind if they weren’t oblivious to it. That is what differentiated Thoreau, Dostoyevsky, and now Tyler Durden. Thoreau went to the woods, Dostoyevsky retreated to the underground, and Tyler Durden began making soap. All were deliberate responses to a taste of awareness that led to a craving for deeper exploration and revelation.
oops, part II:
Dostoyevsky and Thoreau criticize society from a distance, but Tyler proposes something radical from within the very heart of society’s frustration: “The things we own end up owning us…I say let’s evolve.” Our progress has been our downfall; our goals are the things that prevent us from getting anywhere meaningful. We have gotten sidetracked by Martha Stewart and Ikea and grande lattes and the contents of our wallets. I know this because Tyler knows this.
Tyler sees the complacency all around him and believes that destruction, inhibition, and chaos are the way out, or rather the way out of our gridlock and into an evolutionary process. Society has become trained to value efficiency over all else, “Waste is a thief.” Just as Tyler flips our idea of evolution on its head, he completely redefines waste as well. Tyler Durden actually thrives on waste and he builds an empire out of it. His home, his headquarters, his command center is an old unwanted dilapidated house. From discarded human fat, probably one of those most hated and feared substances of this day and age, Tyler can make both a powerful explosive and a classy bar of soap. The funny thing is, in Tyler’s mind they both do the same thing — cleanse. He finds a cathartic beauty and purity in destruction, and even if his methods seem radical, there’s a truth in his thought process. His fundamental intention is to erase the shallow constraints that mold us into something we never consciously chose to be, and to leave us only with feeling and freedom. “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.” Losing everything, losing all hope, losing all expectations, is ironically the opposite of losing ourselves. It’s stripping everything down. No shirts, no shoes. Simplify simplify simplify.
Just as the narrator, Jack’s fill-in-the-blank, has insomnia, our society suffers from a sleeping disease too. Often times we are never really asleep, and we are never really awake. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. Tyler Durden seeks to remedy that problem. His solution? Another sickness that we’ve all heard about: consciousness. Ultimately though, Tyler takes his mission too far. He encourages people to evolve in his direction too much, and the result is a re-evolution (not to be confused with revolution) into more destructive microcosm of the unquestioning society he originally tried so hard to rebel against. “In Tyler we trust” replaces “In God we trust.” Tyler’s words begin to come out of everyone’s mouths, and the men who once tasted freedom mixed with blood in the dirty basements of local bars end up back where they started. The only one who truly evolves and progresses in the end is Jack’s ______. In the final scene he declares that his eyes are open now, indicating that he has found a way out of the vicious cycle of both insomnia and blind allegiance. Surprisingly, it isn’t as difficult a solution as one might think. It’s true that, “We don’t know whose side to be on or where to give our allegiance, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise.” All we can do is make sure our eyes are open, make sure we adjust our sight to the dark monotony of 2 x 2= 4, but at the same time never allow ourselves to accept that 2 x 2 = 5 just because someone tells us so. We have to see it for ourselves. Simply, you are not Jack’s mathematician; you must be your own.
Life is our fight. Society is our opponent. Fight club is a symbol of people taking their anger out on society. Even when Tyler loses or feels pain, he smiles because he is laughing in the face of the world. He is laughing because he knows there are people out there who are so warped into thinking that success is everything that they lose all other values. The members join fight club when they have had enough of society’s misguiding and judgmental ways. The moment that really stuck with me throughout the movie and for the rest of the day was when “Tyler” was asked to leave work because of his recent behavior and “inappropriate” dress code. It reminded me a lot of school, private schools in general. As he is walking down the stairs out of his office, he talks of how people were judging him because he had cuts and bruises on his face. This is a symbol of people’s prejudice attitudes in general. People make assumptions about people from their appearance, race, sexual orientation, and gender without even speaking a word to them. Just because someone is different in one way than you are, how does that make them any better or worse than you? It doesn’t. How do you know anything about that person if you have not spoken to them, tell me that. You don’t. Stereotypes are the most outrageous thing I have ever heard.
“It’s not until we lose everything that were free to do anything”
This saying just blew me away. Throughout they movie Tyler talks about hitting rock bottom. I agree with this statement. When you lose everything, you are given a second change. You can start your life over. For the members of fight club, they hit rock bottom when they join. This is their chance at redemption and they are willing to get it at any cost, even if it means they lose their lives.
-Dylan Martini
Dying is the easy way into your underground. For everyone who isn’t dying, we have to live with the fact that reality is how it is and its not going to change any time soon. For people in the support groups in Fight Club who really belong there, they have it easy. Everyone listens to them, as the main character realizes. Their lives mean more to everyone involved. (From the outside, the narrator thinks that this is a miracle. But later on when he is on the other side of this and he is the one about to take someone’s life, he realizes it’s just logical. “His breakfast will taste better than it ever has… Tomorrow will be the best day of his life,” is the logic Tyler states when he threatens to kill the convenience store worker.)When the narrator convinces himself that he is like the people dying in the support groups, he can finally sleep, and he finally steps away from the catalogs of his apartment. Tyler blows up his apartment and he becomes completely free. Tyler now is the part of him that isn’t dying and is free to do whatever he wants while the normal side of the narrator is not aware of his freedom. Tyler is the narrator’s underground. The narrator cannot accept his underground until he becomes conscious of it. Then Marla shows up again. Before she had just invaded the support groups. “A tourist,” as the narrator put it. “Her lie reflected my lie, once again I saw nothing, so once again I couldn’t sleep,” he states when he feels that she has overstepped her boundaries. She is the problem that will not go away. She is his conscience. She won’t go away because she is a part of him as much as Tyler is. They are the sides of him that he cannot accept while being conscious about it. Marla and Tyler confront their fears and they take what they want. This part of being underground is that they aren’t conforming so they think that they deserve to be above other people. In a way they do but in a way they are conforming by doing so. But Marla is part of the narrator that is keeping him sane. She cannot leave him because she keeps him connected to reality. Tyler becomes a monster inside himself with project mayhem and the consequences of it. He feels no remorse and just believes that because he can do something, he should. Will of us let go of reality to this point? Or is it impossible for us to because we will always have Marla.
Going along with Tyler having Marla as a mirror, Dostoyevsky has Liza be a mirror for the narrator in Notes From the Underground. She shows that people can get out of control but they can never escape it all completely. These women are necessities for the narrators. Without them, we could look at their actions and say, “well that’s not so bad… the buildings are empty… they aren’t hurting anyone.” With Marla and Liza intruding, the narrators cannot hide inside themselves as they wish and they cannot let go fully.
You asked the question of if as females watching this movie should we be offended by the portrayal of women in this movie. I don’t think they are portrayed too terribly. Yes, pornography and sex aren’t the best portrayals but as the conscience of people who are kept sane by women; Being needed is a big part of this portrayal. I don’t believe that the role and function of women is grossly offensive. They are shown as grounding figures. Yes they are desired and taken crudely, but they are never thrown away and discarded because they cannot be.
During the movie Tyler Durden chases people out of their normal, boring lives, and challenges them, and threatens them to "live". When we find out the Tyler is the actual one who blew up the apartment, it came to no surprise to me. He enabled Edward Nortons character to do something with his life rather than waste time buying things we don't need. He asks many times why did you still go back to that job that you hate just to get bossed around by Jack. After Fight Club starts, Nortons character no longer fears, or will take any lip from his boss. He no longer needs to make up names and go to those meetings to feel good about himself. Because Tyler got him out of that boring lifestyle, he is now a different man. A similar thing happens with the man in the convenience store. When he brings the man outside, gun to his head, he questions why he is working in a convenience store. If he wanted to be a veterinarian, why wasn't he on his way to becoming that and wasting his goals and dreams working the late shift a convenience store. Tyler had no intent to shoot the man, only trying to teach him a lesson. Fear played a huge role in this scene. Not only the fear in the man, but also of Nortons character who had no idea what Durden was doing. As the man ran away, Norton looked at the gun realizing there were no bullets, and noticed just how smart Tyler was. This I think was the turning point of when Nortons character, realized he actually wanted to be like Tyler Durden.
-Shaun Millerick
Equilibrium systems involve balance and neutrality. Everything is equal. Everyone is equal. Fight Club starts and ends with a gun in someone's mouth. The beginning and ending are equal in this way. Neutrality is an ongoing message throughout Fight Club. It is always at the back of Tyler's mind and in turn, in the back of the viewer's. Tyler preaches insignificance and equality. He makes the rich and the poor into one entity. It is his job and his passion. This theme is connected to every major point from Marla, to project mayhem, to making soap. It ties them all together, and even ties back to Dostoyevsky's idea of man of action vs. man of thought.
At one point in the movie, Marla calls Tyler because she thinks that she has breast cancer, and Tyler admits that he is neutral to her. In the literal sense it means that Tyler thinks that Marla trusts him enough to examine her breast but not anymore. He is also saying that he is indifferent to her and her feelings. Marla also does not see everything that is changing in Tyler's head. She might see him as neutral, but in reality he is anything but, and this gross lack of neutrality implies that he is still changing to become a more stable state of being. At the end of the movie, Tyler tells Marla that she arrived at a very strange time in his life. This was not just because strange things were happening, It was because he was not in equilibrium. He was still changing.
Project mayhem might be the most obvious place that equality and neutrality are present. Tyler even says, "one more step toward economic equality." By destroying the buildings of all of the banks, Tyler's army is literally putting every person on the same level economically. It wasn't just symbolic of destroying consumerism or the upper class, they were getting rid of debt. Making it so everyone, even the aristocrats, are part of the same compost heap.
Why make soap? Tyler makes soap for the same reason that he made the fight club and project mayhem. He is trying to make everyone in to one small insignificant part of a whole. In other words, to make everyone equal. The fat from the soap is gathered from rich women and men who want to look good. Tyler is turning all of them into small, rectangular blocks just like every other. They are nothing in comparison to the whole. They are all part of the same compost heap. One does not look, smell, or work differently from any other.
Dostoyevsky's ideas are evident in Fight Club. There is a constant struggle between men of action and men of thought within the main character. His old, mindless self is a man of action. He acts and reacts without thinking. He often doesn't know where he is going or what is going on. He just lives his life without a thought. On the other hand, Brad Pitt's character is a man of thought. He is cool and calculating. He assesses every moment and always has a plan. He holds up a convenience store, not because he want anything, but because he had a plan and a mission to make someone's life better. The main character is forced to find equilibrium between these two extremes. He knows that he cannot go back to his old empty life where objects define him, and he also knows that Brad Pitt's character would destroy him if he could. The result is a neutral Tyler Durden. One that wishes to do absolutely no harm, but still wants to change the world drastically.
In Fight Club the narrator and Tyler Durden are essentially revolting against the corporate "machine" that is the capitalist and commercialist society in which we live. Edward Norton's character states that he, and society as a whole, is a "slave to the IKEA nesting instinct". It is by rejecting this system and letting go, that he and Tyler are able to "hit bottom" and why must the hit bottom. Could it be their path to enlightenment? If this is so, than it would follow that the Narrator and tyler and the Underground man are one and the same. Tyler is enlightened (or at least the narrator thinks so) and is therefore underground, and the underground man is enlightened, as is Marla Singer, who as Chelsea said, has "hit bottom".
If we consider Marla as the only character who has truly hit bottom and as a really strong character, Fight Club becomes much less sexist. Marla is the only character who didn't have to fight to find enlightenment. She did go to groups, but it seems that she did not rely on them as much as the narrator. She makes it seem that she is going out of boredom when she says "its cheaper than a movie, and there's free coffee", whereas the narrator flat out states that he needs them.
When the narrator meditates and goes into his cave, he finds Marla awaiting him as his "power animal". Why is this? Is it just that she has invaded his groups and therefore his cave? Or is their more to it? I would argue that the narrator subconciosly recognizes that Marla, and not Tyler, is his path to enlightenment. Tyler only serves as the catalyst for his change in lifestyle, and once he has served his purpose he is only detrimental to the narrator. In the end, it is Tyler who is rejected, while Marla is there hand-in-hand with him when he finally lets go, hits bottom and reaches enlightenment.
Looking back on Fight Club, I found it enticing to see the change in the narrator, from a man concerned with his petty fur nature to a man who is concerned purely about other human beings. The true change in the narrator comes when he realizes that Tyler has left him and Bob has died. He understands that not only are material possessions worthless, but human lives and connections are what really matter. He needs to strip away everything that doesn’t have meaning from his life in order to find himself in Tyler. I think that Tyler’s ideas are more along the lines of Thoreau’s “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” He even creates an army of men who are forced to be simple. Tyler wants to dissolve individuality in order to allow the men find meaning within themselves, rather than material possessions. This is more than a journey of simplicity; it is a quest for the realization that “our great depression is our lives.” They are meaningless because we don’t appreciate and understand them.
I found it interesting when the homework assignment was to start a fight with a stranger and lose, and the narrator chooses to fight himself. Perhaps, he is contemplating the idea that he is in fact a stranger to himself. He knows Tyler better than he knows his original identity because Tyler is strong and the narrator begins with a life of weakness.
Before we can understand our lives, we must understand our death and our pain. Tyler says, as he is burning the narrator, “pain is premature enlightenment.” By experiencing pain we are able to see the truths for what they are, and see ourselves for who we are. We must be able to appreciate live completely devoid of all fear. We will live and die, but we must accept the final result before we can actually live to with purpose. We would only sleep through life without the prospect of pain and death, but what we must truly accomplish is to know how to live without the fear of pain. Without this ability we will create our own destruction.
Tyler Durden says that “the things you own end up owning you.” I think that’s true. By owning things that mean something to you, you become very attached to them and live around them. What I mean by that is, you protect them, and you provide their up- keep. In the movie the narrator buys anything he sees in a catalog or on the internet that he likes. They dictate how he lives. When his apartment is destroyed, he cares and is upset that all his things are ruined. Through the movie he comes to realize that he doesn’t need these things; they are useless. He can own them, but he doesn’t need to care for them because he can’t let them own him.
Marla. She was owned by the meetings that she went to. When the narrator went, he went to see pain and to for one night at a time feel as if he only had a short time to live and feel sorry for what he was missing. He also got glimpses into the lives of people who really actually were dying. Marla, however, let the meetings take her over. She started living like the people there were. She lived with the mindset that she was actually diseased. When she was on the phone with the narrator, she was talking about how she was trying to kill herself; it’d be easier and take away all the pain. She felt she was diseased already. Then the second time that she calls the narrator and thinks that she has a tumor in her breast, she is I think falling into the trap of thinking she’s diseased to the point where she wants to so that she has an excuse to feel the way she does. It’s like in Notes from Underground when the underground man thinks that he has something wrong with his liver, he’s just using it to put the hurt on. He’s using it as a prop to explain why he feels so sick. His real sickness is what’s around him. Marla is in essence the sickness to the narrator in the movie.
She affects him and makes him feel awful. At the end of the movie he starts to come to terms with her and it’s basically him accepting his disease. Like the underground man, he is recognizing his place and himself in the midst of everything.
I think that Tyler is the narrator’s disease. Even though Tyler helps him understand how he “should be”, he also somewhat destroys the narrator. Physically because of the fighting, and mentally because he’s actually just an alter- ego of the narrator. The killing of Tyler at the end is symbolically killing that part of the narrator that isn’t what he’s meant to be.
I was going to, and in fact started to write in my journal, about the macho attitude prevalent in Fight Club. However, I think I’d like to take part of that and explore it instead.
Pain. Why pain? Why fight physically? “How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?” Tyler asks. “I don’t want to die without scars.” I do. But maybe that’s the difference between Mr. Durden and me. Between myself and the Underground Man; I don’t need any golden pins stuck in me, thanks, or anyone else for that matter. The men in Fight Club fought the way they did because…why? That’s what I can’t figure out. It releases something, but it was not until he was trying to stop fighting that Fight Club’s narrator realized something. All the things he wanted to do but could not manifested themselves into a macho, aggressive persona: Tyler Durden. It was Tyler who made him face the pain in the beginning, perhaps because he would never go looking for it himself. When he asks the narrator to hit him, as hard as he can, the narrator at first refuses, but then relents, punching Tyler, in the ear, with all his might.
But, because as the narrator says at one point, Tyler always had a plan, we go with it, trusting the violence will resolve itself in some way. The very beginning of the movie should have been a red flag. The thing is, perhaps Tyler was just helping the narrator. “What did you want to be?” he asked that one man he was holding at gun point. Upon finding out, he told him he had to do it or else he would kill him. That’s how Tyler Durden works. When he was driving down the train tracks towards the train, he says, “If you were to die, how would you feel about your life?” The men in his ‘army’ respond right away, with things they wished they done but the narrator is at a loss. It would not matter, anyways, because when faced with pain that is not a natural response. They are trying to make it so they cannot understand pain. They do not have names, they have nothing to lose…”This is not the worst thing.” But is that healthy?
I understood the Underground Man so much more with his complaints about his liver. At least he acknowledged it, like the narrator on meeting Marla; “When people think you’re dying, they really,really listen.” It may not be brave, but that is not the point. Neither is bringing pain on oneself or others because one deems it necessary. Nirvana cannot be reached through pain. Maybe nirvana was the cave at the beginning, I don’t know. I just know that men like Tyler Durden, the men of action, solely of action, are the foolish ones. The problem is, to achieve the balance the Underground Man was looking for, between the man of action and the man of thought, a man must go through both. That is what the narrator does in Fight Club. The danger is going too far one way, which is Tyler, which is pain. He was too extreme, which the narrator acknowledged, especially when he finally acknowledged that he was Tyler. I’ve never understood that expression, “Pain is just weakness leaving the body,” because the man of thought is not weak, and I would say that the man of action, the one who fights, is just irresponsible.
Anya--
I would argue that Marla Singer is the only real character in Fight Club. Whether the narrator is himself, Tyler Durden, or pretending to be Cornelius, Marla is the constant. She represents everything that the narrator wants for himself.
Although she is seen as unstable, she is one of the most put together people in the movie. Marla has an identity of her own and an unchanging name. Unlike the narrator who is constantly changing his identity or Bob who looses his identity, Marla is sure of who she is. However she is the narrators female counter part but she happens to be conscious of her problems unlike the narrator. They both need other peoples emotions to live, but Marla is aware of this need, while the narrator tries to reject his problem.
The narrator at first detests Marla because she is everything he wants to be, living without caring. The narrator at first is so consumed by material items, things such as dining sets that will define him, and a respectable wardrobe. He is trying so hard to have the right things, and the acceptable things, while Marla has disregarded all of society’s values and is living for herself. That is why Tyler is able to be with Marla but the narrator is not. He creates Tyler as a way to be close to Marla. With his life focused of material things and working at his cubicle job, Marla was not an acceptable person for him to be with but Tyler, who has nothing to loose, can be with her because they are both living on the outskirts of society.
The closer the narrator comes to Marla, the more he realizes that he is not real without her. As he looses control and the truth of Tyler is revealed to him, he is aware that he needs Marla, that he has cared for her all along. No matter who that character is he needs Marla to be real. Because Marla is the truth in the narrators life, he is unable to face her at first. He feared what he might discover if he got close to her. Because Marla was a constant, she seemed at first to be a constant problem, but we soon learn that she is to solution. In the end, when the narrator has lost everything, even Tyler, he finds Marla and its seems everything will be ok.
Daniel Davis
(Couldn't get login to work)
I'm sorry that this is so late, and I would not be surprised if first quarter has already closed. Still, I have something that I thought was interesting, so I will say it despite my likely zero.
Marla and Tyler (IKEA Tyler, not Nihilist Tyler) both went to the support groups for problems they did not have. Both characters were clearly unsatisfied by the phony, melodramatic aspect of everyday human interaction. For both, the solution was to spend time around people who were either dying or people who probably wished they were. The hopeless people that populated these support groups were staring reality in the face. For better or for worse, this removes the phony layer of acting and feigned emotions that prevent us from truly seeing each other. As they described it, "When people think you're dying, they actually listen to you..." "...rather than just waiting for their turn to speak."
The thing that I find to be fundamentally significant here is the fact that Marla is clearly very different than (IKEA) Tyler. He is sincere, she in nonchalant; he is engaged, she in detached; he dresses like a normal person, she dresses like only Helen Bonham Carter can. While they may both be filling the same emotional need at the support groups, I cannot imagine Tyler and Marla get the same thing out of them.
Tyler sits in the support group as another dying person. He lets them assume he is dying, he cries with them, and he joins them in guided meditation. His existential crisis is essentially a positive one; he goes to be reminded that life has an inherent value, and that the emotions associated with legitimate human interaction are meaningful. I would think he leaves the support groups each night farther from bottom than he was prior to going.
Marla is a completely different story. Marla goes to the support groups to be reminded of the ultimate meaningless of everything. Not only is she irreverent towards the suffering she witnesses, but she is actively disrespectful. She sits in the back, serving as a nihilistic reminder: you're dying, no one cares. While Tyler's visits to the support groups serve as a reminder that his life is meaningful, Marla's remind her that even in their death throes, people are fundamentally insignificant particles.
Post a Comment