Philosophy, Film, and Flight Club: An Undergraduate Response Paper

When thinking about how to respond to a film like Fight Club, I decided it would be best to concentrate, as Stanley Cavell suggests, on the moment I emerged from our imaginary "theatre," i.e., the classroom. As I walked down the hall, out of the building, down the path to the parking lot and my car, I found myself trying to imagine myself in such a world as Tyler's. I would look at the faces of the people passing me, wondering just how I could ever really be sure that they were not another alter ego of mine, just as Tyler was to his counterpart. Or equally, how could I be sure that I wasn't someone else's alter ego also? And seeing as how Tyler was a product of all of his counterpart's dreams, goals, and desires, I found myself wondering just what dreams, goals, and desires I had that serve to shape my own existence. But how could simply a collection of goals, etc. be sufficient for one's existence? Surely there must be more to one's identity than those things. And yet, as I emerged from the classroom and studied the faces of those passing me in the hall, it was easy to imagine myself in a world similar to that depicted in Fight Club, or that in The Matrix, in which there is purely a mental component to some, if not all, of the external world. The faces of people, for the first ten or fifteen minutes or so after leaving the room, seemed to be almost animated. And it was easy to imagine that they were all products of a mind as delusional as Tyler Durden's. It was almost as if the world I was viewing was part of the sequence in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? that we viewed in class during the first week of the semester. Thus, for me, Fight Club, presented a serious skeptical problem about the identities of myself and others, in a manner similar to the Cartesian "evil demon," deceiving one's mind into believing that there is in fact both an external world and of other minds, i.e., solipsism.

As mentioned in the handout, the repetitive sequence of violence is reminiscent of the "death of death" in later westerns. It is the east vs. west, and civil vs. barbaric contest that perpetuates the violence in Fight Club. The scene that seems to illuminate this claim is the one in which Tyler shoots himself to rid himself of his alter ego. It is this death of the violent and savage side that connects Fight Club to the east vs. west theme in many of the westerns we have viewed, especially when it is remembered that the alter ego is the one who began the violence by a request that Tyler hit him. It is this desire for a return to a savage Hobbesian state of nature that spurs the creation of Tyler's alter ego in the face of so much seemingly mundane and pacifist culture.

My interest now turns to the moment of realization that Tyler Durden had when first realizing that his alter ego was in fact himself. It made me reflect both on clues earlier in the film that they were in fact the same person, and on certain moments in my life when I have had a very strong convicting realization of consciousness. For example, in the film, Tyler notices his alter ego's briefcase and seems startled that they are in fact the same. There were countless other clues throughout the film, such as the discovery that Tyler's apartment had been destroyed by a homemade explosive device, i.e., his alter ego's claim to fame, so to speak. Thus the film's true nature can only be realized at the end (or death, perhaps?), suggesting yet another layer in which the film may be referring to death and savagery as an ideal. While thinking about the nature of Tyler's realization, I found it to be very similar to certain moments I've had in which my own consciousness seems to leap out at me from a world of inanimate matter, seeming to be nothing short of a miracle that I am in fact here to view the world at all when so many other collections of matter are forever condemned to lifelessness. Thus Tyler's realization of a whole new level of consciousness can be plainly seen as a metaphor for mankind's self realization that so separates us from other collections of matter and also is one of the seeds to the creation of the philosophic art. That moment of Tyler's transcends either of Tyler's two alter egos, in effect, simultaneously solidifying his own existence, while leading to the "death of death" that is alluded to in the film.

So what makes a film like Fight Club so appealing to us as philosophers? Because Tyler Durden's alter ego must wage a war against reason in order to achieve a return to his desired state of nature, philosophers are exactly the types of people that such a war must be waged against. Is Fight Club then to be viewed as a sort of challenge to the rationalistic thinking that we philosophers claim to hold so highly? It is this question that leads my reflections back to Hitchcock's The Birds and the attack on order and reason that was symbolized by the mass bird attack in conjunction with the order that is symbolized by the school and the symmetry of the jungle gym. It seems that Fight Club is on some level trying to achieve the same thing as The Birds: taking revenge against the harm done to the state of nature by reason.