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Richard Marley

UWRT 1101

Instructor: Malcolm Campbell

05 September 2014

A Punch to the Head: An Analysis of Fight Club (film)

1 in about 17 Americans live with a serious mental illness such as Schizophrenia or

severe depression (or both) according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI.) Fight

Club, The movie I have chosen to analyze falls into the Cerebral Drama genre. Cerebral Dramas

are famous for their flashbacks, multiple story lines, misleading information, plot twists, hidden

messages, and other tricks that are used to confuse the audience and keep them guessing until the

very end. Fight Club is a very confusing story but the general idea is that a middle class white

collar worker is depressed about his average life and how he is a slave to consumerism (making a

comment about buying things he doesn’t like to impress people he doesn’t like) and becomes

afflicted with insomnia which is even worse because of the aforementioned depression. He seeks

treatment and ends up attending cancer support groups (claiming to have the illness even though

he is healthy) to be able to vent and cry which allows him to sleep. At one of the groups he meets

a woman named Marla that follows him around and ruins his experience with the groups so he

ends up unable to sleep again and they decide to split up the groups so they don’t see each other.

After this, on a flight for a business trip the narrator meets a flamboyantly dressed, outspoken

guy named Tyler Durden. The two men end up going for drinks which leads to a fight in a

parking lot. The fight makes both of them feel like men again so they decide to make a “Fight

Club” to attain this feeling more often. The fight clubs progress into a militaristic group of men

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that are also afflicted with the same depression and sense of emptiness that the narrator feels, this

group is called “Project Mayhem.” Tyler takes over a leadership role in Project Mayhem and sets

in motion his plan for equalizing the human race… destroying major banking and credit

businesses. Toward the end of the movie and through dialogue with Marla the narrator

eventually comes to the realization that Tyler is actually himself and tries to stop the plan that his

alter ego started. The movie ends with Tyler and the narrator on the top floor of an office

building with a gun in the narrator’s mouth (being held by Tyler) the narrator decides that Tyler

isn’t real and that the gun must therefore be in his hand and not Tyler’s… then he shoots himself

in the mouth (through his cheek) and Tyler falls to the floor with a giant hole in his head. Just

then the credit and banking companies across the street explode and fall and the narrator ends the

movie with a simple line to Marla, “You met me at a very interesting time in my life.”

Other movies that belong in the Cerebral Drama genre include Memento, and Shutter

Island. These movies also exhibit many of the conventions of the genre. Memento is actually

played in reverse but you don’t catch on to that until almost the end of the movie and the main

character has a bad case of amnesia (which could be considered a mental illness.) In Shutter

Island a man believes he is a U.S Marshall and is going to this island to investigate the

disappearance of a patient at a mental facility. Throughout the movie it comes to be that he is

actually a patient at this facility and his role as a U.S Marshall was many years ago… and the

woman he was investigating the disappearance of was actually his wife whom he had murdered

years prior. These movies all involve some sort of mental illness and use plot twists, and

flashbacks, hidden messages, etc. to lull the audience into thinking one thing and then blow their

mind with the revelation that everything they thought… was wrong.

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Fight Club’s purpose is most likely to bring attention to younger audiences that we need

to stop living our lives for other people and do something that makes us happy. I feel like it

achieves that purpose by showing how toxic a lifestyle like that can be by displaying a man with

such severe issues that he created an imaginary friend, blew up his own apartment, and started

building bombs to blow up other businesses (UNKNOWINGLY!) The film is definitely directed

at a younger male audience, between the ages of 16 and 35. The director uses a number of

“tricks” to express these points. In scenes with just the narrator the color scheme is dark and dull

as opposed to scenes with Tyler where to the colors are bright and people are almost waxy

looking. There are also subliminal messages that the director put in to the movie… in 1 frame,

completely impossible to read unless you pause the movie (see image 1.) The director is using

Tyler to appeal to the audience to not end up like the narrator and I think he does a damn good

job getting his point across.

Fight Club was originally a novel written in 1996. I believe that the movie is a better

medium for getting the main point across though. Being able to see someone fall apart and place

himself back together is much more effective as a movie. During the time the movie was

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released there was some controversy over the messages that the film could portray. In 1999 the

Columbine High School Massacre happened just months before Fight Club was released (they

actually pushed the release date back because of the incident.) Many people believed that the

movie was encouraging such acts to happen again and almost inviting it.

If Fight Club were to be switched to another genre I would choose to make it an Action

movie. This wouldn’t be a hard transition but it would mean doing away with some of the themes

of mental illness and maybe even the entire plot twist involving Tyler being the narrator’s

secondary personality. Tyler would probably be the star as action flicks usually have a hero that

the story is centered around and he wouldn’t die at the end by suicide but rather in a blaze of

glory at the hands of police or something keeping with the story of him trying to destroy

businesses. Marla would also very likely be played by someone considered super attractive and

have more of a role in the movie because action movie girls tend to be overly sexualized and

very attractive. Honestly the only major change that would have to be made would be to take out

Tyler being an imaginary friend and making him a real person and Fight Club could be a

successful action movie.

I hope this analysis helped you, the reader, understand more of what Fight Club is about

and how it finds a home in the Cerebral Drama genre. From the plot twists, flashbacks, and

multiple story lines Fight Club stacks up against other similar movies quite well. I recommend

all three movies mentioned as all are massively entertaining and fun for your brain. Also, “Why

are you reading this? Do you read everything you’re supposed to read?” – Tyler