The Life Lessons of Fight Club — a Romcom for the Neurotic (Jungian Analysis)

Prepping to pick my life back up from ruins I rewatched my favourite romantic comedy that is Fight Club, this time armed with a deeper understanding of Jungian psychology and narrative. So, on this occasion, here’s an analysis!

I am not going to bore you with the dry details of Fincher’s cult classic. Knowing what year a movie came out in or how much cash it pulled sometimes does offer insight, but none of it interests me here right now. Instead, I’ll be diving straight into the Jungian concepts that this movie uses to structure its story and deliver its wisdom, so SPOILER ALERT — if you haven’t seen this film yet, maybe go watch it? It’s really good.

The genre bender

If you’ve seen it, you may understandably be thinking: “a romantic comedy? What the mother of clickbait is this?!”

Well, let me quote the film’s unnamed narrator, who at the beginning proclaims “it all has something to do with a girl named Marla Singer.” You see, that is the real crux of this movie, the one that bookends the protagonist’s journey and the key to understanding how to interpret what is actually happening in Fight Club.

Forget what you think you know about this film, dear reader, this is an archetypal rom-com with David Fincher’s unique, dark perspective and a dash of sociopathy.

It goes like this: boy is stuck in his boring old life that is going nowhere. Boy meets girl who lives in a completely different world than the one he exists in. Boy meets a magical friend who takes him on a journey to become the person he needs to be to join the girl in that fascinating world of hers.

While we’re on that subject, remember the sequence where our Hero confronts Marla about coming to all his support groups? The way she crosses the street and the cars just pass by at full speed, she pays them no mind and yet none of them touches her in an almost cartoonish fashion. This trick serves to show us that she exists almost in a whole other dimension than our protagonist. He’s fascinated by Marla and her ability, shown here quite satirically through his eyes, to live in the moment without any fear of consequences. Yet he cannot hope to join her there, he’d surely die if he tried to follow her, wouldn’t he?

On the other hand, we’ve just seen her inside his mental cave during the meditation session, so there is definitely a strong desire for connection — if not the protagonist’s own, then his psyche’s for sure.

That is the core problem in this narrative, the one that kickstarts our Hero’s journey and the entire plot. In Jungian terms, the Hero’s anima took on Marla’s form to guide him out of the rut he is in, but he can’t hope to be with her because of the rut he is in. That’s our tension right here, two extremely strong, opposing psychic forces.

The mind’s solution

So what other Jungian archetypes does a human psyche have to give us a push in the right direction? Well, there is the shadow self — the part we suppress or are in denial of, that often also has idealized (though not in any moral sense) qualities — and then there’s the trickster. The trickster is typically a being (could even be just an event but let’s not dig into that right now) that doesn’t abide by the rules of the world that it seems to inhabit. It can be a karma houdini, it gets away with stuff that we dream of doing but never do, it appears and vanishes when it’s the most convenient for it. Its purpose in the psyche is to rattle us, sow some discord when we’re held down by order, to destroy the status quo when we get too attached to it for our own good.

Enter Tyler Durden.

It bears mentioning here that knowing or guessing the so-called “twist” of Fight Club doesn’t in any way detract from the experience. If anything, being overly focused on it makes you miss out on the universal wisdoms this movie contains. Knowing about it, on the other hand, allows us to really appreciate the depth of what’s going on. After all, the movie itself plays the reveal of this twist as comedic, showing us the silliness of the Hero’s denial of his other side even though it was so obvious all along.

Tyler doesn’t beat around the bush in letting us know what his purpose is. He swiftly declares that the protagonist should hit “rock bottom” to feel who he really is. Remember, Tyler is not some demonic entity (although he is a daimonic one), he is something that the Hero’s psyche created to serve a purpose, to get him to really live life for a goddamned second and fall in love.

Marla Singer was the catalyst the Hero’s mind chose as something to draw the protagonist out of his shell. Yet when he held her in his arms he chose to push her away instead of going with his feelings. That’s the problem to which Tyler responds and his reason for existence.

Knowing that it was Tyler who blew up the Hero’s apartment gives us a glimpse into what could have been the premature ending of that story — the only thing saved from the explosion is Marla’s phone number. The Hero picks it up. He goes to a payphone, he picks up the receiver, calls her.

And then he can’t utter a single word. At this point, the Tyler Durden inside him must’ve punched his imaginary nose inwards with the force of his facepalm. The Hero then rings Tyler, symbolically (and in art symbols are the only reality) almost as a desperate call to the gods for help. And wouldn’t you know? The gods almost always answer.

Or, in this case, they *69'd him.

The entire (in)famous anti-capitalist thread of Fight Club is a subplot, really. Sure, it aged like fine wine, but it could be abstracted and turned into anything else. The point of the film is that any system, mental or societal, that keeps people unhappy, shall be opposed, because we have those powerful beings in our minds that make sure we don’t die before we truly know life.

In fact, looking at the movie through the lens of jungian narrative, capitalism in Fight Club represents the Hero’s neurotic system of values that’s killing him from outside and preventing him from living a full life (or even a convincing empty one).

In the psychoanalytical sense, we can become awakened by going up towards the Higher Self/the Divine, but when where we’re just stuck with no way up, there’s another way: death of the ego. Hitting rock bottom. That is Tyler’s declared purpose all along. As a shadow self/trickster of the protagonist’s psyche, he came up from the ether of collective unconscious to destroy the status quo in which the Hero had hidden himself away from real life.

Tyler starts Fight Club, Tyler bangs Marla, Tyler does some more crazy shit and then finally launches Project Mayhem (fun fact: the establishment, symbolizing the neurotizing influence of the superego, tries at one point to counter Tyler with Project Hope). But taking down society as we know it was never his stated goal.

I mean, just look at how many interactions the Hero has with Marla that he royally fucks up. Tyler sets it all up for him and then the protagonist’s projections and complexes make him assume the role of a child, a frenemy, and then even a friendzoned “neutral” pal. She asks him to feel her tits, goddamn it, how many clues can a guy ignore? Our Hero is so hopeless, neurotic and stubborn that his psyche has to begin destroying the world around him to make him live a little and IT STILL DOESN’T WORK!

The process

Despite the obvious magnetism of Brad Pitt’s portrayal, the latter half of Fight Club goes out of its way to paint Tyler as evil because it needs an antagonist. While he is definitely a jerk, he hasn’t really done anything truly evil that can’t be attributed to the Hero’s loathing for life itself — both his own and that of others.

“But Meat Loaf is dead!” you may exclaim, feeling sorry for the protagonist’s first real friend in this film. Well, since he symbolically represented the state of the narrator’s masculinity from the outset of the story, I’d argue he kind of had to go, but the real point is that it was the Hero’s own interference that killed him.

Tyler had a plan to only allow into Project Mayhem the people who truly knew in their minds that this was their place in the universe. When Bob/ML faced the rejection that Tyler planned for all Project Mayhem initiates, he was about to leave, which means he wouldn’t die in this story, because it truly wasn’t his natural destiny.

…but then the neurotic ego that always thinks it knows best stuck its nose in, stopping Bob, screwing it up, costing him his life as a result.

Let me switch from my movie analyst mode to a psychoanalyst one, cause that’s an understated lesson of this movie: if your inner demon manifests itself in your actions, don’t directly oppose it or you’ll be doing more harm than good.

I’ll reiterate cause this is important: our inner demons only grow stronger if we deny them their wants and I’m by no means advocating debauchery or hedonism here. See what they want and how you can give it to yourself without harming other people. Otherwise, sooner or later, you may lose control or fall into depression.

For instance, if you’re starting to be attracted to people other than your partner, the answer isn’t to give in to temptation but to see if you’re perhaps refusing to notice how your relationship is making you unhappy. Staying in denial strengthens the wants and leads us to really dark places. It’s always better, and healthier, to see where the inner demons get their strength from, and since most of us have been at some point conditioned by conservative upbringing or a restrictive religion, it’s possible that we’re denying ourselves something good and healthy to us, which then means we can’t help being drawn to what’s evil and unhealthy both to us and our surroundings.

Welp, back to interpreting the movie!

So with Bob being the only casualty of Tyler’s plans out of the equation (the Hero at one point even says the magic words “I accept responsibility”), what’s Tyler’s deal with Marla? Why does he want to kill her if his entire purpose as a psychic being was to get them together?

Well, ain’t that obvious by now that Tyler is bluffing? The Hero is a neurotic of epic proportions, nothing gets to him, the world around him is falling apart and he still refuses to see that it’s all been about HIM and HIS ATTITUDE all along. He even risks his life trying to defuse the bomb and it still doesn’t wake him up!

As such, Marla really is the final card that Tyler can play in his bid to make the Hero touch rock bottom.
The protagonist’s disregard for his own life, while we’re on the subject, was even foreshadowed in the car crash scene, when, pulling an unconscious space monkey from a flipped car, TD exclaimed “we had a near-life experience,” following it up with his signature weird laugh. What did he find so weirdly funny? Doesn’t this laugh scream of desperation, isn’t it the same one we heard when Tyler was being beaten half to death by Lou the gangster?

It was indeed desperation, because as we could glean from the narrator’s voice coldly recollecting this event, it didn’t even faze him — NOTHING WAS GETTING THROUGH TO THAT GUY!

A fincheresque angel

The movie, and perhaps the Hero’s psyche itself, plays Tyler’s exit as his defeat, but it’s anything but. His goal was to make the Hero die to become alive. In psychic symbolism, death is a return of a being to the ether it was born from. That is why there’s so much death in our art, even though we’re not serial killers: we parse it as a psychic event, not a real-world one.

Tyler finishes his nigh-impossible assignment and exits the stage with the grace of a loving father who topples down in make-believe defeat when his child shoots him with a finger gun. Truly a fincheresque angel if ever I’ve seen one.

If you think TD never cared about the protagonist’s wellbeing, remember the scene with Lou the gangster. As Lou was beating on Tyler, the narrator wanted to interfere but TD waved him away. “I’ll take this one,” he seemed to say. Now, knowing that Tyler and the Hero are the same person leads us to the realization that the alternative version of that scene wouldn’t change anything about it in the movie’s in-universe reality. Mentally, however, it would be the conscious ego facing all that pain. Tyler knew that it wasn’t the right way to lead the Hero out of his protective shell, it would push him further inside if anything. So he took it on the chin.

That’s what happens in our minds during trauma, i.e. events and pressures that we’re unable to process. Our consciousness may depart for the duration, leaving a part of itself behind with a protective being from the collective unconscious that assists us in surviving the dire circumstances. Recovering the part of ourselves that’s lost is a major goal in the process of healing from said traumas. That’s a topic for another blog post, however.

Suffice to say, in the terms of our jungian narrative that revolves around a single consciousness that drives it, Tyler was a benevolent being that had a duty to fulfil.

Tyler was the best friend a person could ever have. The kind who pushes you to do things you really want to do, who supports you — in a wise way, none of that “fairy godmother” crap; happiness is only felt at its fullest when it’s earned — to be your True Self, and then vanishes (or rather reintegrates into the psyche) when no longer needed.

We all have that kind of friend in our minds.

“I’ll drag you kicking and screaming and in the end you’ll thank me for it, like you always do,” Tyler says at one point. Look at your life’s story and see if you can find some events that could match this description.

Say hello to your best friend.

See, a lot of therapists or life coaches advise you to give your inner voice silly names when it turns into your saboteur. They convince you to try to diminish it and make it easier to ignore.

I say fuck that, therapy is wrong, civilization is wrong, it’s our human nature that is right. Almost always.

Instead, perhaps try to understand what your inner saboteur really wants to accomplish. Look past the words and surface-level images towards symbols and intents. See if you see a plan there anywhere. Truth be told, you probably won’t, but see if you FEEL a plan there anywhere. Allow yourself to imagine it. What it would be like? What could happen if the intent of that sabotage — not the contents, mind you, don’t take any criticisms seriously down there, but the goal of it — came true?

I get that it may seem scary to do that. What if the saboteur wants to show you that you’re not in the right place in the world? What if it tells you you’re not happy, not truly alive?

It’s understandable to be scared that it might be right. Shouldn’t we be more afraid of dying without first truly living, though?

Many of us on the “civilized” side of life are stuck in bullshit unnatural jobs that add nothing to the world but further suffering to someone else along the line, in the hopes of amassing a pile of paper (or, nowadays, a virtual number on a banking app) that no longer represents what it was originally supposed to. No wonder we’re scared.

I mean, you won’t find me advocating for anarchy. Sure, keep the capitalism, we need money to abstract the value each of us brings to the lives of others, but for God’s sake, our system needs to let normal people fucking LIVE!

But I digress, and we’re nearing my favourite scene in this whole magical, super-sweet movie: the get-together.

Sweet catharsis

Let’s take a minute to appreciate just how fucking incredible an ending this is. After all that’s happened, with everything going to hell and back, after the Hero finally snapped and let himself feel desperation and touched rock bottom, he says to the girl: “you’ve met me at a very strange time in my life.”
My favourite line in this movie.

Then the Pixies slowly fade in, she’s shocked at the sight of his wounds, he says “I’m okay. Trust me. Everything’s gonna be fine.” and as he utters the final word a flash denotes the beginning of the explosions.

True. Cinematic. Magic.

Perfection.

Love.

Now as I said earlier, in a jungian narrative the world the hero exists in is always more representative of his psyche than any tangible reality. That’s why art can dance along the lines of realism freely as long as it makes symbolic (i.e. psychic) sense.

And as for love, neurologists might tell you that love is a mixture of oxytocin and serotonin and whatnot. I’m not 100% sure and from what I’ve heard of the field they aren’t either, but that’s an interesting factoid when we consider drugs.

I’ve done my fair share of them, and I’ve also experienced my brain launch me into trips reminiscent of the effects of MDMA and LSD when I was totally clean. MDMA, after all, kicks your brain to pump that serotonin it’s hiding away back there. It is possible to have it released without any synthetic substances.

MDMA and, by extension, serotonin, is an easy thing to know. It makes you more accepting, loving, it’s your psyche’s integrating force. The real danger of artificial serotonin overdose is that it may make you accept a part of yourself you weren’t yet ready for. [Kids, this might cause serious harm if your mind likes to drift towards twisted things, so watch out! Don’t do drugs!]

LSD is a difficult one, I don’t feel authoritative enough on the subject to try to state facts but I always felt it had a destructive side to it, tearing things down, optimally ones that have no use and now burden the psyche, even if at some point they were beneficial.

That weird digression leads me to love, and to falling in love in particular. The butterflies in your stomach, the little changes in perception — if you’re observant enough you can even see how your standards of beauty get overwritten and adapt to the looks of the one you’re falling for (or the other way around, it’s really quite fascinating how flexible we are at perceiving things).

That sensation of vanishing of the ego, of becoming someone else, is again something that many modern therapists fight against when they work with people who were burned by love. Overindulging in it does make us defenceless against emotional vampires and other people who might abuse us. But I fear it’s a bit like giving everyone a gun cause some bad people have one, too. “Shoot or you’ll get shot” seems to be the message, while that tsunami of feelings and brain chemistry that’s launched when we fall in love is a gift from our brain/psyche/God/nature to prepare us for a wonderful adventure that every relationship should be.

It makes us more accepting of the other person as we integrate the parts of us that correspond to them, and softens our defense mechanisms to make our psychic landscape more inviting, welcoming the other person’s psyche and fusing two souls as a result. It’s beautiful.

I imagine if we fight back against it, it’s harder to iron out discrepancies later on or perhaps the potential relationship dies before it even has a chance to begin because of the unnatural distance we create when we’re on guard. But I digress.

Fight Club is a movie about an insanely neurotic person falling in love. The Hero is constantly on guard against everything, even life itself. This vision of his neurotizing psychic system is represented by overly ordered capitalistic society in the movie. Therefore, the buildings out the window in the final scenes represent his status quo, the elements of his psyche that prevented him from feeling love.

Which finally brings me to THIS:

This is what falling deeply, truly, madly in love feels like for a neurotic person. It feels like everything you’ve known, trusted and believed in was falling apart around you, and yet you somehow know it’s all gonna be fine.

Did I mention that Fight Club is my favourite romantic comedy?

~

I dedicate this post to all the Tyler Durdens in this world. To the one in my mind — I love you, man — and in the minds of all the people who may or may not know what to do with them.

And as a sidenote, if after reading all this you’re still not convinced that Fight Club can and indeed should be analyzed through a psychoanalytical lens, remember that Tyler Durden was breaking the fourth wall (“Ah, flashback humor!”) and the ending has a frame of male genitals (surely Tyler’s way of telling us “yeah and then they screwed”). Everything in Fight Club, from its opening to the end credits, screams that its universe shouldn’t be treated as any kind of objective reality. We’re seeing the world only as it is introjected by the narrator’s psyche.