obscurum per obscuri | General | 11 August 2004, 11:56pm
"Tyler, you are by far the most interesting single-serving friend I've ever met."
-the Narrator
Tyler Durden is a revolutionary. He is a man who walks through puddles and rides a tricycle indoors in his underwear. Instead of answering his phone, he uses the callback feature. He lives in a run-down house and makes explosives in his basement.
He had never been in a fight until he convinced the Narrator to hit him for no reason. Tyler's philosophy of life is simple and unique: you can't be happy until you hit bottom. In reality, Tyler's physical form is a hallucination of the Narrator.
The "real" Tyler durden is the Narrator himself. Everything he sees Tyler do, he himself is actually doing, without ever realizing it. Oddly, Tyler knows that he and the Narrator are the same person; upon meeting Tyler, when the Narrator points out that he and Tyler have identical briefcases, Tyler only smirks.
The Narrator even has doubts at times as to who is the living human being and who is the hallucination.
Tyler's Professions
He makes his soap from human fat stolen from the trash outside liposuction clinics; oddly enough, the women who tend to buy the soap are those who would also get liposuctions. As the movie states, Tyler is "selling rich women their own fat asses back to them."
Working in the theater gives Tyler the opportunity to splice frames of pornography into family movies, while as a waiter, he urinates in the food. Not to mention what he does to the cream of mushroom soup...
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obscurum per obscuri | General | 11 August 2004, 11:49pm
A house full of condiments and no food
At the beginning of the movie, the Narrator defined himself through his possessions. He obtained things one item at a time, buying objects that he thought would reflect who he was as a person. In reality, he was shaping his personality to be the kind of person who would own the things he had. Among the things he owned was a round table whose top was painted with a giant yin-yang.
This table symbolized what was lacking in the Narrator's life: balance, something that a coffee table couldn't replace. This is shown rather clearly after the table is blasted out of his condo by Tyler's explosives.
After the explosion, the Narrator sees his refrigerator lying on the street outside, full of ketchup and mustard. He comments, "How embarrassing. A house full of condiments and no food." This illustrates what his possessions really were: condiments.
There was nothing substantial in the persona he tried to build through them. Even after he has gone to live with Tyler, the Narrator continues to present what he owned to the outside world as himself. He tells the dectective who called, "That was not a bunch of stuff that got destroyed, it was me." Of course, the Narrator immediately adds to himself, 'I'd like to thank the Academy,' but the very fact that he would even jokingly define himself by what he owned shows that he hasn't really changed.
In the scene where "Tyler" beats himself up in his boss' office, there is a flash of the business cards on the desk. It is very quick, about 5-10 frames. It is toward the end of the scene, where "Tyler" is crawling, all bloodied, toward his boss.
If you use the pause button, you'll notice "FMC" in large letters across the front of the card. I'm sure this is a play on the Ford Motor Company, but in smaller letters on the card it says "Federated Motor Corporation."
It's pretty neat, it has an address, telephone number and even e-mail address."
I find the business card itself pretty clever... "Compliance & Liability Division"? If you look closely, you'll notice that no state is given . . . and that the zip code has six digits. The phone numbers have the classic 555 area codes. The domain of the email address, "telnex.com," is registered but I couldn't pull up a website for them.
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obscurum per obscuri | General | 11 August 2004, 11:36pm
This blog is meant to be the starting point of an interaction for all Fight Club Fans in Hyderabad ( if such do exist ).
For those who havent watched the movie, maybe you should rent it this weekend and come back later to discuss.
For those of you you have watched it. Lets talk.
Email thoughts to obscurum_per_obscurius@yahoo.com
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obscurum per obscuri | General | 11 August 2004, 2:35pm
There are three ways to make napalm...
Before the Narrator actually "meets" Tyler, he sees him in brief, one-frame flashes, representing Tyler's development in his mind. Below is a list of these appearances.
- Tyler is standing in front of the copier at the Narrator's company, as the Narrator says, "Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy."
- When the Narrator goes to the doctor for his insomnia, Tyler appears as the doctor tells him to go to the testicular cancer support group. As the doctor says, "That's pain," Tyler is standing just over his shoulder, laughing.
- At the support group, when the leader says "really open ourselves up," Tyler is smirking and leaning against him with his arm around him.
- After the Narrator confronts Marla and is watching her walk away, Tyler appears in his line of vision, smoking.
- In the Pressman Hotel welcome video, Tyler is the waiter on the far right. (Thanks to Caite!) This appearance isn't actually subliminal. The Narrator, as Tyler, really did work at the Pressman Hotel, so he would have appeared in the video.
- Tyler is riding down an escalator as the Narrator is riding up in an airport.
In the beginning there are quick flashes of Tyler in the back ground. I counted 3 of them in different times. Later in the movie they explained the projectionist job that Tyler had and how he put pornographic clips in family movies. Do you think those two things have anything in common?"
The characters are aware that they are in the movie (Tyler's references to "flashback humor," etc.), and Tyler DID splice a porn clip in at the end, so it's very likely that he put himself in as well.
So why did the bullet kill Tyler but not the Narrator? My own theory is that Tyler was destroyed because the Narrator hit bottom when he was so unafraid of death that he was able to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger. The Narrator no longer needed Tyler because he had hit bottom, and he had become Tyler."
One more question I think what I thought about with great consideration what does Tyler Durden or the Narrator look like, Edward Norton or Brad Pitt. It doesn't show you clearly you just assume that he looks like Edward Norton because Tyler dies but there are different scenes that make me think he really looks like Brad Pitt.
I always assumed that he looked like Norton, but WANTED to look like Pitt... like in the one scene where the Narrator and Marla are walking past a movie theater, and the marquee says "Seven Years In Tibet." So obviously Brad Pitt "exists" in the world of the movie.
I just thought that the Narrator would want to look like him. (Like Tyler says, "I look like you wanna look.") Also, in the Narrator's flashbacks, he sees himself performing Tyler's actions, which suggests that he looks like Norton.
In Jungian psychology, Tyler is the narrator's Shadow figure, a mental archetype meant to represent all qualities the narrator represses in his daily life. As the narrator's satiric comments on the overrefined sensitivity of the world he lives in make obvious, the rough, brutal, primordially masculine side of the narrator becomes thought of as "evil" and repressed.
While the narrator appears to be the mild mannered, politically correct young man our culture idealizes ("I used to be such a nice guy"), in fact the rough, masculine qualities are becoming so repressed and so concentrated that they eventually reimmerge and take over his life in the figure of Tyler Durden.
As the popularity of the Fight Club makes obvious, many males have similar repressed Shadow Figures ("a guy you met at Fight Club wasn't the same guy you met on the streets") Fight Club allows the masculine Shadow side to vent. Because our culture, while repressing masculinity, also glamorizes it in figures such as the beefy figures of the likes of Fabio, the narrator's instant admiration ("You are without a doubt the most interest single-serving friend I've met") becomes understandable.
Tyler comments that "we have no war, we have no depression"-in times of war or depression, the rough, primordial, violent side of human nature is offered a socially acceptable outlet. The Tyler Durdens in the Gen Xers who fill up Fight Club have no socially acceptable outlet."
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