Psychological Action Film "Fight Club"

Fight Club does has no specific genre but it is a deep psychological action film, which includes dramatic and thriller elements. In the movie, narrator has an easy, well-paid desk job but lives an empty and meaningless life with no family, friends, or goals. In addition, he suffers from insomnia and the empty consumer culture that he and those in a similar position have rapidly started to inherit.

He frequently visits local disease groups in order to form relationships with others and get rid of his insomnia. One day, he meets a magnetic stranger named Tyler Durden on a plane and begins to admire his qualities.

Soon after he meets Tyler, there is an explosion in the narrator’s apartment; the narrator ends up moving to Tyler’s place and they become close friends. With Tyler’s leadership, they form their own secret society called Fight Club, where young and middle-aged men brutally fight each other let go of their frustrations. Durden’s vices against capitalist society are further emphasized in his remark, “We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie astars and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re just learning this fact..” Tyler Durden aligns himself with Adorno and Horkheimer’s thought processes, basing most of their ideas on the negative effects of the capitalist system, not the whole picture. Adorno and Horkheimer in The Culture Industry identify the source of these negative effects in popular culture and the ‘culture industry’. They pinpoint these as reasons for people’s passive satisfaction and lack of interest in overthrowing the oppressive capitalist system. The culture industry forces people’s emotions and actions through certain accepted values; there is no place for unique ideas or behaviors. For instance, the narrator lacking a name is an obvious way of claiming that no one is special in consumerist society; a name will not even make you different, so there is no point in including one.

Fight Club is analyzed superbly when Adorno and Horkheimer discuss that the culture industry is a clever dictator. It does not exert any physical power over people. Yet, people may have serious “invisible” mental problems or unconsciously waste their qualities to behave according to popular values. Tyler Durden recognizes this systematic human error and tries to correct it with Project Mayhem. However, he becomes what he set out to destroy. Project Mayhem morphs from the wild fight clubs to a full-fledged dictatorship over those in the group. Durden exerts his mental power over the “maggots” in Project Mayhem by repeatedly assaulting them both physically and mentally.