Tyler Durden Lost! Fight Club 15 Years On
“Of course he lost,” you say. “He ends up with a giant hole in the back of his head!” But Fight Club concludes with Durden’s Project Mayhem successfully resetting everyone to zero. In the world of the film, Tyler Durden wins, even though he is dead. (He even slips in one last “nice, big cock” posthumously into the film). While Durden’s anarchy club might’ve followed through and ultimately succeeds in getting the Narrator to a more Durden-esque life like he was manifested to do, Tyler Durden still lost in the real world.
Durden would be disgusted with this world fifteen years after Fight Club!
Corporations have never been more powerful, people have never been more dependent on the things they own, and his army of blue collar/middle class space monkeys have even less to lose. Durden’s dream of upending the corporate stranglehold on defining our lives is entirely still relevant, but I think fewer and fewer people would be interested in joining him as the years have gone by.
This isn’t entirely the people’s fault. Our current media landscape often obfuscates the sort of things that really matter on a daily basis, but technology today allows people to focus on the bullshit easier than ever. The problem is that nobody really wants to look.
I wonder how this film resonates with younger people today and how much they take away from the film other than it being pretty cool and entertaining? Fight Club is still a damn fine movie that entertains from start to finish, and to be quite honest, I find it hard to find many flaws with it this many years later. But are people thinking critically about the film today? Ever since 1999, the film’s ideas and messages have fallen on deaf ears and been embraced by bros and assholes who think punching shit is awesome, but there is a lot to still take away from this without becoming a right wing anarchist. Fight Club doesn’t support anarchy, Durden brainwashes his Space Monkeys for control and they are all portrayed as fools, but I think viewers of today could take into consideration some of its warnings about our reliance on corporate identity and finding our own independence.
We don’t need a Tyler Durden to expose the evil underbelly of our world, we don’t need him to set us free from the structures that try to hold us back, we can see that from our fingertips, but we have become so complacent with the corporate structure that more people just seem to accept it.
Apple has created an entire segment of our population that feels such a sense of identity for a product, that they will buy a new iWhatever every year, no matter how much better it is. We side with corporations, we believe everything they spoon feed us, all while the majority of them will do anything they can to make as much money as possible. Corporations don’t care about anything but your dollar, but we feel the need to defend them until it is next to impossible not to. We run towards the next big corporate thing, where Durden was ready to run away.
Durden laments about how his generation has had no war, no great depression, but in the fifteen years since we have had a never ending war and a “great recession.” Again, Durden would be appalled by how these events defined the people that lived through them, as the corporations and elites used both plights to increase their wealth while the common folk fail to recover. The people Durden fights for had little to no control over their fates, and while I am sure this would inspire Durden even more, the apathy listed above would probably lead to few followers.
Project Mayhem might have succeeded, but Tyler Durden has lost his war for now.
by Zac Oldenburg
