The Story
The Art of Fighting: "Fight Club’s" 10-Year Anniversary
The blockbuster "Fight Club" premiered on Blu-Ray DVD last week in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the film’s debut.
I have a kind of moral aversion to most Hollywood productions, but "Fight Club" is a standout exception: it’s the best movie I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, I missed out on the first nine years of its existence, since I only discovered this masterpiece last October.
It feels like much more than a year has passed since I sat on the edge of my couch in a dark room at 2:00 in the morning, finishing "Fight Club" for the first time. Perhaps that’s a sign of the impact the film had on my outlook on life.
As ridiculous as it sounds, I think "Fight Club" has some very insightful and relevant things to say about the world. So, I’m going to show some audacity and break this classic club’s first two rules: let’s talk about "Fight Club."
The film is an intimate look at the life of a nameless, urban-middle-class male. He lives alone in a condo, kept company only by the furniture he buys from catalogs. Looking to escape his isolated, complacent lifestyle, this man begins to join various support groups; for example, he sometimes attends meetings for tuberculosis patients.
Our nameless character eventually meets Tyler Durden, an eccentric bohemian. The two encounter each other by chance at various times, leading to a conversation at a bar one night. As the two leave the bar, Tyler throws out an idea for an experiment: he tells his nameless, condo-dwelling pal to hit him as hard as he can.
The request is met; then the two fight. They fight like wild animals, throwing punches to the ribs and roundhouses to the head. They fight until blood flows freely and their hands fall limp at their sides.
And it feels great.
Suddenly, all the support groups mean nothing, their effects completely muted by the rush of fighting. The new, two-person therapy group grows and transforms into a nationwide organization.
While most people I know are repulsed by the idea of watching two people tear each other apart, fighting as a means of therapy makes sense to me. Punching someone for no reason feels so utterly ridiculous, but at the same time it feels poetic, completely appropriate from a literary perspective.
I believe that there are two reasons why these guys fight.
First, fighting is instinctual. Going back to our ancestral roots, the ability to defend oneself on a physical level was of utmost importance; any person lacking the ability to fight had trouble surviving in the hostile environment of early humanity. Today, we suppress that instinct. At best we channel it in things like sports or gym workouts.
Society at large sees fighting as a truly negative thing, if not a criminal act (which is reasonable).
We try our best to avoid things like armed robberies or warfare because, by and large, they have highly negative impacts.
But I don’t think that a person-to-person fistfight is negative on the whole.
I have yet to experience a real fight myself, but from my limited experience in physical altercations I can make certain guesses as to what it feels like.
Namely, a fight shows a true person. The inner soul is bared, all pretense stripped away by adrenaline and instinct. In a fight, we see whether or not a person has the ability to take a hit with pride or has the guts to strike another person. Or, more importantly, has the self-control to show mercy.
Once we’ve been thrown into our basest state, this instinctual craze, we can define ourselves quite easily.
If only on a theoretical level, a fight shows who a person is. Yet, fighting is taboo in our culture. As our nameless friend notes in the film, “most people will do anything they can to avoid a fight.”
But it’s important for us to define ourselves, so we do it in other ways. As students at the College of William & Mary, we define ourselves based on our ability to gain admittance to a relatively selective school. We define ourselves by our majors, our activities and our grades and then one day we’ll define ourselves by our jobs, the homes we live in and the money we make.
"Fight Club" isn’t about fighting; it’s about identity. And how relevant that is today! Think of the times when we define ourselves as the things we are on the surface, hiding a completely different self underneath it all.
The characters in "Fight Club" have an interesting remedy for their self-denial: they incinerate all their worldly belongings and move into an abandoned house.
While that’s not an entirely practical solution, we can free ourselves by worrying about what really matters in life. Importance is completely relative, but in my experience the truly important things in life are usually evident.
Life is difficult when we want ourselves to be something else or when we look in the mirror and see something we don’t want to be. A part of me thinks that it would be better to just cut loose every now and again and went at each other. Maybe then we’d be comfortable with ourselves.
So, come on: hit me as hard as you can.
Max Cunningham is a staff columnist for The DSJ. His views do not necessarily represent those of the entire staff.