A Review of Fight Club: Duality, Delusion, and the Crisis of the Self

At its core, Fight Club (1999) is a film about duality: masculine self-invention and self-destruction, chaos and control, and reality and delusion. The film's ability to reckon with these dualities simultaneously serves as a testament to its cinematic excellence. The protagonist (Edward Norton), whose name is never revealed, is introduced as a man who follows the same mundane routine and blindly buys into consumerism. He spends his nights scrolling through IKEA catalogs and attending support groups for illnesses he does not have, simply to feel something. His boredom with everyday life is not extraordinary. His life could be best compared to a robot: following the orders of society without a second thought.

Enter Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a flamboyant anarchist who bursts into the narrator’s life. Tyler embodies everything that the main character is not: physical, spontaneous, anti-establishment, and confident. Together, they create Fight Club—an underground movement that helps men escape their mundane lives through bare-knuckled violence. The fighting scenes are grotesque and disturbing, but director David Fincher is able to draw the line that allows the scenes to be undeniably captivating. Fincher dedicates the perfect amount of screen time to fighting scenes so that viewers experience the gory nature of Fight Club without needing to stop watching the movie. 

However, to fully grasp what Fight Club is trying to convey, we must understand that at its heart, the film is about a single protagonist and how he mentally escapes from the shackles of modern life. We move along with the main character as his grip on reality slips and the movie’s plot twist finally surfaces: Tyler is not a real person. He is a projection, a split in the protagonist’s psyche, that was created through hatred and dissatisfaction with life. Once the plot twist is ultimately revealed, viewers are left rethinking about the entire film: every punch, speech, and act of destruction that we now know was because of only one man. Although the hallucination plot twist is well-known now, at the time of Fight Club’s release, it was a poignant reminder that what we thought was real can often be a figment of our imagination.

The slow deterioration of the protagonist’s mental state is mirrored in the quiet downfall of Fight Club itself. We see how as Fight Club slowly begins to spiral out of control—such as the pivotal moment when Meatloaf, a member of Fight Club, gets shot and killed on a mission—the movement transforms from a form of personal liberation into a violent cult of destruction, exposing how the narrator’s fractured identity fuels the continuous cycle of chaos and psychological breakdown. Additionally, Fincher utilizes multiple film techniques such as jarring jump cuts, breakdowns of the fourth wall, and film grain to mirror the protagonist’s psychological state of mind. What starts as a rebellious brotherhood slowly starts to evolve into a fascist cult—for example, when Tyler begins assigning ranks and having members shave their heads and give up their identities in complete devotion to their cause. Personal liberation takes on the forms of domestic terrorism. The number one rule, “Do not talk about Fight Club,” becomes sacred. Tyler, initially a source of freedom, becomes a dictator. This dangerous change in Fight Club is both parallel to the protagonist’s psychological state but also a direct result of it. As the protagonist takes on the role of Tyler more and more, the beliefs of Fight Club become more distorted.

One of the film’s most impactful scenes is not in one of the structured fights that Fight Club hosts, but in a parking lot. The protagonist (but portrayed through Tyler) holds a convenience store clerk at gunpoint and forces him to confront death. “Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel’s life,” Tyler declares. Tyler knew all along that he was not going to shoot the store clerk: he wanted the clerk to wake up the next morning with a new sense of purpose and appreciation for life after thinking he could’ve died. In this twisted moment of awakening, Fincher inserts a strange desire for authenticity—for living deliberately and appreciating life.

The film’s final scenes are iconic: the protagonist, now fully aware of his fractured psyche, puts a gun in his own mouth and fires. Tyler disappears and corporate office buildings explode in chaos as Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” plays. The narrator, bloodied but alive, reaches his hand out to his primary love interest, Marla. While the film has focused mostly on the internal mental state of the protagonist, this scene is symbolic of the first real human connection that he makes throughout the entire movie. This scene brings the entire film down-to-earth as viewers can witness what Tyler and the protagonist’s actions have all come down to. They stare out at a crumbling skyline together, and viewers are left seeing the tangible result of a mind that has spiraled out of reality. 

The film exposes the dangers of unchecked masculinity while also acknowledging simultaneously that such a thing can be alluring. Fincher is somehow able to, amid all the blood, smoke, and philosophical monologues, offer a strangely hopeful truth: in order to become the versions of ourselves we aspire to be, we must confront the versions of ourselves we have tried to suppress.

Nicole Au is a freshman at Columbia University studying Psychology and Film. When not sharing her love of film, she likes to bake, paint, find new food spots in the city, or do jigsaw puzzles. While a cinephile, she especially loves any movies starring Tom Hanks. 

@nicoleeen.au