Fight Club and its rejection of Nihilism and Toxic Masculinity
Fight Club is one of the things that influenced my edgy and Nihilistic teenage years. Its themes are so easy to be misunderstood and that’s why I myself, misunderstood it.
I think the reason why the message of the movie is so easy to misinterpret is because of its charismatic villain, Tyler Durden. The main character’s split personality.
Tyler Durden doesn’t care what other people think. He is Anti Consumerism/Anti- Establishment. He makes the main character and us, the audience, question our lives. He tells us how the things we own end up owning us. He tells us how we work for jobs that we hate so we can buy the things we don’t need. He even threatens to (falsely)kill a grocery store cashier if he does not follow his dream to be a Veterinarian and tells him his life is ending one minute at a time, just so he would not settle for mediocrity. To be fair, the things he says are kind of true. That’s why my younger self felt enlightened when I first watched it.
I think a lot of people think the movie’s message is to embrace Tyler’s idea of Nihilism and Anarchy. to embrace destruction because life is meaningless anyway. But the film’s ending disproves that. As the movie progresses, we see Tyler Durden become more of an Extremist with his ideas. He is willing to blow up buildings with people in them just to prove something. That’s the effect of the adrenaline rush that we feel when we think we’re “awake” and everybody else is not. We think we could never be wrong.
This is what happens when Intellect is not balanced with humility. We become like Tyler Durden. We feed our ego so much that we always want to prove we’re always right and everyone else is wrong. or That we’re enlightened and everyone is a sheeple. We only care about proving how smart and right we are to other people.
Towards the end of the movie, the main character shoots himself to kill his split personality, Tyler Durden. It symbolizes his rejection of his Nihilistic past self which is Tyler. In the end, he also rejects Tyler’s toxic masculinity and in a way finds a middle path between mindless consumerism and the self destructive Nihilism he created in order to escape his boring middle class life.
Watching the movie, as I grew older. I’ve realized that I had the same conclusion when it comes to Nihilism. I also rejected it like the main character, because I realized that we have the power to give meaning to our lives and that the chance of us existing was so improbable that it is kind of a miracle that we even exist. We can grow and share the meaning that we create with the people we love.
that’s how we paint the blank canvas of life . We ourselves have the power to give it color.
