Gothic Elements in Fight Club - Intro

The plot of the story of Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (both the book and the movie) are based on conflicts with the working classes and upper classes of society. Though it is never explicitly stated in the book, the narrator's "other personality" is plotting throughout the whole story to destroy the buildings of all of the credit card companies in the country, "sticking it to the man" in any way he can in the process.

This blog will be providing my evidence for this idea for both the book and the movie, as well as evidence of isolation within the plot, devolution of the main character ("Jack"), and antiquated spaces.

Works Cited

Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. Perf. Brad Pitt, Edward Norton. Fox 200, 1999. DVD.

Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996. Print.

Isolation in Fight Club Chapters 1 - 5 (Book)

In the first five chapters of fight club, we meet the narrator, "Jack." We learn that Jack suffers from insomnia: "This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you" (21).

We also learn that he cannot sleep unless he goes to support groups for people who are terminally ill and sees what "true suffering" looks like: "This should be my favorite part, being held and crying with Big Bob without hope. We all work so hard all the time. This is the only place I ever relax and give up. This is my vacation" (18), "This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom. If I didn't say anything, people in a group assumed the worst. They cried harder. I cried harder. Look up into the stars and you're gone" (22). Still, he isolates himself further at these support groups: "I never gave my real name at support groups" (19).

Jack's ability to isolate himself is threatened when another "faker" starts coming to all of his support groups. Her name is Marla. "Until tonight, two years of success until tonight, because I can't cry with this woman watching me. Because I can't hit bottom, I can't be saved. My tongue thinks it has flocked wallpaper, I'm biting the inside of my mouth so much. I haven't slept in four days" (22). Jack and Marla divide up the support groups so that they don't see each other.

After this point, it seems like Jack isn't isolated, but it really just becomes the devolution characteristic in isolation's place.

Antiquated Spaces in Fight Club

I'm just going to list the issues with Tyler and "Jack's" house, and these can be found on page 57:

•  "The shingles on the roof blister, buckle, curl, and the rain comes through and collects on top of the ceiling plaster and drips down through the light fixtures."
• "When it's raining, we have to pull the fuses. You don't dare turn on the lights."
• "The rain trickles down through the house, and everything wooden swells and shrinks, and the nails in everything wooden, the floors and baseboards and window casings, the nails inch out and rust. [...] Everywhere there are rusted nails to step on or snag your elbow on."
• "The house is waiting for something, a zoning change or a will to come out of probate, and then it will be torn down."
• "There's no lock on the front door from when the police or whoever kicked in the door."
• "There's nine layers of wallpaper swelling on the dining room walls, flowers under stripes under flowers under birds under grasscloth."
• "Our only neighbors are a closed machine shop and across the street, a block-long warehouse."

This is the house used in the movie:

This antiquated space relates directly to Jack's devolution - Only when Tyler, his "other" personality, is strong enough to be able to rent homes on his own without Jack's knowledge does this space appear in the novel.

Working Class Struggles in Fight Club, Chapters 1 - 15

After forming Fight Club, Tyler and "Jack" are servers in a hotel, where they frequently sabotage the food of the patrons, including:

• "I got mine hard and stuck it in all their orange mousses" (80). -- Jack, referring to his penis
• "[Tyler and Jack] farted on a whole cart of Boccone Dolce for the Junior League Tea" (80).
• Tyler pees in the soup in an elevator (80)

They do this, because they feel that the patrons of the hotel restaurant take advantage of them, and my evidence follows:

• "The giants, they'll send something back to the kitchen for no reason at all. They just want to see you run around for their money. A dinner like this, these banquet parties, they know the tip is already included in the bill so they treat you like dirt" (80).
• "Tyler and me, we've turned into the guerilla terrorists of the service industry. Dinner party saboteurs. The hotel caters dinner parties, and when somebody wants the food, they get the food and the wine and the chine and the glassware and the waiters. They get the works, all on one bill. And because they know they can't threaten you with the tip, they treat you like a cockroach" (81).

At the same time, Tyler also worked as a projectionist at a movie theater, where he spliced hundreds of single frames from pornographic films into hundreds of reels of family movies.

Later, "Jack" goes to his employer at the hotel while Tyler goes to his employer at the movie theater, and they both use their knowledge of what they had done against their employers to get free money. It is their way of sticking it to the man.

On Tyler's side, here is what was said:

• "Under and behind and inside everything the man took for granted, something had been growing" (112).
• "'I am trash,' Tyler said. 'I am trash and shit and crazy to you and this whole fucking world,' Tyler said to the union president. 'You don't care where I live or how I feel or what I eat or how I feed my kids or how I pay the doctor if I get sick, and yes I am stupid and bored and weak, but I am still your responsibility'" (115).

On Jack's side, here is what happened:

• "I told how I'd been peeing into the soup, farting into the creme brulees, sneezing on braised endive, and now I wanted the hotel to send me a check every week equivalent to my average week's pay plus tip. IN return, I wouldn't come to work anymore, and I wouldn't go to the newspapers or the public health people with a confused, tearful confession" (114).

The boss calls his bluff, so Jack calls a newspaper and begins to explain that over the last several months, he had been "protesting" at work. He says, "My protest is over the exploitation of the workers in the service industry" (115).

The boss grabs the phone and hangs it up and calls security, so Jack gets into a fight with himself, and frames the boss. Security walks in as Jack begs the boss not to hit him anymore, so Jack gets his pay in order to keep quiet about everything, so that the boss doesn't get in trouble for beating him.

The movie adaptation was slightly different, as this fight took place in Jack's office job, but it is still very interesting to watch.

By this point, it is very clear that there is a struggle between the working class and upper class, but they are just getting started.

Working Class Struggles in Fight Club, Chapters 16 - 30 (End)

Fight Club eventually becomes something called "Project Mayhem," which is Tyler's plan to eventually blow up every credit card building in the country, to reset everyone's financial records back to "zero" so that the working class has a chance to make something of themselves. While this isn't made very clear in the book, it is extremely clear in the film.

"Jack" describes the creation of Project Mayhem as, "When Tyler invented Project Mayhem, Tyler said the goal of Project Mayhem had nothing to do with other people. Tyler didn't care if other people got hurt or not. The goal was to teach each man in the project that he had the power to control history. We, each of us, can take control of the world" (122).

Jack says, "What Tyler says about being the crap and the slaves of history, that's how I felt. I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have. [...] I wanted the whole world to hit bottom" (123).

Project Mayhem sets out to do just that - start getting the upper class to hit bottom. They do so by doing the following:

• "One day it's in the newspaper how a team of men wearing black had stormed through a better neighborhood and a luxury car dealership slamming baseball bats against the front bumpers of cars so the airbags inside would explode in a powdery mess with their car alarms screaming" (132).
• "And one night in an uptown square park, another group of men poured gasoline around every tree and from tree to tree and set a perfect little forest fire. It was in the newspaper, how townhouse windows across the street from the fire melted, and parked cars farted and settled on melted tires" (133). 
• "Another night that Tyler didn't come home, someone was drilling bank machines and pay telephones and then screwing lube fittings into the drilled holes and using a grease gun to pump the bank machines and pay telephones full of axle grease or vanilla pudding" (133).
• "Mischief and Misinformation Committees are racing each other to develop a computer virus that will make automated bank tellers sick enough to vomit storms of ten- and twenty- dollar bills" (145).

Later, Jack describes the goal of their soap-making business: "Our goal is the big red bags of liposuctioned fat we'll haul back to Paper Street and render and mix with lye and rosemary and sell back to the very people who paid to have it sucked out. At twenty bucks a bar, these are the only folks who can afford it" (150).  This steal-from-the-rich-to-benefit-the-poor is a classic example of class tensions that is seen in Robin Hood, and the reference is even made in the book with, "That makes tonight a kind of Robin Hood thing."

Devolution in Fight Club Pre-Jack's Suspicions

Rather than focus on self improvement, Jack and Tyler begin to destroy their own lives in order to be happy. "Maybe self improvement isn't the answer [...] maybe self destruction is the answer" (49).

They form Fight Club, where men beat each other up - they do not tell each other their names or anything about them. At Fight Club, they are just humans at their most basic state. Fight Club is a way for these men to cope with the real world, and eventually leads to the formation of Project Mayhem. Jack says, "After a night in fight club, everything in the real world gets the volume turned down. Nothing can piss you off" (49). This helps him get over any anger issues he had in his workplace.

We also start getting clues that Jack and Tyler are the same person, or at least that not all is what it seems. When Tyler starts having a sexual relationship with Marla, Jack narrates, "All night long I dreamed I was humping Marla Singer" (56). Jack also later comments that, "Tyler and Marla are never in the same room. I never see them together" (65), and after Marla leaves the room, "Not a sound, not a smell, Tyler's just appeared" (68). Until the end of the story, it may seem like Tyler is a ghost, or at least that Jack is really unobservant. Either way, things do not seem right.

This is represented in the movie by showing very quick flashes of images of Tyler Durden in scenes where he has not yet been introduced.

Tyler can be seen at about 00:16 in this clip.

Tyler is smart enough to make sure that Jack doesn't reveal their secret. He insists to Jack that he shouldn't ever bring him up: "Don't ever talk about me behind my back" (72). Tyler tells Jack that if he ever talks about him, their friendship will immediately be over, but Jack is very dependent on Tyler so he will do whatever it takes not to disrupt their friendship.

Tyler even makes sure nobody in Fight Club or Project Mayhem reveals the secret to Jack, by telling them that even he himself cannot be trusted, so that when Jack is in control of his own body, nobody tells him anything or calls him Tyler Durden.

Devolution in Fight Club Post Jack's Suspicions

As Tyler becomes more and more powerful, he is able to take over Jack's body more and more, and starts flying all over the country to spread the plans of Project Mayhem. Jack becomes irritated because he never sees Tyler anymore, but he sees signs of Tyler's presence everywhere: "And Tyler was never at home, but after a month a few of the space monkeys had Tyler's kiss burned into the back of their hand" (133).

Soon, he starts breaking Tyler's rule not to talk about him, and whether they've seen him. Jack says that they reply, "No, sir. Not hardly, sir. Nobody they know's ever met Tyler Durden. Friends of friends met Tyler Durden, and they founded this chapter of fight clubs, sir. And then they wink at me" (135).

Then, "Is it true, everybody asks. Is Tyler Durden building an army? That's the word. Does Tyler Durden only sleep one hour a night? Rumor has it that Tyler's on the road starting fight clubs all over the country" (135).

Later, Jack gets a clue that his body is doing things out of his own accord, because he realizes that his hands smell like gasoline, when to his knowledge, he has only been at work today. Then he says, "Here, I'm not sure if Tyler is my dream. Or if I am Tyler's dream" (138), but at this point, he's still not completely aware of what is going on. He finds all of Tyler's plane ticket stubs, and starts going everywhere that Tyler went. Eventually, he ends up in a bar, and finds a bartender who reveals who Tyler really is to Jack: (Movie script)

                             MAN'S VOICE (O.S.)
                       (from behind Jack)
                 Welcome back, sir.

     Jack whirls, startled -- facing the wounded BARTENDER, who
     wears a NECK BRACE, his nose a smashed eggplant.

                             WOUNDED BARTENDER
                 How have you been?

                             JACK
                 ... You know me?

                             WOUNDED BARTENDER
                 Is this a test, sir?

                             JACK
                 Yes... it's a test.

                             WOUNDED BARTENDER
                 You were in here last Thursday night.

                             JACK
                 What?

                             WOUNDED BARTENDER
                 You were standing right where you are
                 now, asking how good our security is.
                 It's tight as a drum.

                             JACK
                 Who do you think I am?

                             WOUNDED BARTENDER
                 Is this part of the test?

     Jack nods slowly.  The Bartender holds up his hand, shows
     the KISS SCAR on the back of his hand...

                             WOUNDED BARTENDER
                 You're the one who did this to me.
                 You're Mr. Durden, sir.  Tyler Durden.

Once Jack realizes that Tyler is really just another version of himself, he goes back to his hotel, where he finds Tyler. Tyler begins to explain things. I don't want to spoil EVERYTHING in the book, so here is an excerpt from the movie script where Tyler explains to Jack about the situation, That Tyler is Jack when Jack is sleeping, and that he doesn't really exist:

                             JACK
                 No!  This isn't true.  We... we were
                 around other people, together, both
                 of us...

                             TYLER
                 You never talked to me in front of
                 anyone else.

                             JACK
                 Wrong, wrong -- what about the car
                 crash... the two guys in the backseat?

                             TYLER
                 What about them?  They're lunatics.

                             JACK
                 You took me to the house.

                             TYLER
                 The house is rented in your name.

                             JACK
                 You have jobs.

                             TYLER
                 Night jobs -- while you were sleeping.

                             JACK
                 What about Marla?

                             TYLER
                 What about Marla?

                             JACK
                 She's... you... you're fucking her.

                             TYLER
                 Um, well... technically, no.

     Jack stands, trying to absorb, feeling ill, trying to find
     words, then -- he suddenly FAINTS to the floor, OUT COLD.