Therapist breaks down the FIGHT CLUB narrator
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- čas přidán 18. 06. 2024
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The narrator from Fight Club has an interesting psychology. In this videoessay, a therapist tries to break down Ed Norton's character from Fight Club and understand who he really is.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Intro
01:37 Repression
12:50 World Anvil
14:34 Strength & Weakness
18:46 Franchises
21:10 Destruction
MUSIC
Kupla - Genesis
Calme -- Ever So Blue
Ted Mercury x Hugo Mars x Alien Cake - Polly (Nirvana remix)
Earth Ting x Hugo Mars x Alien Cake - Where Is My Mind? (Pixies remix)
Alien Cake - Pretender (Foo Fighters remix)
Alan Ellis - Sea Terms
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#fightclub #analysis #psychology - Krátké a kreslené filmy
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This is such an important film to men of my generation. When we watched Fight Club as teenagers in the 2000s, we wanted to be like Tyler Durden. When we watch Fight Club in our 30s in the 2020s, we feel like the Narrator.
Single serving friends
This film is so much deeper than it's often given credit for. I'm really enjoying your vids about it.
This is Edward Norton's best performance, in my opinion. He really does a Terrific job of conveying so much anger and dissatisfaction. Please cover "Primal Fear", another top notch Norton performance.
Yes! Do Primal Fear, please. My introduction to Ed Norton's brilliance
May I toss in a vote for American History X as well?
The DVD commentary track with Ed Norton is great too. It's been a long time since I've watched it (or _Fight Club_ at all) but I remember liking it.
Omg Yes! I saw Primal Fear & Red Dragon before I saw Fight Club & was blown away by how scary he was in PF!
Absolutely make more videos about Fight Club! They're fascinating
Something else in terms of the bathtub scene. Tyler says about the Narrator's dad setting up "franchises" by having families in different places. And that's basically what the Narrator/Tyler do by setting up the different Fight Clubs around the country - the Narrator even repeats the word "franchises" in reference to Tyler doing this. Maybe trying to replicate his dad's behaviour or seeking family that he feels he doesn't have
There are two really good commentary tracks on the DVD - in the one with Fincher and Palahniuk, the author several times notes that the director saw and brought out stuff about the characters that he hadn't realized himself.
0:42 "World Anvil Appreciation" - nice little subliminal advert there!
I was hoping it'd be spotted!
I hadn't caught that! Nice catch!!
Haha! Didn't notice that.
Loving these Fight Club videos. I remember watching this film with my (now ex) husband, and being both enthralled and disturbed by it in ways I couldn’t express. Oddly, I remember finding it LESS disturbing after the reveal that Tyler wasn’t real- there was something comforting about all the championed, celebrated toxicity before being now thrown into question.
Okay but like.. I know we are talking about the narrator, but the narrator’s dad: imagine how much abject WORK it is to go through all that cycle every six years! 😅 Move to a new city, get a new job, get a new home / apartment, meet a new romantic partner (in the pre-internet era at that), possibly get remarried, convince them to have kids IMMEDIATELY, uproot your Entire Life separated from them, rinse and repeat. There is a level of dedication and energy that comes with this level of flakiness. Imagine being so ambitious as to start your life completely over every few years! That sounds absolutely exhausting and I need a nap just thinking about it. Also, the level of rizz this man must have had to convince presumably several cycles of women of these shenanigans is unreal 🤣Presumably they aren’t aware of the other families, but surely some would be suspicious. Who are these hypothetical women that find this man so desirable, but aren’t noticing he doesn’t have family, friends, lacking any roots at all but trust him enough to want to build a life with him at a breakneck speed?
I’m probably thinking too deeply about the offhanded comments of an unreliable narrator, lol. Not to mention he would have to have one hell of a memory to remember his parents dynamic in that specific depth if his dad left when he was all but 6. But again, that's assuming it's genuine memory and it isn’t imagined by the narrator.
Now, you have me thinking the Narrator's dad probably had dissociative identity disorder, too, and that all his marriages and moves were done under dissociative fugues!
@@darlalathan6143 I like the way your mind thinks!
this comment made me laugh i was just listening to this true crime case where a woman didnt want to work and kept killing her husbands family members that tried to get her to get a job, but when i heard how much actual effort she put in avoiding work she might as well have had a job. like with all that effort he might as well just be a dad
@@zakourille exactly 💯
well as a teen in the early 2000s I knew roughly half a dozen kids, who's father left their moms to restart a new family. They all knew of the other families.
of course the relationships were all a little different and so on and so on, but for me, as an outsider, it always looked like the first family was a "failure" to the father.
Absolutely more videos. This movie was a huge part of my upbringing. Probably not the best idea for a 10 year old boy but it shaped my outlook on life and a lot of things and woke me up to a lot of things. This film alongside Ed Norton's performance in American History X scarred me, in a good way at age 10.
Good stuff right here...
I feel like if you are to do one of the gay subtext, referencing the bokn would be useful as in that it is actual text
I'll never forget the film trailers for "Fight Club" in 1999. I had absolutely no interest in it as it looked excessively violent. It wasn't until I watched the film at a friend's house after it came out on DVD that I fell in love with the film. That said, I still avert me eyes during most of the bare knuckle fights, especially the Jared Leto fight scene, but I think this film and "The Matrix" which both came out in 1999, helped define the anxiety society was expressing: is this the best we can all expect; to live as a cog in a capitalist machine? Charlie Chaplin addressed this question in 1925 with his film "Modern Times" and it rang true for people watching then. Society must be more than just making enough money to buy things we don't need to fill the emptiness of loneliness. As a larger metaphor, it also addresses these ideas that men become toxic without proper connection to other people. Just my little thought on your excellent video. Thanks for sharing your insights. ❤
I loved your previous fight club vids - one of my favorite of your catalogue and this was a great addition. More fight club!
I do not see this as a story about trauma. I think it takes more of a sociological approach than psychological. In my eyes the story about his father moving and starting new families is another symptom of the lack of direction for men in modern society. Taylor says that he he once every few years check in with his dad to get some direction in life. "Get a job" he says. "Get married" he says and once that point is made we shift to the narrator's dad who left every few years once those goals of conformity had been achieved. There was no purpose after this, so the only rational thing to do was to wipe the slate clean and start all over again. New job, new family, new goals, new life. Rinse, repeat. The difference between Taylor and the narrator's dad is that Taylor decided break the pattern and take his life into his own hands once those tasks were completed and society had nothing left for him to strive for. So your point about Taylor being a father figure is spot on.
The thing about the Narrator is that we all have felt some degree of his hypoarousal; maintaining constant control with something, staying in a perimetre that you set for yourself, yielding to what you think people of expect of you. Everyone has felt like the Narrator in that way, but what really affected me was the thought of his constant state of rigidity, order, and self-control to the point of suppressing his genuine feelings. He does feel adolescent in how he views himself and the world, with a sense of what he SHOULD do, what OTHER people do, and how he chooses to categorise (ex: what is weak or strong, freedom or containment, etc) things. It's heartbreaking to think how deeply he repressed and never allowed himself truly express how he felt or what he really wanted to do, and instead apted to adjust to what he thinks a man his age should do, or what other people think a man his age should do. And it's funny to think that his only outlet of vulnerability, the cancer support group, was all men he could deem inferior, not women, but other men. He feels like an adolescent boy who is attempting to construct and find comfort in his own masculinity (at points; obviously the movie is also about what it means to actually find what makes you happy and what it means to feel freedom and connection, but I feel like his stifled view on that part of his identity is a part of what builds up to the creation of Tyler and his need to repress himself while having little to no connection with anyone).
It is also interesting to not that the only woman he truly interacts with in the film, the Narrator himself has no desire to have sex with her, and instead, Tyler, his own perception of what a man needs to be, does, not him, but Tyler. (idk I felt like it could contribute to the gay undertones the movie has, but that in itself could be interpreted in many other ways)
I'd like to hear more about this gay subtext, since Planiuk, the author, is openly gay and said the novel symbolized his coming-out process.
These are 100% my favourite videos on your channel
Broken teenage me definitely took the wrong learnings from this movie and the book - I also used to admire Tyler and thought it's something to strive for. It also motivated me to try out self-harm, although luckily I was such a softy that it transferred from awkward leg-punching to running until my legs couldn't handle it anymore to actually just doing sports haha. I can definitely relate to your descriptions to it "somehow feeling good, but not knowing why" though. These breakdowns really make me curious how I would view this movie nowadays, apparently there's tons of things that went over my head back then.
One of the best experiences was comparing the book and the movie, and juxtaposing the differences. The movie is more glamorous, more intense. The book is much more distanced, emotionally cold. And the outcome of Project Mayhem and the end of the book are very different, much more raw. Reading the raw, unedited and stripped of any glamour book after the cult movie was a profound experience.
Yes! More in this film please!
I always thought all the characters that the director superimposed Tyler over in the beginning were all in the narrator's head. this included marla, Tyler, Bob- and even the doctor. maybe the doctor was real but he imagined the conversation differently? To me, Marla and Tyler are the two wolves. You have to decide who to feed. one is hyper masculine and impulsive and juvenile to the point of being dangerous, and then there's marla-sensual, interested in connection, seeking closeness, and reflecting the narrator's issues right back at him, making him uncomfortable but wanting him to face them. bob was his vulnerability, and he died as Tyler went out of control. (queue the "i am jack's colon" jokes. These quotes are a clue that we are seeing pieces of the narrator. in the end he chose to embrace his Marla personality as he shot tyler and stood hand in hand with marla. I also wondered if maybe he imagined the conversation with the doctor, or he changed it in his head. Maybe the doctor did give him the Xanax and he was ashamed he needed it. so he let marla take it. she was too weird to be real, the way she walked into traffic and said that she'd seen him practicing how to tell her off. ? when? and there just couldn't be another person going to all those sessions- I felt like she was the most like him as the narrator. she showed up almost like his conscience when he was faking having cancer. oh wow. so many ways to see this film! what great writing.
Thank you for all your movie review style psychological analysis videos. Please feel free and clear to make as many fight club videos as you like!
Your analysis of Jack really holds the mirror up to me. Some past, some present... And I wonder why this film is so important to me
LOL... I like the background music you've chosen towards the end of the movie; *_"The Pretender"_* by *The Foo Fighters* (a downtempo instrumental version)
Really enjoyed your analysis and I appreciate you staying away from labelling the Narrator with a diagnosis. It's been a while since I watched the movie but here are a few simple thoughts based on your video. The fact that the Narrator doesn't have an actual name could speak of his lack of a well developed personal self, as you say, psychologically he is still at the stage of a child-teenager. He doesn't know who he is inside. I get the impression that Tyler plays a few parts in the Narrator's psyche: his internalised dad, his superego, but especially an inner Destroyer part. The latter is trying to achieve something good but in misguided ways. I guess what I'm trying to say is that his psyche is reaching towards awareness of more aspects of himself so he can accept them and become inner directed. Since he is so repressed, it takes an almost archetypal force such as Tyler to disrupt the order that his ego is trying to create inwardly through external order. I'm possibly reading too much into this but it's fun to think about. I'm also intrigued by the idea that all the people the Narrator meets are parts of him, people in their own right of course, but projections of his inner world in the way they are presented.
Really enjoyed seeing a video by you again. Love this movie! Loved your dive into what's going on with these characters. I'd be happy to see another video on this movie, if you want to do one, or any of Ed Norton's movies, really. He does interesting ones.
I've spent about the past year watching various reaction channels reacting to movies I love, and I realize I just like having an excuse to revisit characters I love, stories I enjoy. I've recently watched Arrival (2016) on different channels. That's a cool movie because it talks about how language affects the mind, and I think the story itself is an offering of one way to handle grief. Would love any thoughts you have on that movie. :)
Do more videos this was great
I like the theory that he actually has testicular cancer, and his doctor telling him to check out the support groups was just him coping through denial (he was telling him to go because... Well, nut cancer). Explains the feelings of emasculation as well
I’m down for more
Great video! However, my question has always been is the stuff prior to the plane scene about Tyler true? That is, was Tyler/The Narrator really a waiter, projectionist etc prior to them "meeting" on the plane? The movie implies this is the case when The Narrator says, "I always wake up in random places not knowing where I have been for days" in the scene with the doctor early on in the movie, which is very similar to what happens when he wakes up after Tyler has "disappeared" towards the end of the movie, and the Narrator realises he has been asleep for days and does not know why or what has occurred while he was sleeping. This implies he has been been Tyler for periods for many months, if not for years before the plane scene, and therefore probably before he attended any of the self-help groups.
It doesn't have to just be tyler, could be others, but the flashing images are meant to show that he was always there
i could listen to you talk about fight club anytime! this movie has so much to say and is still so relevant today, with materialism and toxic, unhealthy masculinity in abundance, meanwhile healthy masculinity is rarer by the day. this obsession with status and wealth and success... not a fan of the idea marla and the other's aren't real, can't understand that and would totally negate the strength of what happens and tyler being a delusion because then nothing that happens would matter. the book, even with it's ambiguous ending, still makes it quite clear these things did happen, the narrator was just seeing himself as tyler doing these things.
Really enjoying these Fight Club videos. I would love to hear your thoughts on the gay subtext you mentioned, as well as any other layers you've picked up on.
good video
Yes more Fight Club - Myra could be the narrator's anima his feminine half. She does seem as messed up as he is.
i watched fight club when i was around 15 and it imprinted on my brain ever since. I read the book every few years. it's terribly modern even if it was written in 1999. personally i've always seen every other character as real and Tyler being the only product of the narrator's immagination. and the message i always got away from this story is how painful it is to be part of a society that doesn't value you as a living being. it's always left unsaid that the narrator's job is checking cars' damage in deadly accidents. he flies around the country inspecting burnt skeletons of cars, describing how people died and his job is deciding if the comapny should remove the model from the market and he makes that decision based on the amount the company will loose if they keep the model out.
He keeps dreaming about having accidents on his way to an accident site. he acts as a cog in the machine that despises him and will cross him out as just a number.
The narrator's has followed the 'instructions' people/his father gave him. get a degree, get a job, start a family. You can only be sad and comforted if you're dying.
And the result are that his job is deciding if lives are more important than profits. and his idea of family is having kids and abandoining them.
following society's instructions has just caused him to perpetuate hurt. Tyler Durden allows him to try to destroy this hypocritical system but doesn't really offer him a way to make it less violent.
In the book he says tyler was created when he met Marla because Tyler wanted her and by extension the narrator wanted her but had no way of getting her
I'd definitely agree that's part of it
I have to contend with you when you say that what he's gained from Fight Club isn't strength. I understand that you mean it more in an "emotional" way than the very literal definition, but even so, I believe that a man's formidability plays very heavily into his self-esteem. Becoming a member of some kind of boxing or martial arts gym can often build more confidence in some men than a lifetime of reaffirming words.
Oh don't get me wrong, as someone who used to enjoy boxing, there are many great benefits and I talked in my first video about the confidence Tyler gave him. However it's not a true strength and sense of autonomy that the narrator mainly develops, and he is still caught in a system of judging his own masculinity. Mainly it's a boost for his ego but definitely not exclusively, no. I tend to think most things have a good and a bad somewhere
Burnout psychosis? What are your thoughts?
I don't have anything more interesting to say right now, but good stuff. This was fun, and I enjoyed watching it.
What happened to your Monkey Man video? 😭
To be honest, I don't even know. It's not blocked or anything, just not there 😅 I might've been mad but no one had watched it anyway
I don't believe Bob is real. He's the only "Member" of Fight Club that doesn't know "the narrator" is Tyler Durden.
24:09 Tyler the Non-Creator😏
DID makes it hard for the host alter to sleep, but switching (persona) where the fronting persona disappears can feel like getting sleepy. So I find it obvious that Jack goes to bed each night, feels like he's about to go to sleep, switches to Tyler and has dissociative amnesia. The actual lack of sleep the brain is getting is causing the psychotic symptoms outside of dissociation, especially the inability to distinguish reality from fantasy. Normally people with DID do not see their alter doing things in that alter's body in the external world even if they feel like an observer, alters visually are only internal in DID by itself. If Jack was not psychotic and just had DID, he would have felt like Tyler and him can meet in an internal world that is a very consistent fantasy world where alters live, but that in the external world, he either wouldn't remember if he was fully dissociated, or he would see tyler doing things in Jack's body without his consent. Tyler would not be able to act when Jack is there, in his own body, only control Jack's
With DID when they are in the external world it ls like there is an internal dialogue, and different "people" are between total passengers who can only hear, see but not be heard, talk but not see, to passengers who can see and talk (internally), to those who control either partially or part time what the body does, to those in full control but who can hear the others. It's incredibly complex.
DID sufferers believe the internal world continues without them, but obviously, the alters could just report things to the host that were invented by the subconscious to tell the host, there was not actually an internal dream like world where alter X and Y had a fight for example. In that case, when alter X appeared to the host, the subconscious could invent on the spot what that alter had been doing based on (in the internal world, which is as real as a dream) "where they live" "who they know" and "what they are like" and they would explain it. Anyone with DID has an incredible imagination.
DON'T BOTHER PAUSING TO READ THIS
lol you can't write that as a headline for a wall of text. is that legal? (is joke)
Please talk about the gay subtext
"Tyler isn't real."
You've already lost the plot. Tyler is just as real as the narrator because he is the narrator. If Tyler is strictly unreal, then he couldn't have done all the things he did.
I'd have to disagree. We both know Tyler is important and that the narrator wouldn't have created him unless he mattered, I even talked about his importance in my last video. In a literal sense though, he isn't real. The film makes this explicitly clear. He is an important part of the narrator but not actually his own independent living person
Probably the biggest question about Fight Club that needs a deeper dive is the psychology of Project Mayhem. How Tyler is able to take the group from a bunch of disaffected men beating the shit out of each other in a basement to a full-on terrorist organisation.
This is why they said fight club is my holy water. Now through this I understand the Nietzsche's ideal Tyler durden), infact it's the embodiment of it. Nietzsche said "Art and art alone is our saving grace". This is true if we see life as an artwork there is something wonderfully affirming to the Nietzsche's ideal.
Nietzsche's BLEW!! Apart the distinction between life and art. We as with the creator (aurthor). Are dancing with rapture and wonderment to the true essence of life is to make an art work out of our lives. We will in time begin to solve life's problems through that of art and movies and observe the real beauty behind this appearance of chaos and mayhem. The world is a true Interpretation of this, it our redemption.