Fight Club - Conformity vs Rebellion

Fight Club - Conformity vs Rebellion

The conflict between conformity and rebellion has always been a struggle in our society. Fight Club is a movie that depicts just that. The movie portrays the polarity between traditionalism and an anti-social revolt. It is the story of man who is subconsciously fed up with the materialism and monotony of everyday life and thereafter creates a new persona inside his mind to contrast and counteract his repetitive lifestyle.

The main character is actually unnamed, but sometimes is referred to as Jack, which comes from a medical book he reads in the Tyler’s house perhaps. He is the normal, everyday, worker bee that carries on his overly boring life day in and day out because he is the typical conformist that society tells us to be. Jack is the everyday common workingman to which the audience can sympathize with and relate to. His character portrays the struggles and longevity of the American dream. He is constantly rating his life and his lifestyle by his furniture. The designer furniture that he orders out of mail catalogues defines his personality and self worth. This is due to the fact that he is constantly trying to improve and complete his lifestyle by buying certain pieces of furniture to create a modern but still simple and traditional household. His house is beyond perfection but yet he still tries to further its flawlessness, which relates to his dream of the typical American. But as he constantly tries to improve himself with his furniture and work habits to define his personality, he actually fails miserably and does quite the opposite. When Jack buys his furniture he destroys every attempt that he has made to improve himself. He only falls deeper into the hole that he digs himself. Every piece of furniture that he buys, he loses another part of his identity.

Jack’s conformity follows him to work as he becomes a doormat. His socialization is confined to the limits of his cubicle with the only exception being when he is on business trips. During flights he develops relationships with the passengers around him. This is not done out of a real honesty for a conversation, but out of a need to fill a void, a loneliness, a lack of self-worth. His life is full of “single serving friends”, car crashes, and wishes of an eventful death because the monotony of his life gives him strict boundaries to live by. His...

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...rkingman, as Tyler is the man everyone wants to be. Fight Club shows a man that everyone wants to be but can’t because of laws and in most cases common courtesy. The movie states that there is basically a Tyler in all of us, wanting and waiting to come out. None of us will let him out though because we don’t have the courage, or maybe stupidity to do it, although Jack does. For a while in the movie Jack did get everything he wanted. He had no care in the world and couldn’t have felt better about himself as a whole. Not until later does the final message come in, without any control there is chaos. When Tyler ran rampant and did what he pleased things began to get out of hand. For instance his final act of defiance towards society was the blowing up of credit card companies in order to erase the debt record so that everyone’s debt would go back to zero. This is only to create total chaos and embody Tyler’s world without rules. Tyler sums up the movie in his own terms, “You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your khakis. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. The things you own end up owning you.”