Materialism In Fight Club

Light shines through a revolving semi-translucent reel, projecting 24 different pictures a second. “In a projection booth, Tyler did changeovers if the theater was old enough. With changeovers, you have two projectors in the booth, and one projector is running. I know this because Tyler knows this. The second projector is set up with the next reel of film.”(Palahniuk, 13) Light, rapidly changing, reflects off the screen forming the illusion of movement in the spectators’ eyes. “As most of the movie rolls onto the take-up reel, the take-up reel turns slower and the feed reel has to turn faster.” (Palahniuk, 15) Light, absorbed into rod cells, is flipped in the brain where, combined with the audio, forms a scene. Add taste, smell, touch, and

the ability to process all of this to the equation and perception is formed. “At the end of a reel, the feed reel turns so fast the alarm will start ringing to warn you that a changeover is coming up” (Palahniuk, 15) Perception is, however, a fickle thing, that varies from one person to the next, and although a vital tool to survival can also lead to one’s demise. “Change over. The movie goes on.

Nobody in the audience has any idea.” (Palahniuk, 15) In Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club the narrator rejects his comfortable lifestyle, in an attempt to break through the materialism, anti-masculinity, and delusion, which plagues the ever-degrading American society.
“If you can wake up in a different place.

If you can wake up in a different time. Why can’t you wake up as a different person?”(Palahniuk, 157) Fight Club is narrated by a nameless man suffering from insomnia, who assesses car wrecks to determine if it is cost effective for car companies to make a recall. It begins with a standoff between the protagonists at the top of a skyscraper ready to explode. Then it backtracks, to the narrator crying into Bob’s tits at a testicular cancer support group. He goes to various support groups to cure his insomnia by exemplifying pain. All is well until he meets Marla who fakes the need for a support group in the same way, reflecting his own fraudulence, and thus reinstating his insomnia. His paradigm shifts when he meets Tyler Durden, a rebellious, gritty, waiter and film projectionist. After an unfortunate ordeal at his apartment he moves in with Tyler. Following a night of heavy drinking Tyler asks him to punch him in the face, escalating into a brawl. The fighting fills a spiritual vacancy, and soon the brawls attract the attention of other men, who like him seek the immediate spiritual experience. The Fight club is moved to the basement of a bar, but it evolves into something much more. Eventually Tyler sees that either he can disband it or take it to the next level. Tyler starts project mayhem, a fascistic, totalitarian order that’s sole purpose is to eradicate modern society. The reality of it all sets in when Bob is shot dead by a

Cop. The members of mayhem glorify his death, but it strikes a nerve in narrator that compels him to disband the project. His attempt to do so lead him to the same duel at the onset of the novel.
Chuck Palahniuk was born in 1962 to Carol and Fred Palahniuk in Pasco, Washington. His father worked for the railroad, and his mother at a nuclear power plant. They fought often, and sometimes violently to the point that he and his siblings moved to their grandparent’s cattle ranch in eastern Washington. (Straus) “His home life was unspectacular on the surface, but underneath that façade his family held a violent and tragic secret. Palahniuk’s paternal grandfather killed his wife and tried to kill Fred, Chucks Father, with a shotgun but the boy hid under a bed as his father looked for him… When the disturbed man could not find his son he shot himself.” (Zackheim) Chuck studied Journalism at the University of Oregon, and graduated with a bachelor of arts in 1986. He worked at He was infatuated by what drives people to behave the way they do, specifically the recreation of one’s self in line with their dreams. He published his first novel, Fight Club, in 1996. In 1999 the book was adapted into a movie starring Brad Pitt. Tragically, during the filming his father was murdered. (O’Hagan) The tragedies in his life clearly inspired his twisted writing style and since is his inception as an author he has specialized in a dark breed of man: misanthropes, schizophrenics, hustlers, drug dealers and the like.
“His fiction hits a nerve with people whose lives - and desires and neuroses and pitch-black humour - go unrecorded by most writers of fiction.” (O’Hagan) Palahniuk’s writing style is short and to the point, nearly mimicking a thought process, or a movie script. “I like to cut to the chase,” he says. “I try to tell a story the way someone would tell you a story in a bar, with the same kind of timing and pacing.” (Palahniuk)(O’Hagan) Robert Stone reported Fight club as “a powerful, dark, original novel… a memorable debut by an important new writer.” “His story has captured the imagination of American readers and the broader culture.”(Garrison) Illicit Fight clubs, inspired by the novel, have surfaced all over the U.S. and “his readings always attracted one or two serious young men who would ask him where they could find a fight club in their area. “I always felt bad telling them that they didn't actually exist, that I made them up, but the fact they were looking for them somehow attested to the power of the fiction.” (Palahniuk) (O’Hagan) Men can identify with the melancholy narrator, and although fighting for pleasure is a taboo in modern society it feeds a primal hunger and “allows men to fiercely embody revolution and desire and rejuvenate utopia with every punch” (Burgess) Palahniuk addresses issues and questions which many are fearful to confront. This attracts negative criticism, in part due to the fact that the majority of people don’t want to hear the bleak truth. They would rather hear a comforting lie; White lies, and America is built on them. “Fight Club defines the violence of capitalism almost exclusively in terms of an attack on traditional notions of masculinity.” (Giroux) “To escape a life that is outwardly “complete” but inwardly numbing, the narrator in the novel invents the community of fight club, where brutal fist fights, injuries, and pain instantly jolt participants back into an immediate connection with a primal, fully embodied, and according to their principals, more genuine existence.” (burgess)

“We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit, we have a great revolution against culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression” (Palahniuk 149) Masculinity, in today’s society is riddled with double standards. Men are “What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women.” (Palahniuk 50) Individuality however is “Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, we all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.” (Palahniuk 134)
The narrator represents the American working man.

Materialism is the notion that material possessions will improve a person’s happiness, and that items one can fulfill an empty life. Capitalism feeds on this shallow materialism, and is a beast never satisfied. “As the public sphere is consistently removed from social consideration and notions of freedom are replaced by an utterly privatized model of the good life, the collapse of public imagination and a vibrant political culture is celebrated by the neoliberal warriors rather than perceived as a dangerous state of affairs that Americans should both be contemptuous of and ashamed to support.” (Giroux) The novel itself is a testament to how easy it is for the mind to fool itself, and in turn be fooled by others. The narrator’s delusion hints at an unsettling philosophical question. What if one’s own perception is unreliable? For if you cannot trust your very own senses then what can you trust? The fact is, everyone believes in some lies but a large portion of Americans believe in an obvious one that has become so rooted in our own culture that it’s nearly impossible not to succumb to, materialism. “You have a class of strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy something they really don’t need” (Palahniuk 149)