Tyler Durden's Dream in Fight Club

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Tyler Durden's Dream in Fight Club

In the Movie Fight Club, we are introduced to an eccentric soap salesman named Tyler Durden. Tyler is the alter ego, I guess you could say, of the main character Jack. Jack and Tyler start an underground bare-knuckle boxing club that, "channel primal male aggression into a shockingly new form of therapy." These men are not just fighting for sport, but are actually trying to find meaning to their lives. So they look to Tyler, a childish leader, who believes in the purity of impulse and expression, while trying to escape from material possessions.

Tyler shows us his childish behavior by the mischief he always seems to be getting into. Tyler spends his nights making his own formula soap, which doubles as dynamite, and working odd jobs. He has a night job as a part time projectionist, where he gets his kicks out of splicing single frames of pornography into family films. He is also on probation from another job, as a banquet waiter at a five-star hotel, "over the urine content of their clam chowder." These jobs actually seem to be a form of self-expression for him.

Violence is another unique form of Tyler's expression. He tries to use violence of fight club to get his followers to open their eyes and see their life. "How much can you know about your self and never been in a fight." Once they start thinking about their life, they don't always like what they see. That's when all of Tyler's little sayings start to make sense. Tyler calls these sayings durdenisms.

Durdenisms like, "you are not the contents of your wallet" or "Its only after we have lost everything that we are free to do anything," Are the sayings that his following start to live their lives by. He is trying to get them to change their lives to live ore freely, but Tyler believes that a person can never be free until they have escaped from the control of material possessions.

Tyler is trying to escape from material possessions because all he sees is people living life according to what they have to buy next, "We are consumers. We are by products of a lifestyle obsession." TV commercials and magazines have defined they way America should and has to be.

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