Tyler Durden: Was He Wrong? (A Fight Club Exposition)

It’s 2025, of course everyone has heard about Fight Club. What’s the first rule? A story by Chuck Palaniuk written in 1996, later adapted and directed by David Fincher in 1999, Fight Club is a theatrical psychological exploration of what happens when you get stuck in the rat race of modern society, surrounded by an overly consumer-capitalistic world. It cycles through themes of masculinity, mental health, identity, self-destruction, and anarchy.

I don’t remember the exact year, but I remember watching Fight Club for the first time with my brother who is four years older than I am. As a teen boy, of course that was his favorite movie. What adolescent male didn’t want to be Brad Pitt?? Our narrator played by Edward Norton, essentially created a dissociated second personality, projecting onto Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) everything that our narrator wasn’t in his life. The movie starts with our narrator dealing with insomnia. Unable to receive any kind of professional help, he was dismissed by doctors and told that “it’s all in his head.” He was mocked for his pleas for medication to help sleep, telling our narrator if he wants to see real pain, to go to a men’s support group for testicular cancer. This was the catalyst for everything.

The film goes on to discuss major themes that I think are still real, honest concerns in today’s world. To start we have how the medical profession often dismisses what it can’t easily define. Existing and suffering in the gray area of healthcare is pretty much a giant target on your chart telling them “IGNORE ME I’M FINE.” Spending money and useless premiums to not be taken seriously, when Big Pharma is out there essentially letting people die because they profit from it. Much like how our narrator’s job was to determine if a car accident involving newly made vehicles was worth the cost for a recall:

Spending years in this type of work would make anyone feel disillusioned. How could we let greed get in the way of safety, community, and life for the human race? Our narrator/Tyler eventually dissociated from lack of respect, purpose, and sense of self from society telling him goods will make him feel better and that money solves all. In rebelling against the system, and ultimately his own mental health, Tyler created a space (honestly a cult) for people to reject modernity. While it mainly focused on masculinity and was a men’s group, I don’t feel his ideas catered only to men. They called upon what every human being feels whether consciously or not: the search for purpose and meaning.

Boiling Tyler’s ideas down to their core, they really aren’t that far off from what everyone who wants to reclaim their sense of self feels. Could he have gone about it in a different way? Well, of course! While executed poorly, his dogma isn’t entirely off point. Here’s how I see it:

Freedom through liberation (his method was destruction)

Rejection of modern masculinity (his method was to beat each other up, but underneath it was just to create a space for men to feel safe, heard, and not judged. To let themselves simply just be human beings)

Self-actualization (done through pain which is honestly not the way to go, perhaps something more kind to the soul)

Anti-authority (Project Mayhem did blow up credit card headquarters, but was he wrong?)

The illusion of control (ironically Tyler becomes an authoritative figure through his preaching by commanding obedience)

Especially concerning greed and corporate exploitation, I think of this parable that’s been on the Internet forever.

It’s a slow and hot day in the little town somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Times are tough, everybody in town is in debt, and everybody lives on credit. On this particular day, a rich tourist is driving through town. He stops at the only hotel in town and lays a $100 bill on the desk, telling the hotel owner he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night. The owner gives him some keys, and as soon as the visitor has walked upstairs, the hotelier grabs $100 and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.

The butcher takes $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes $100 and heads off to pay his bill at the feed store.

She, in a flash, rushes to the motel and pays off her room bill to the hotel owner with the same $100 bill. The motel owner now places the $100 bill back on the counter so the rich tourist will not suspect anything.

At that moment the tourist comes down the stairs after inspecting the rooms, picks up the $100 bill, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money, and leaves the motel. No one earned anything. However, the whole town is out of debt and looks to the future with a lot of optimism.

The whole point of Project Mayhem was to reset the generational stress of debt so the future generations could actually have a chance at a happy, stronger, more purposeful world. Is helping future generations and people who are currently under the thumb of corporate greed and takeover to find freedom and have a more purposeful way of living really a bad thing?

Most philosophies ask these same questions. Essentially, do they not follow that same dogma? That’s been the whole reason of questioning throughout history, of finding meaning, of rebelling for something better. Obviously, in this work of fiction, Tyler went about it in a way that ultimately left people to question if the ends really justify the means. Do I think his implementation was wrong? Yeah. Do I think he still helped a group of people find purpose (although it would have been better if they chose to act from a place of genuine goodness rather than destruction)? Absolutely. To quote Kanye West, “the truth is crazy in a world full of lies.”

Even now, as a 27 year old woman in 2025 (twenty-nine years after the book was written), who decided to rewatch Fight Club last night, I couldn’t help but notice that in his ideals, Tyler wasn’t inherently wrong. In a way, I kind of found myself in Tyler. I mean come on guys, I started a whole blog to question life, why we follow the rules of society like we do, and to just talk about anything I wanted. Tyler questioned his corporate job. I questioned my corporate job. Tyler followed the rules laid out for him. I followed the rules and became a Mechanical Engineer. Tyler dissociated and started Fight Club’s all over America as an outlet. I started a blog, became a ceramic artist, and started living for people, light, and goodness. This is where Tyler and I differ. Same set of dogma, different implementations.

I don’t think Tyler Durden was wrong. I think we as people have the duty and responsibility to care for those around us. I think people need purpose. A genuine, kind purpose. I think we need to stop letting greed run the world. None of it matters. When it all comes to an end, are pieces of 25% linen and 75% cotton that we were told hold value going to carry any meaning? Are adventures, community, culture, and kindness not the most important things we as human beings can ever experience? If everything we’ve built around us burned away, would we finally remember who we are, or realize we never really knew?