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Happy Boxing Day to those of you who celebrate it! Somehow premiering this today feels fitting.
The song heard at the beginning and end of the episode is "Hunger is Freedom" by Jak Locke, which was used with permission. I chose it because its theme matches Fight Club perfectly. You can hear the entire song at the Bandcamp site, and if you like it, throw him a buck for the download, will ya?
You can find the book version of Fight Club out there in paperback, e-reader, and audio book editions. Though sadly the audio book is not read by Edward Norton. How awesome would that be? The movie is also available on DVD and Blu Ray. You really need to own the special edition to see all the fun marketing materials I mention in the episode.
I think enough time has passed that it's time to leave my comment re:the ending.
ReplyDeleteIf there's any problem I have with Fight Club, it's the scene that kills Tyler. Whether we're talking about the movie or the book, there's just a lot of vagueness there for me.
Did the narrator mean to kill himself or was he purposefully just trying to kill Tyler? In the book, with the epilogue having him say he's in heaven, it certainly sounds like he meant to kill himself. But in the movie he doesn't seem remotely shocked that he's still alive. Perhaps they are meant to be different.
It just seems to me that if the narrator was purposefully trying to fake out Tyler, it wouldn't work. By that point, both of them know what the other knows, so Tyler would be able to call his bluff.
I think, in the movie at least, when the narrator looks at Tyler and says "My eyes are open" that is his way of taking control and asserting himself, and willfully killing Tyler off, and the shot was just done for dramatic effect. But it still just feels wrong to me somehow.
My senior seminar in college was a men's lit class, where my final paper was about male dominance using both Jekyll & Hyde and Fight Club as my main example. Good times.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised that you didn't touch on the splicing that shows up early on and the other Tyler touches at the end. I didn't see the movie until after it was out of theaters, but the DVD run has a message from Tyler during the FBI warnings. But then again, this is the kind of thing that you could on about for hours and still not hit every single point of the movie/book.
I think I still have my copy from the aforementioned class, but it's in storage. However, I think it's kind of interesting that Beth didn't remember reading the epilogue, as Chuck says that he prefers the film's ending to his own book. And tying back into what you were both saying, I look at the book and the movie as separate entities and both endings work for me. They're just different contexts.
As for whether or not Tyler's dead...Again, it takes a different turn in both the book and the movie. In the book, I don't think Tyler's gone, I think he's still influencing people with the narrator barely noticing. In the movie, though, I could see that Tyler could be gone for good. Take that how you will.
You are right in that there is SO much to talk about. I once thought about doing a whole blog series on various Fight Club topics, put it that way. But I do love that false FBI message from Tyler and the subliminal Brad Pitt's that pop up in the beginning of the movie.
ReplyDeleteI used to think that the book was suggesting Tyler wasn't dead either, but listening to Chuck Palahniuk's commentary on the movie, he mentioned that people want him to write a sequel. He said that was ludicrous because the only way you could do a sequel would be to bring Tyler back to life, and he refused to do that. So that says to me that in the book he's supposed to be dead too.
The fact that I didn't remember is more related to personal stress than anything else, I fear.
ReplyDeleteI like the whole movie ending was the Narrator wresting control of himself from this other personality that has, largely, taken over. The moment where the Narrator kills Tyler is both literal- blowing him away- and symbolic, like much of their relationship has been.
In the book, Tyler had planned on them both dying at the end. I think it's because he knew he only would have control for so long before the Narrator would take it back. If both died, then things would carry on as planned. But the Narrator lived, partially because he was already starting to reclaim the parts of himself that were Tyler. This is why Tyler used the unsure components that the Narrator would normally use, causing the bomb to not work.
I believe the Narrator's suicide attempt at the end was actually Tyler's last hurrah- just as Tyler was making decisions that the Narrator would make, the Narrator made a decision that Tyler would have made. He survived due to sheer luck. That's just my reading of it, though.