When I was a teenager, I watched Fight Club with a friend of mine. She was a cute out-of-state freshman from Florida, and I was 16 year-old who secretly had a crush on her. I can still remember the way her apartment smelled; usually like cheap cleaning products.
That movie hit me like a load of bricks. Barely old enough to drive (I didn’t) and hearing the heavy metal messaging contained in the movie was a lot for me to process. That was a movie I never wrote a theme about – until now.
What is the theme of Fight Club?
Space monkeys and chemical burns: deconstructing narrative programming
– if I had to give it a Plaatademic title.
There’s a bold line in Fight Club where Tyler Durden says:
“If our Father’s were our models for God, and our Father’s failed us – then what does that tell you about God?”
The line hits you faster than a single slice of pornography in a family film; blink and you miss it.
If. Then.
This matters. But we’ll get back to that point.
Ever since I can remember reading articles about family values, as well as from the likes of Orwell and Bradbury, I’ve seen one topic discussed: Narratives, or ‘programming’ as some like to call it.
How do you force a ‘narrative’ into somebody’s mind? You replace one thought with another.
“If Dad failed me – Then God will too.” is the conclusion most people come to while Durden is slapping Jack’s face across the kitchen table.
Circumstantial + Definitive.
“If our Father’s were our models for God and our Father’s failed us – then what does that tell you about God?”
It’s a subtle switcheroo on words. However, going from a hypothetical to a definitive statement in a question is sort of like asking somebody:
“If the sky is blue – and blue skies symbolize the failure of God – then God must be a failure.”
Perhaps you don’t think that God is a failure, or you’ve never seen a blue sky. However, statements like this tend to erode away at our conscious views of topics, people and even concepts, gradually ‘programming’ our minds to accept, believe and evangelize mesages – oftentimes, to our detriment.
it doesn’t take very long for a mind that’s been forcibly programmed to begin thinking in manners that aren’t in the best interest of the programee. For example “defund the police” was a message that spread like wildfire, to the detriment of the cities where these messages were spray-painted on police stations.
Perhaps you’re thinking, “Hey, I don’t want to be programmed!” as I imagine many of you prefer. If so, then it’s helpful to take a step back and evaluate the belief systems you have about the world around you; where did they come from?
Chances are, you didn’t come out of the womb with a [Name a foreign country here] flag in your hands. Your love, hatred, compassion and even desire for vengeance all came from…somewhere. Yes, that’s a difficult pill to swallow…Neo.
How do you break the power of a demon? Ask it what its name is. It’ll tell you right away. Every time.
How do you break the power of a narrative? Start by asking narratives are present in your life.
There’s a hidden message in Fight Club, which most people miss entirely. This will probably be the only part of this blog that you’ll remember.
Tyler durden promised to ‘break the chains’ of all of those corporate drones who flocked to him like the Dad they never had.
What did he give them in return? Nothing. He took everything they had left.
He took their hair.
He took their possessions.
He took their names.
He took their lives.
“We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world…” he famousy chanted to his followers…only to fulfill the very message he promised to abolish.
No, we aren’t. Trust me; everything’s gonna be fine.
Unless your name was Robert Paulson.
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