Doubling in Fight Club

I’ll be honest, I’d never seen Fight Club before I was required to watch it for class, nor did I have any reservations to watch it in the near future. I saw it mostly, not to be stereotypical, as a “guy movie,” kind of like Pulp Fiction, a cult classic for most men. Truthfully I expected this film to mostly just be about Brad Pitt fighting other guys, and it was, but it was much more than that as well.

This film has an interesting connection to the doubling of self. The obvious doubling seen in the movie is when the narrator, unknowingly, creates a version of himself which is described as all the ways he wishes he could be. An interesting aspect of this doubling of self is how they introduced it; though we may have made some inferences from foreshadowing, the restrictive narration allowed the viewers to only know as much as the narrator, meaning we did not figure out he and Tyler were the same person until he figured it out himself. 

Another aspect of the film that I believe ties in to the idea of doubles is when everyone in the fight club had to live two lives; one part of their identity restrained within the basement walls of the fight club, and the other aspect of themselves they saw fit to show the outside world. Though this double life was forced on them by rules of non-disclosure, I believe, in a way, it relates to the ‘twoness’ W.E.B Dubois speaks about in his book The Souls of Black Folk.

Overall, Fight Club definitely proved to be more than I had originally judged it to be. I think rewatching it in the near future will be beneficial to get a well-rounded understanding of just how much they alluded to Tyler and the narrator being one in the same.