LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Fight Club: Tyler Durden
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Jack determines to stop Tyler when he discovers that the former Fight Club (now Project Mayhem) has spread to cities across the country, morphing into an all-American terror network. Like bin Laden, Tyler has some dramatic financial targets in mind, although Project Mayhem goes to pains to make sure no one dies unless it's one of them.
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Fight Club begins with a hyperreal journey through what first appears to be cosmic outer space becoming neuronal tissue becoming testicular vasdeferines. In positing the deep unity of these three elements, which are, in principle at least, differentiable, Fight Club organizes the transformation of the narrator from a white-collar wage slave into the leader of an anti-capitalist terrorist organization. His transformation, which involves rediscovering primal masculinity, is wrought through his identification with alter-ego Tyler Durgan, expertly played as the long lost rebel by Brad Pitt. In Fight Club, Pitt is literally the phallus, the film's image of male power. It becomes exceedingly clear that the narrator desires this stylized phallic image to combat the emasculation dealt out in daily life. Through a truly brilliant organization of image-clusters and narrative, the film thematizes the problematic of masculinity by seeing Pitt as the utopian dick he is.
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"The first rule of Fight Club is," Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) announces to a motley group of twenty and thirty-something males, "you don't talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is, you don't talk about Fight Club." Fat chance. This movie is controversial. Everybody is going to be talking about Fight Club. It starts as a testosterone-juiced call to arms against an empty and emasculating consumer culture.
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Fight Club was shot in the Super 35 format to give the director maximum flexibility in composing shots. To direct the cinematography for the film, director David Fincher hired Jeff Cronenweth, the son of the late cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth with whom Fincher had collaborated for Alien³ (1992). Fincher and Cronenweth drew from elements of the visual styles that Fincher had begun exploring in Se7en and The Game. For the narrator's scenes without Tyler Durden, the look was purposely bland and realistic, while for scenes with Tyler, Fincher chose a look that was "more hyper-real in a torn-down, deconstructed sense - a visual metaphor of what [the narrator's] heading into". Heavily desaturated colors were used in the costuming, makeup, and art direction, and the crew took advantage of as much natural and practical light at filming locations as possible. The director ... took various approaches to take advantage of lighting situations in the film's scenes, and several practical locations were chosen for the city lights' effects on the shots' backgrounds. Fluorescent lighting at practical locations was also embraced to maintain an element of reality and to light the prosthetics of the characters' injuries appropriately.[20] On the other hand, Fincher also ensured that scenes were darkened enough to reduce the visibility of the characters' eyes, citing cinematographer Gordon Willis's technique as the influence.[15]
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Fight Club does not rupture conventional ways of thinking about violence in a world in which casual violence and hip nihilism increasingly pose a threat to human life and democracy itself. Violence in this film functions largely through a politics of denial, insulation, and disinterest and is unable to criticize with any self consciousness the very violence that it gleefully represents and celebrates. Fight Club portrays a society in which public space collapses and is filled by middle class white men--disoriented in the pandemonium of conflicting social forces--who end up with a lot of opportunities for violence and little, perhaps none at all, for argument and social engagement.31 Macho ebullience in Fight Club is directly linked to foreclosure of dialogue and critical analysis and moves all to quickly into an absolutist rhetoric which easily lends itself to a geography of violence in which there are no ethical discriminations that matter, no collective forces to engage or stop the numbing brutality and rising tide of violence. While Jack renounces Tyler’s militia-like terrorism at the end of Fight Club, it appears as a meaningless gesture of resistance, as all he can do is stand by and watch as various buildings explode all around him. The message here is entirely consistent with the cynical politics that inform the film--violence is the ultimate language, referent, and state of affairs through which to understand all human events and there is no way of stopping it. This ideology becomes even more disheartening given the film’s attempt to homogenize violence under the mutually determining forces of pleasure and masculine identity formation, as it strategically restricts not only our understanding of the complexity of violence, but ... as Susan Sontag has suggested in another context, "dissolves politics into pathology."32
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Fight Club is ... a cautionary tale. It highlights the dangers of blindly following a figure (Tyler, here) no matter how charismatic. Comparisons to the rise of fascism are totally justified. Here is also the real danger of the film. Those going to films as pure entertainment will probably not feel the need to analyze the themes running through Fight Club, and hence could walk out buying Tyler Durden's nihilism hook, line and sinker; many of his arguments are pretty persuasive.
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Tyler Durden