Fight Club Through Hegel

Fight Club Through Hegel

There are times when a movie or literary work has the potential to further the work of influential minds.  Fight Club is such a movie.  Fight Club, at its core, is about a man who feels emasculated by conforming to cultural expectations and illustrates his attempt to reclaim and affirm his own existence outside of societal conditioning.   George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit  speaks to Fight Club.  Fight Club, as interpreted by Phenomenology of Spirit, forms new insights to Hegel’s work be deciphering how characters develop and affirm their existence and demonstrating the master to bondsman relationship.

The narrator of Fight Club describes how emotionally void he feels although he has everything culture dictates as pleasing.  He befriends a free spirit named Tyler.  Tyler is highly intelligent, acts on impulse, does not respond to social conventions and lives outside the norms of society.   Hegel describes the formation of self-existence as a process that occurs when two beings come into contact (Phenomenology 541-543).   Conceptually, as the beings recognize each other, they move into conflict in which they stake their own life against the other.  This process proves the reality of the self to each being and affirms their existence (543-547).   In Fight Club, Tyler suggests a fight while asking the narrator “How much do you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?”  Their sense of life is meaningfully elevated after the fight, and they decide to form a club allowing other men the same experience.  Although Hegel’s description is based in the conceptual, the one-on-one fights engage two men who risk and stake physical pain against another.  The results are club members who become confident, crystalize and heighten their sense of existence, and remove themselves from societal spheres of influence. 

Hegel describes the formation of dominant relationships as master and bondsman (543-547).   The dominant relationship in Fight Club is the culture industry as master and the narrator and club members as bondsmen.  Although cultural standards are not living beings, literary works such as Max Horkheimer’s and Theodore Adorno’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment” identify numerous elements aligning with Hegel’s criteria for master. The culture industry feeds off recognition from people and perceives them as objects to its own ends.  It also has implied authority and it seeks to reproduce and maintain power by enslaving people through conformity and compliance.  A master bondsman relationship is presented between the narrator and Tyler.  Tyler is portrayed as a teacher leading the narrator to independence and freedom from social conventions.   However, tensions are present, and Tyler’s dominance shows itself in his adamant desire for the narrator to become more like him.

Tyler disappears and the narrator becomes aware of Tyler’s plot to destroy several buildings.  The narrator initiates a search for Tyler that results in a significant reversal. The narrator comes to the realization that he is Tyler.  Tyler is a hallucination created by the narrator’s own mind that is seeking freedom.  The narrator agonizes between the levels of freedom he has attained against the knowledge of the horrific acts he has put in motion.  The final confrontation between the narrator and Tyler ends with the narrator attempting his own suicide in an effort to kill Tyler.  Hegel would recognize this act as the physical manifestation of the narrator staking everything to seek the death of the other (Phenomenology 543).  The consequent effect is the removal of Tyler and the narrator regaining control of his own existence.

The unique presentation of Fight Club offers insights to Hegel’s work.  The impulsive nature and acts of Tyler, without concern of consequences, are reflective of Sigmund Freud’s description of the unconscious (Freud).  The narrator represents the super-ego repressed by society.  The parallels are uncanny in how Fight Club’s personifications of consciousness, along with their interactions, so aptly describe Hegel’s work.  An argument is put forth that the consciousness and unconsciousness struggle for dominance of the mind and behave in a fashion similar to Hegel’s account of self-conscious affirmation and the master bondsman relationship.  In effect, Hegel’s work provides a dynamic working model that illustrates Freud’s ideas on the human mind.

Literary works are generally made for mass distribution and consumption.  However, a literary work may come along containing complex concepts and speaks to deeper levels of human understanding.  Fight Club is an example and its interpretation through Phenomenology of Spirit provides the discerning viewer the opportunity and enjoyment of exploring some of the greater ideas.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.”  The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.  Ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al.  2^nd ed. New York: W.W.Norton & Co., 2010.  1046-1072. Print.

Fight Club. Dir. Fincher, David. Perf. Brad Pitt and Ed Norton et al.  20^th Century Fox Distribution. 1999. Film.

Freud, Sigmund.  “Consciousness and What is Unconscious.”  Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality.  Ed. Linda Martin Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003. 32-40. Print.