Fight Reason

The BWD in 2003
February 22

Shift Movie Review
Fight Reason


Your world is about to be rocked.
See it in your local reality.
The collapse of the social structure.

And you open the door to step inside the self.

This is your life, good to the last drop. Doesn’t get any better than this. This is your life, this is your life, this is your life, this is your life, doesn’t get any better than this. There is NO better.

Welcome to Fight Club. If this is your first night, you have to fight.

Opening sequence. The flight of the impulse.


People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden. For a few seconds I forget about that control demolition thing that I’m seeing all around me. I forget that Tyler is Jack’s doing self. That part of Jack that chooses. I guess they’re asking me if I know the part of Jack that chooses? What a strange question. Tyler and I are different aspects of the same focus. But it did take me a while to get to know him.

Suddenly I know that all of this has something to do with a girl named Marla Singer. I connect her name to marvelous singer, the speakers, Calliope the muse of the eccentric Sumari. Now I know that Marla is my personal muse of inspiration. But like all fantasy love stories I have to hate her before I can love her; break up and get back together before this can be defined as a love story.

For six months I couldn’t sleep. With insomnia nothing is real. Dreaming reality and waking reality merge into one. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. I start to blink out, that’s when I first realized the coming of Tyler. Well, maybe the feeling self did; certainly not the thinking self busily trying to interpret all that was happening to me.

It was Tuesday, he was wearing his horizon blue tie. Red flag. Red alert. My tribal instinct kicks in. I had almost forgotten the lingo of the corporate world that renames thereby redefining everything. Reprioritize my current reports, be advised of my status upgrade, make these my primary action items. What happened to my language translation? I don’t understand it anymore. Everything is duplicitous.

Red alert kicks up my nesting instinct. It used to be pornography that roused my primitive instincts, but now it’s replaced by the illusion of security. The concrete reinforced cell of my filing cabinet apartment. The concrete reinforced cells of my belief systems begging for release like a geyser building.

I am a victim, but a low status victim. I can’t release enough to offer to myself the support that I require unless I relinquish myself to some high status disease. But I don’t really like that choice, it’s just so disfiguring. That’s when I got another Tyler flash, I was looking to really open myself up. Perhaps I’ll choose something mental that’s just dysfunctional without the deformity. Must be that Zuli alignment. Pretend a crippled self in order to allow myself my own comfort and acceptance. My thinking self thought it didn’t want any sort of self-violence.

That’s when I met Bob consciousness, the common man in the painful process of change. And then something happened. I let go of all control. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom. It matters not. Babies don’t sleep this well.

I wasn’t really dying. I wasn’t host to cancer or parasites. I was the warm little center that the life of this world crowded around. I was paying total attention to myself. I was in tune with myself. I went within the cave of self and found that my power animal was a playful Sumari. Every night the old victim died, and the new victim was reborn. I had found the satisfaction in being a full-blown high status victim. Then she ruined everything.

This chick Marla Singer was a liar. She had no diseases at all. She was a perfect mirror of myself. Her lie reflected my lie. But she was my muse of inspiration, because of her I had another Tyler flash. I needed to create something better than victim to deal with my Marla muse. Victim no longer looked so good, more like a good humored subservient walking skeleton of human existence. If I did have a tumor I would name it Marla. I hated her. She made me realize that being a victim becomes an addiction.

Marla’s philosophy of life is that she might die at any moment. The tragedy is that she doesn’t. Marla is free of normal convention.

If you wake up in a different time, in a different place, do you wake up as a different person? On a long enough time line the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. Human recall. I prayed for the coming collision in order to accept my fate. I needed to establish a relationship with myself. That’s when Tyler, the most interesting single serving friend, manifested into flesh and blood. Tyler would only serve me.

Then by circumstance of the collision of fate, I destroyed all my material things, forcing instant change.

I called upon my muse, but I couldn’t connect. I didn’t know what to do until Tyler called me back. We are consumers, not creators, he says, while identifying my beliefs, one by one. We are the by-products of a life style obsession. Stop being perfect. Let’s evolve. Let the chips fall where they may. Things you own end up owning you. Then Tyler forced me to ask for his help.

I want you to do me a favor. I want you to hit me as hard as you can, he says.

But first…
let me tell you a little about Tyler. He is a night person. While the self is sleeping, Tyler is at work. He is the subjective self. He is the projectionist. The one that creates the projection of waking reality. He is in charge of the seamless changeover from one probability to the next. Every once in a while there is a blink in of recognition of Tyler’s contribution. Tyler’s attitude is to piss on everything.

I want you to do me a favor.
I want you to hit me as hard as you can, he says.

Tyler introduced me to my own self-conflict. How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight? he says. Go crazy. No one is watching. It felt good. We should do this again sometime, I said.

And so we did. A total change of environment, complete with the hamster cage smell of wood chips. The recognition of the motivating factor of conflict. The recognition of the physical factor of pain that brings attention to self. Want to participate? Loosen your ties to concrete reality.

I am Jack’s doing self.
Without me Jack could not make choices.

After fighting, everything else got the volume turned down. I could deal with anything. I was no longer a victim. Most of the week we were Ozzie and Harriet, but every Saturday night we were Ozzie and Sharon. We were finding out more. We were finding out that we were not alone. Used to be if I came home angry and depressed, I just cleaned my condo. It was right on the tip of everyone’s tongue, Tyler and I just gave it a name. Conflict.

Every week we made up our own rules. Don’t talk, do. Don’t overwhelm yourself. Fight one dragon at a time. Fights will go on as long as they have to. If this is your first night you have to fight.

You weren’t alive anywhere like you were there. I am Jack’s physical self. No denying it. We started seeing things differently. Self improvement is mental masturbation. Self acceptance is not.

Fight club wasn’t about winning or losing. It wasn’t about words. After the fight was over, nothing was solved, but nothing mattered. Afterwards we all felt saved. Tyler spoke for me.

Then Marla caught me, I hadn’t been going to my support groups. You ever heard a death rattle before? she says.

Tyler’s door was closed. Now how could Tyler, of all people, think that the death of my inspiration was a bad thing? Then it all became a blur, interrupted only by the ringing signal of the telephone, followed by the messages that I was refusing to listen to. I am Jack’s cold sweat. The liberator destroyed my property and realigned my perceptions. The liberator caused me to reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions. Tyler’s words were coming out of my mouth.

Fight club, this was my and Tyler’s gift to the world. The realization that violence is a choice. Violence is always self inflicted. We were working jobs we hate to buy things we don’t need. Only something so intense as violence could make us feel alive again. Violence to one another is not the most offensive, violence to self in the terms of self-loathing and self discounting is. We were fighting back to build self-esteem. How duplicitous can you get?

You had to give it to him, he started to make sense in a Tyler sort of way. No fear, no distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.

You are not your job.
You are not how much money you have in the bank.
Not the car you drive.
You’re not the contents of your wallet.
I am Jack’s rage and anger.

Sooner or later we all became what Tyler wanted, although in retrospect, Tyler was what we wanted. What we wanted then was to stay within the familiar established religious structure of ready to sacrifice for the greater good. The belief in authority outside of the self that is greater and more powerful. Tyler was god.

And we became original sin. Maggots. Not special, not beautiful or unique snowflakes. The same decaying organic matter as everything else. Part of the same compost heap. All singing, all dancing crap of the world. Space monkeys. A sinful animal product.

Tyler built himself an army. Why was Tyler Durden building an army. For what purpose? For what greater good? No, it was because in Tyler we trusted. Do not fuck with us. I wanted to breathe smoke. I had gone from fighting the dragon, to being the dragon. I decide on my own level of involvement.

Forget about what you think you know, about life, about friendship, and especially about you and me, he says. What does that mean? Who is Tyler Durden? I am Jack’s complete and utter disgust. Stop trying to control everything and just let go, Tyler yells. LET GO!

And I do, anticipating the collision.

And then Tyler was gone. Was I asleep? Had I slept? Was Tyler my bad dream? My reality had changed. It had become a living thing of its own. I am all alone. I am Jack’s broken heart. I need to bury it all. I need to find Tyler and kill him. I am living in a state of constant déjà vu.

Then I am Jack’s complete surprise. I AM Tyler Durden. Please return your seat backs to their full upright position. We have just lost cabin pressure.

I was looking for a way to change my life. I could not do this on my own. All the ways I wished I could be, that’s what Tyler is. He looks like I want to look, he fucks like I want to fuck, he’s smart and capable and most importantly, he’s free in all the ways that I am not. People do it every day. They talk to themselves. They see themselves as they would like to be. They don’t have the courage I have, to just run with it. I am Jack’s doing self.

I am in-sane. It’s called the changeover. The movie goes on, and nobody has any idea. It’s the seamless transition from one probability to the next. Have I been going to bed earlier every night? Have I been sleeping later? Has the veil dropped between waking and sleeping realities? Can I not tell the difference? Déjà vu over and over again.

I am Jack’s doing self. I am the part of Jack that chooses. What am I choosing? What do I really want? I confess. I want to collapse the social structures. I want to erase the debt record, then we all go back to ground zero. Start over. I don’t want to owe anyone anything. I want to be free of karma and dogma.

I’m not in a movie, I am the movie.
I’m not in a dimension, I am the dimension.

I am now firing a gun at my imaginary friend. I realize I am beating my own self up. I can see it clearly now, in black and white. This is it, the beginning. Ground zero. I take the responsibility for me. It’s all me.

I put the trust in me.
Everything’s going to be all right.
These are strange times.

Roll credits.



Shift movie rating: Five stars for all the indigo children of any age. Those innocents beating themselves up to institute change. (Indigo, the combination of black and blue. A different perception.)