Existential Love

The ability of love to conquer all is a recurring theme in Western fiction. Phil is only able to escape the time loop in Groundhog Day by making his dream-girl/coworker fall in love with him. Love's kiss wakes both Sleeping Beauty and Snow White from their comas (and let's not get into the issues involved in true love and determinism). The Beast is only able to become human when his love for another person is returned.

All of these characters' "worth" is derived from love. The narratives in which these characters exist puts a person's whole worth on love - very specifically, romantic love.

And then, like a cold breeze on a hot and stifling day, there's Fight Club.

Chuck Palahniuk is an existentialist - this much is made clear in his book, Fight Club, and the 1999 film adaptation thereof. His world is a world without inherent values, without great answers; Palahniuk has a world of subjective worth and personal answers. And Fight Club, in his words, is a love story for people who don't like love stories.

Of course, unorthodox type I am, I see Fight Club as two concurrent love stories. Yeah, there's the narrator's love/hate relationship with Marla Singer, but there's also his relationship with Tyler Durden, which is far more interesting.

Spoiler alert: Tyler Durden is the narrator's alter ego/imaginary friend.

Now that this is out of the way, Tyler Durden is simultaneously the narrator's frustrations, tenuous sense of self derived from his consumerist value system and hollow and unsatisfying lifestyle, and honest desires; and the narrator's idealized version of himself. Throughout the film, the narrator seeks a relationship with Tyler in order to escape the cage of vapid consumerism and validate himself on his own terms. And for a while it's pretty good, if a bit odd. They live together, work odd night jobs for the stupid kicks they get, and get drunk & fight on Saturdays.

Then along comes Marla, once again, now physically intimate with Tyler Durden. The narrator becomes jealous. Jealous of Tyler for sleeping with the woman to whom he is attracted despite his confusion and difficulty accepting with said attraction, and jealous of Marla for being intimate with Tyler – Tyler's physical intimacy with Marla impedes the narrator's emotional intimacy with Tyler.

But this is not an insurmountable problem. Tyler and the narrator still stay intimate through violence and crime; Tyler's approval, despite being harsh, builds the narrator's sense of worth up. Indeed, Tyler's approval becomes the narrator's self-worth.

This is when Tyler's starts keeping relationship-damaging secrets in the form of Project Mayhem. This tries the trust built between the two characters. The narrator's idealized self is leaving him behind in favor of other people and other pursuits. Jealousy builds, and the narrator reacts as a spurned lover might: he savagely beats a rival for Tyler's affections (Jared Leto) and drinks heavily.

This is when the idealized-narrator aspect and the projected-narrator aspect begin to separate. The narrator starts to follow Tyler's footsteps and eventually discovers that Tyler Durden is him. At this point, the narrator could give up the sense of identity he's been gradually forming and become just another member of Project Mayhem, or he can accept responsibility for his fate and act according to his own values. At this point, the narrator and Tyler are wholly separate characters, psychologically.

The scene in which Tyler dies is, symbolically, the narrator breaking off his emotional dependency. He doesn't need that validation anymore – he can validate himself. Now he can deal with his feelings towards Marla and towards the world.

The narrator's worth comes from his own approval of himself, not from god, not from a lover, not from his Ikea life, and not from an external standard. When he is free from others as his primary source of self-worth, he becomes happy as a discrete entity, making him capable of enthusiastic contributions to his surroundings and equilateral emotional support in his relationships, to name only a few things. He is complete as an entity - he is free to grow.