The film chosen for this article is an American film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel “Fight Club”, directed by David Fincher. The scenario of this film raises many psychological and psychopathological issues. In this article, we will focus more specifically on the identity disorder of the main character.
Many aspects of Jack’s journey evoke an important fragility of identity, and his inability to know who he is. This fragility will be at the origin of the occurrence of a severe psychopathology of psychotic structure: dissociative identity disorder, or according to Berne’s designation: dissociative schizophrenia. The character has no name in the film, which echoes the idea that he has no clear, stable and unitary identity. The film illustrates a loss of temporal and spatial references for the narrator, signifying the progressive loss of his relationship to reality and evoking the occurrence of his dissociative experience. Jack’s story and memory are fragmented, characterizing the dissociation of the character into two faces: Jack and Tyler Durden.
This psychotic organization of Jack’s personality implies an important diffusion of identity, an altered differentiation between the representations of oneself and others, but also between his inner psychic world and the external reality. One of the fundamental symptoms of his psychosis is that of “dissociation”, which refers to the separation, the psychological disconnection that the subject experiences with several large areas of subjective experience: the here and now; time and space; the link with others; and his own experience, that is, the affects that cross him and his sense of identity. The many manifestations of this pathological dissociation take the form of recurrent amnesia, depersonalization and fragmentation of identity. In Fight Club, it is easy to observe the subject’s inability to live in the present moment, to remember his daily personal experiences and to maintain relationships with others. The director’s constant changes of place and time accentuate the dissociative dimension of his experience.
This film tells us the life of the main character, a technician at a car manufacturer. He is the narrator of the story, his name is never evoked in the film, which echoes the fragile identity of the subject that we will present later on. In order to facilitate the writing of this article we will name him “Jack”. Jack is presented as a man who is very busy with his work. His life seems morose and apathetic. He is a lonely, single man, with no love and friendship life and no ties to his family. He seems to have depressive features. Jack is struggling with many persistent insomnia which diminishes him on a daily basis. The film is marked by his “encounter” with Tyler Durden, during one of his business trips. Tyler is a marginal man, charismatic, rather unpredictable. This “encounter” will upset Jack’s life, who shortly after exchanging with him, finds his apartment destroyed in a mysterious explosion. Jack, who has no ties, finds himself on the street and calls Tyler to join him in his dilapidated, out-of-town home. Tyler introduces him to violence, a way for them to feel alive and to relieve their discomfort. Their first fights, in front of bars, attract many men who will associate themselves with these times of fighting. This is how the “Fight Club”, led by Tyler Durden, was born. The Fight Club then takes on a political and critical dimension and denounces the consumer society in which we live. Tyler first began to give “homework” to the members of the Club, and then undertook many larger actions against society. Club members then form a kind of militia dedicated to one goal: the “Chaos Project”. Jack felt left out, not understanding the magnitude of the Project and the direction Tyler was taking: the Project was to blow up buildings in Manhattan where major credit companies were headquartered. Tyler mysteriously disappears and Jack starts looking for him. It is when he reappears that the most important plot of the film is discovered: the two men are the same person. Jack then understands that Tyler is only a figment of his imagination and that his existence is hallucinated. He tries by all means to put an end to the “Chaos Project” to which he gave life, by fighting against himself, that is, against Tyler.
If the reality of the outside world is too difficult to bear, the “I” will reconstruct another reality that will be less difficult, we will call it: a delirious, hallucinatory reality. By hallucinating Tyler’s existence, Jack gives meaning to his existence. Tyler is everything Jack is not, he is free, provocative, extroverted, confident, he refuses to submit to society’s norms.
In this form of psychosis, the narrator feels he only exists in “hand-to-hand” with an opponent. The only form of identity, social bond and encounter with the other is physical attack, violence and the search for mutual destruction. Therefore, violence and the fight club’s creation re-establishes a sense of continuity in its existence. The Club partly breaks Jack’s dissociation, allowing him to feel emotions again and to be connected to others.
The collective identity of the Fight Club reinforces his individual identity and gives him the feeling of existing within and through it. The violence, shared by all Fight Club members, will become the basis of a new identity. The weakened identity will be compensated by a collective identity forged in act and violence, in opposition to society and the outside world held responsible for its suffering. The fights become temporal landmarks that reassign meaning to the narrator’s existence and to the club members. The value that Jack attributes to times of fighting is linked to his quest for identity, he will express: “One cannot be more alive anywhere else than at the Fight Club“; “every Saturday I would die, then I would be reborn“.
The “Fight Club” seems to transform Jack’s identity, he gradually becomes aware of his psychosis and tries to regain control of his existence.
More generally, the film Fight Club illustrates the important impact of interpersonal, social and cultural influences on our individual behavior, our subjective experience and on the construction of our identity. It can be assumed that the violence depicted in Fight Club is the result of the protagonist’s inability to forge an identity but also corresponds to a means for him to feel that he exists again, to be recognized by others, by the group, by the “Fight Club”, unconsciously participating in coping with his psychosis.
- Raises : soulève
- Headquartered : siège social
- to put an end : pour mettre un terme
- Inner psychic world : le monde psychique intérieur
- Allowing : permettant
- Reinforces : renforce
- Weakened : affaiblie
- Linked : lié