I recently re-watched Fight Club, the 1999 film that had me bewitched during my early 20s. It’s in every sense a movie that is dark (in both tone and lighting), gritty and brilliantly written, despite its endemic violence. It also has a superb cast.

Plot spoilers alert: I hadn’t seen it for several years and in re-watching it I remembered how many incredible lines are genuine reminders that life is finite and that we are all mortal.

“This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time,” says the narrator’s alter-ego, Tyler Durden.

“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else. And we are all part of the same compost pile,” he says in another scene, as he indoctrinates followers who eventually become the terrorist group Project Mayhem.

“You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your f****ng khakis,” he says scathingly about consumerism.

Reject consumerism

This last line is a recurring feature in Fight Club: materialism misleads people into believing that they will find fulfilment in their physical possessions.

True fulfilment, according to Tyler Durden, is found once you reject consumerism and become mentally independent and emotionally self-sufficient.

Of course, in the movie this is done in the worst way imaginable. Tyler Durden starts a cult that engages in terrorism and ultimately seeks to attain change through violence and destruction. Not only that, but for all of his seemingly desirable mental and physical characteristics, he is in fact a manipulator and a narcissist (and a heavy smoker – a person who truly believed in his vision would know that the tobacco industry’s products are one of the worst forms of consumerism imaginable).

And yet, if you dissect the work of fiction and strip away the meat-head attitudes, the gratuitous violence, the anti-macho machoism and the cultish herd mentality, we’re left with a rather profound and virtuous message.

Namely, that we inhabit a world (in the West at least), suffused by materialism. That so much of mass culture is essentially disposable. And that attachment to material possessions is ultimately pointless (“the things you own end up owning you” articulates Tyler Durden). So many of the ideals that we are sold and strive to attain are, ultimately, unrealistic and derived from someone else’s desire for financial profit.

Instead, we should think about the things that truly matter in the limited lifespan that we have. This is demonstrated in one scene, where Tyler attempts to make the narrator and two goons realise how little it takes to feel fulfilled. They are in a car which Tyler is deliberately about to crash. As they veer off the road and are in mortal danger, Tyler asks the two goons what they wished they could achieve in life before they die. Without hesitation, one goon responds that he wants to build a house, the other that he’d like to paint a self-portrait.

The car crashes and injures its occupants. They escape hurt but with their lives. The scene demonstrates that those who do see the world according to Tyler Durden will be confident in knowing what they want in life, even when facing imminent death.

Finding fulfilment

Tyler’s message of rejecting consumerism and putting your life force into the things that really matter is embodied in two of his lines.

First you have to know, not fear, know, that someday you’re going to die.  

And:

No fear, no distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.

All art is a reflection on real life, even if it’s quite abstract. Indeed, Fight Club would not have been a critical and (ironically) commercial success if its fictional portrayal didn’t touch on something with which we can all identify.

We all want to better. We all want to be free. We look for ways to achieve those things. But often we are deluded into how we go about it.

Not for a second am I advocating that we should pursue violence as a means of liberation. Rather, legitimate fulfilment comes from understanding what matters most to us.

That may be family life. It may labouring towards a philanthropic cause. Or it may mean the completion of a creative work like a novel or a painting.

At heart, so many of us have some notion of what it will take to be fulfilled – but we allow consumerism to feed us distractions that prevent us from being happy.

This is one of the most important messages in Fight Club that becomes even more apparent once you see beyond the regular violence.

And it starts with embracing the ultimately truth that our time is finite.

“First you have to know, not fear, know, that someday you’re going to die.”