Fight Club Essay

In the movie Fight Club is nigh the cashier, poops, fantasy of an alternate reality, his personal tracinger. Tyler Durden represents Jacks un informed collective shadow. Jack, the protagonist, has a meaningless, dilatory and empty life, and suffers from insomnia. Jack tries to lend color to his insignificant life by purchasing new commodities homogeneous his furniture which are the fetish items of the fabricator and they provide him with more meaningful existence. Jack has a dull life and he could not find any time for his hobbies due to his busy business life.He has no girlfriend or even a close friend. He does nothing to have childs play and he suppresses all his instincts for pleasure in his unconscious. Although he is not riant about his life, every dayspring he wakes up, goes to work and travels frequently. He suffers from insomnia because he is suppressing his shadow. Later, he finds the idea of participating in cancer and ailment support meetings. Jack lacks the courage to confront his shadow. Instead, Jack indentifies with her persona, the role the world expects him to play. As the movie progresses Jack gradually begins to become aware of his shadow, and how it motivates his behavior.It is only by doing so that he begins the process of self-realization. One comment that will be made is that the movie depicts a superficial and incomplete process of self-realization. Jung considers the confrontation with the shadow, with adepts own evil, to be of the great psychological value. Understanding something about ones shadow side is the beginning of self-knowledge. Without the realization of the shadow all real further psychological progress is jam (34). As I mentioned before, Tyler Durden is the collective unconscious side of Jack. In other words, Tyler represents the shadow of the narrator in political confrontation.Jack projects onto Tyler, the enemy side, which we view as hopelessly corrupt, sadistic, vindictive, and inhuman. The collective shadow, viewed as a component of the collective unconscious, is the archetype of collective evil and can be represented by such archetypal images as the Devil, the Enemy, the Bad Guys, and the Evil Empire (33-4). Tyler slowly begins to take control away from the narrator.The narrator gets pleasure from Tylers crazy, uncontrolled behaviors because Tyler does the things that the narrator imagines doing unconsciously, but was unable to do because of ociety pressure, which encouraged repressing his desires. Jung states, Your shadow, the unaccented being in you that follows after and does everything which you are loath to do, all the things you are too cowardly or too decent to do (35). The narrator gets pleasure from these anarchistic behaviors. Tyler also destroys the narrators menage in order to prevent him from continuing his virtual life. Then, Tyler initiates a reaction like Jungs shadow conception, full of violence and sexuality. He manifests his violence and forms an undergroun d boxing club called Fight Club.Hopeless hoi polloi like Bob who has testicular cancer and many other people who are not happy about their lives, which are full of suppressed emotions and societal pressures, join Fight Club. Tyler also satisfies his sexual instincts with Marla whereas the narrator fails to do so. Tyler becomes a cult fighter aircraft and he even manages to get paid without ever vent to work because of the shadows charisma, self-confidence and revolutionary aspect. However, after a while we start to exonerate the negative effects of the shadow. The shadow, Tyler Durden, takes control completely and he gets out of balance.Fight Club becomes an anarchistic group and Tyler prepares a big plan (Project Mayhem) for destroying all the banks, financial sector buildings. Tyler is thus transformed into a unrestricted enemy who wants to destroy the capitalist system. In the movie, Tyler says, It is only when you have lost everything, you are free to do anything. He wants to live in a primitive society in which everyone has nothing and everyone is equal. This feeling comes to his wit because of the influence of the shadow archetype. As Jung mentioned, archetypes are characteristics that reflect our primitive nature.Tyler rants, You are not your job, you are not your money in your bank account. The shadow becomes very destructive, violent and dangerous as Tyler intelligibly becomes a monster who threatens society. Tyler sees society and the capitalist system as his enemies. Tyler shows us exactly all the aspects of Jungs shadow concept violence, sexuality, self-confidence, charisma, courage, madness and a lack of balance. What makes Tyler so strong is the narrators wrongdoing in repressing his shadow for such a long time. After a period, the narrator understands that his conscious mind was taken over for a while and he begins to fight Tyler.He gets rid of Tyler in the last scene by shooting himself and thus by metaphorically reducing the influence of the shadow, Tyler in his mind. The narrator thus achieves a new psychical balance and gets rid of his shadow Tyler Durden. Jung explains, Consequently, the murder of the hero represents the need for change, for a revaluation of earlier values, at midlife. The shadow figures of savage and dwarf represents the murderous brawn as well as the insight, the shadow wisdom, needed to kill the hero and to transcend a new heroic attitude toward life.