Tyler And Jack example essay topic

The Polarity of a Man The conflict between conformity and rebellion has always been a struggle in our society. Fight Club is a movie that depicts just that. The movie portrays the polarity between traditionalism and an anti-social revolt. It is the story of man who is subconsciously fed up with the materialism and monotony of everyday life and thereafter creates a new persona inside his mind to contrast and counteract his repetitive lifestyle. The main character is actually unnamed, but sometimes is referred to as Jack, which comes from a medical book he reads in the Tyler's house perhaps. He is the normal, everyday, worker bee that carries on his overly boring life day in and day out because he is the typical conformist that society tells us to be.

Jack is the everyday common workingman to which the audience can sympathize with and relate to. His character portrays the struggles and longevity of the American dream. He is constantly rating his life and his lifestyle by his furniture. The designer furniture that he orders out of mail catalogues defines his personality and self worth. This is due to the fact that he is constantly trying to improve and complete his lifestyle by buying certain pieces of furniture to create a modern but still simple and traditional household.

His house is beyond perfection but yet he still tries to further its flawlessness, which relates to his dream of the typical American. But as he constantly tries to improve himself with his furniture and work habits to define his personality, he actually fails miserably and does quite the opposite. When Jack buys his furniture he destroys every attempt that he has made to improve himself. He only falls deeper into the hole that he digs himself. Every piece of furniture that he buys, he loses another part of his identity. Jack's conformity follows him to work as he becomes a doormat.

His socialization is confined to the limits of his cubicle with the only exception being when he is on business trips. During flights he develops relationships with the passengers around him. This is not done out of a real honesty for a conversation, but out of a need to fill a void, a loneliness, a lack of self-worth. His life is full of "single serving friends", car crashes, and wishes of an eventful death because the monotony of his life gives him strict boundaries to live by.

His job is to go around and examine horrible car wrecks and determine if the vehicle needs to be recalled. He observes the aftermath of vehicular violence with as much dispassion as another inter-office memo passing across his desk. Death and violence are trivialized by the brutal nature of his job. He subconsciously yearns for death and violence to be tangible, not something he witnesses after the fact. One sleepless night, he decides to go into a support group for testicular cancer survivors. He has never had cancer but finds release by pretending to sob on the shoulders of other recovering men.

The ultimate 'letting go' permitted in the support group clues us in to the mental illness we are about to watch unravel amid the violence and desperation of Fight Club. Eventually, he starts attending other support groups; he becomes addicted to addiction recovery from his lack of a social life. On a plane during one of his business flights, Jack for once has an empty seat next to him. He is so used to discussing life's unimportant matters with "single-serving" friends in the neighboring seat that, on this occasion, he invents the perfect one to fill the void. Enter Tyler Durden, a mysterious man who is apparently full of information. Subliminal images of him are present early the film.

He flashes onto the screen in four split-second appearances before they actually encounter each other. This is to show how Tyler has always been inside Jack's mind, just waiting for his chance to come out. Tyler also briefly appears in a television ad for an upscale restaurant that Jack watches from his hotel room. He lives in a rundown house that looks like it should have fallen to pieces years ago. Almost every window is boarded up, there is no lock on the front door, and it has the stench of a fart. Tyler is America's quintessential rebel.

He shows no obvious care for other people, he splices pornographic footage into family films while working in a projection booth and urinates into a bowl of soup as a banquet waiter. To Tyler, happiness is pain. Away from his support groups, Jack's insomnia returned without him realizing it, and he creates Tyler. Tyler states, "I look like you want to look, I fuck like you want to fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly free in all the ways you are not". Tyler is everything that Jack wants to be. When comparing the two you can begin to notice how opposite of each other they really are.

Tyler dresses crazy, always wearing bright exciting clothes, while Jack is always dressed in a white, button down shirt, tucked into his khakis. Jack has a somewhat out of shape body, and on the other hand Tyler has an 8-pack and is well toned. Jack's former condo was the epitome of perfection, while Tyler's house was by far unlivable. And most importantly Jack is the conformist as Tyler is the rebel. They are the antithesis of one another, but for a very good reason. Together, Tyler and Jack found Fight Club.

They begin Fight Club, which is essentially a view of a contemporary man behaving primal, in effect freeing themselves from the surplus of things that people value most. Stripped down with just muscle and instinct to help you, a millionaire and a homeless man are the same. It is the release from who you are and what society deems you, what you own is of no consequence all that matters is the fight. With the no social constraints everyone is their own person and no boundaries to be focused upon by your peers. Tyler tried to take fight club to a global level as well. His master plan was to blow up major bank buildings so that everyone's debt would revert back to zero.

If nobody had any bank records or debt they would have nothing, and a sense be equal to every other man. A rebel's instincts always point to creating chaos, and what better chaos could there be than no social status. With no social status Tyler could bring his fight to a whole new worldwide stage. Jack symbolizes the everyday workingman, as Tyler is the man everyone wants to be. Fight Club shows a man that everyone wants to be but can't because of laws and in most cases common courtesy. The movie states that there is basically a Tyler in all of us, wanting and waiting to come out.

None of us will let him out though because we don't have the courage, or maybe stupidity to do it, although Jack does. For a while in the movie Jack did get everything he wanted. He had no care in the world and couldn't have felt better about himself as a whole. Not until later does the final message come in, without any control there is chaos. When Tyler ran rampant and did what he pleased things began to get out of hand.

For instance his final act of defiance towards society was the blowing up of credit card companies in order to erase the debt record so that everyone's debt would go back to zero. This is only to create total chaos and embody Tyler's world without rules. Tyler sums up the movie in his own terms, "You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your khakis.

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. The things you own end up owning you.".