A Marxist Review of Fight Club

Rating: 10/10 (23 March 2008)

This is my humble Marxist review of Fight Club.
Fight Club is about the conformist and materialist attitudes an individual must possess to be considered a productive member of society. In order to reject the narrow confines of his society, the Narrator, who begins the film as a typical drone, decides to do things that are anti-materialist. He destroys his fashionable home, refuses the insurance money he is due, and moves into a dilapidated house in a slum. Still, it is not enough for him to merely passively reject his society; he must lash out and show his contempt for it. He begins by fighting strangers, an action that is anathema to normal bourgeois people of the type he mostly interacts with. He eventually joins with working class people in an attempt to overthrow the oppressive upper class. Finally, he sees that his methods are likely to prove ineffective; yes, the society to which he belongs should be rejected but his followers follow him blindly; they are just as guilty of being conformists as the people he worked with before. If they are put in power, they will rebuild society with all of the same problems-the only difference is that it will be even more brutal than it was before.
If you are a student of history ( especially a Marxist) you will see how the Narrator's situation is a good metaphor for pretty much every revolution that has occurred over the last one hundred years; particularly the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
Fight Club lends itself to other interpretations; this is just one simple take on it.