Analyzing Evil: Tyler Durden From Fight Club

hello everyone and welcome to the 72nd episode of analyzing evil featuring tyler durden from fight club an anarchic rebel manifested from the mind of a troubled man fed up with a life mired in corporatism and consumerism tyler is the other side of the coin that is our narrator's mind an escape from reality that sends this man on a path to becoming the leader of a revolution that means to remake the world through destruction and chaos in this video we're going to explore everything we're given about our narrator and tyler in the fight club novel and film as the film stays relatively faithful to the novel with some key differences that we'll be discussing as we progress with this video we won't be covering the sequels to this story fight club 2 and 3 as though both are canon their reception has been mixed at best and the narrative they offer is incredibly confusing and arguably detracts from the original story when taken as canon i encourage you to read them yourself and perhaps i'll make a separate video covering them at a later date if that's something you'd like to see but for now we'll stick to the original story in fight club 2 and 3 the narrator is given the name sebastian which is also technically canon as of the making of this video but for a long time this character was unofficially referred to as jack and seeing as that's likely the name that many of you are most familiar with we'll be referring to the narrator as jack in this video but before we begin let's engage in a bit of consumerism ourselves with our sponsor for this video magic spoon many of us grew up on a steady diet of not so nutritional sugar-laden cereals and though our memories of that time in our lives are fond the cravings that come as a result of those memories serve as more of an invitation to a larger pant size than anything else enter magic spoon the company that's all about providing that same nostalgic sugary cereal taste without any of the junk that comes with it they offer a wide 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we don't know all too much about jack's backstory we know that his father left him at a young age but aside from that we aren't given too much to go off of this lack of a father figure is important and we'll be talking about it more a little later on in this video but for lack of background we'll start by taking a look at who jack is before his other half manifests itself jack works for an unknown auto company as a recall coordinator someone who travels from accident to accident to determine whether or not his company needs to issue a recall for any defects that might be present in their vehicles or to determine whether the accident can be blamed on forces outside of their control this line of work is incredibly macabre as jack often has to face death and destruction on a gruesome level that few of us ever have to experience directly this undoubtedly weighs heavily on jack psyche but the part of this job that really affects him is how mundane and corporate the whole thing is working day after day to uphold the profits of a company who doesn't care even the slightest for the people involved in these accidents jack becomes increasingly disillusioned with the work he's doing and by extension the life he's living not only is he standing by as people's lives are being reduced to numbers on a sheet of paper but he's living a meaningless life to boot one where his happiness comes in surges as he orders yet another piece of cutter furniture from ikea furnishing a condo that he has no real connection to with stuff that serves as just that meaningless stuff that can't fill the void that's growing larger within him as each day passes him by he flies from city to city chasing morbidity all the while adding to a condition that has been slowly creeping up on him over time severe insomnia which is so severe that at the beginning of this story jack hasn't slept for six months jack's involvement in a line of work that has him traveling to every corner of the united states on a weekly basis has severely impacted his circadian rhythm add to that feeling that you have an empty life in a hopeless future and you have the perfect recipe for a deeply unsatisfied man one who whittles away the knights by eating junk food and gluing his eyes to late night infomercials to remedy this problem jack attempts to get help from a doctor but that doctor only tells him that he needs good natural sleep unaided by any medication and when jack remarks that he's suffering the doctor challenges him to visit a support group for testicular cancer so he can understand what true suffering really is taking his advice he heads to this group and finds something quite unexpected the solution to his insomnia though there are several factors that play into jack's insomnia one of the main things keeping him from sleeping is his inability to express his feelings in a meaningful way part of this comes from the fact that jack seems to have no one close to him in his life before coming to these groups there's not a single person we see jack interacting with outside of his work environment he has no friends that we know of no significant other and he seems to be far removed from any family that he may have had when he was younger when jack comes to these groups he gains something that he desperately needs genuine human contact as jack points out here people actually listen to you they don't just wait to deliver their own part of the conversation and the affection deprived jack melts as soon as he's given the opportunity to let go of all his pent up emotions and the embrace of another human this intimate connection is exactly what jack needs and unfortunately instead of seeing this as a sign that he might need to get out in the world and associate with people on a deeper level he views it as an addiction that he needs to help him to sleep however his lack of human contact doesn't mean that he doesn't desire it as we can see that he tries to seek out this kind of attachment with his appropriately named single serving friends but for whatever reason jack seems unable to find permanent friends that he can rely on for longer than a plane flight so for nearly two years jack goes to various support groups to use them for emotional support and because of that this period in his life ends up being somewhat normal for jack all of that changes when he first sees marla at one of the groups as her appearance there forces him to come to terms with the feeling he had been repressing up to this point guilt jack had been using these people in their pain to express his own and now that someone had interfered with his newfound world of emotional freedom he found himself panicking at the thought of someone revealing to the world that he was sick enough to exploit the pain and death of others for his own benefit blaming marla in the process and calling her a lying tourist when he himself describes these meetings as his vacation after marla's intrusion jack is unable to sleep once again staying up for four days straight before he decides to confront her for encroaching on his action striking a deal with her that allows both of them to continue coming to these meetings without ever seeing one another evidently this doesn't work very well for jack we find him dozing off on several different aerial excursions with the same dark lines and bags under his eyes that he had when he hadn't slept properly for six months and now it's time we talk about the condition that's manifested in jack's psyche due to his severe insomnia depression and anxiety disassociative identity disorder or did for short now typically a person develops this disorder due to some kind of trauma or abuse they suffered as a child and though it would seem that jack had a poor relationship with his father when he was younger this disorder doesn't seem to be a result of past experiences but rather the continued stress his mind is under due to all the issues we've discussed so far unbeknownst to jack he's been suffering from this disorder for quite some time and it's quite possible that his insomnia evolved from a nuisance into a severity because of this disorder rather than the opposite as perhaps his depression anxiety and the repression of his feelings resulted in the development of this disorder and by extension a deeper dive into insomnia as his alternate personality took hold of half of his life how we know that he's been suffering from this disorder since the onset of his severe insomnia is because of three key things one of which is a visual indicator that we're only given in the film the flashes of tyler on screen as jacko's about his day but the other two tie into one another and they affirm for us that tyler was more than just a simple flash in jack's mind in the beginning since tyler is a part of jack and tyler reveals that he works several different jobs at night later on in this story that would mean that jack has been unknowingly working these jobs and earlier on in this story jack mentions to the doctor he sees nearly two years before meeting marla that he thinks he has narcolepsy as he finds himself waking up in strange places without ever knowing how he got there which indicates that tyler has been taking liberties with jack's mind for quite some time however jack wouldn't become aware of tyler's existence until marla caused his insomnia to re-emerge and it's this re-emergence that sets the stage for jack's evolution from a deeply troubled man to a rebellious anarchist perhaps the tyler aspect of jack psyche understood that what jack was doing with these therapy groups was merely a bandage slapped onto a fatal wound and chose to solve the problem in a permanent way but whatever the case may be this is where jack's mind finally breaks under the weight of all his problems which pushed him into finding a solution to those problems by destroying his mundane life in a very literal sense when he riggs his apartment to blow while he's away on one of his many business trips a business trip where tyler finally reveals himself fully to jack though in the novel they meet on a nude beach rather than on an airline now during their first meeting tyler emerges as a handsome man with a trendy haircut stylish clothing and a lax bad boy-esque attitude a confident and appealing individual that jack only wishes he could be and when this alternate persona takes over that's exactly who he is a rebel who doesn't care about the constraints imposed upon him by society or the mindless soulless consumerism that's taken hold over everyone's lives so jack destroys his quote near complete life in order to free himself from his pain and in a way he succeeds but in more ways he just puts yet another bandage on the problem that new bandage being fight club fight club is surely an outlet for these men's pent-up emotions and it accomplishes the same thing as the support groups it allows these men who in their everyday lives have no one to express themselves to to let go of their emotions through a barrage of violence now there's nothing wrong with fighting occurring between two consenting adults but the fighting isn't the problem it's the emotional bandage it provides when these men come to fight club and duke it out to release their feelings they aren't solving anything they're just exploding in that moment and going back to their lives afterwards without doing anything to fix the problems they have just like jack was doing with the support groups this is like self-medicating for any condition sure it helps but in the long run you aren't really addressing your problems you're covering them up and treating yourself in an improper way now all of the actions that tyler takes on jack's behalf are done to accomplish one goal propelling jack towards rock bottom this is touched on a bit in the film but it's mentioned much more frequently in the novel tyler tells jack at various points that he needs to hit bottom in order to remake himself he needs to destroy himself totally in order to rise from his self-immolation as a phoenix reborn one that's perfect unmolded and unconstrained by any and all expectations or artificial desires created by the banal world of corporatism and consumerism something we haven't discussed just yet about jack that ties into this mission to hit rock bottom is his obsession with death and destruction throughout this story we're shown that jack often thinks about incredibly morbid or destructive things like what a man looks like after he's been hit by lightning or the recipe for napalm but what's more important than his morbid thoughts are his suicidal ones jack at a few different points in this story expresses his desire to die to be taken out in a plane crash and we even see him mulling about the sweetness that is the impending death of chloe a member of one of the support groups he frequents why this is relevant to jack's desire to hit rock bottom is because it amplifies his capability to reach that point as a man who doesn't fear death or wishes for it is a man who's able to engage in any sort of dangerous endeavor without any regard for his safety which in jack's case means he's on the fast track to hitting his goal and once he hits the goal of rock bottom he'll be a new and free man a man who has unlimited potential and no fear and this makes jack into an exceedingly terrifying man as there are few people who have more potential to cause harm in this world than a person with nothing to lose that doesn't care whether they live or die now if jack simply wanted to destroy himself so he could shape himself into a different person that wouldn't really be a problem it's not the greatest idea in the world but a person can do with himself what they will the problem here comes when jack decides that it's not only himself that he wants to see hit rock bottom it's the entire world to quote jack directly i wanted to destroy everything beautiful i'd never have burn the amazon rainforest pump toxins straight up to gobble the ozone open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells i wanted to kill all the fish i couldn't afford to eat and smother the french beaches i'd never see and so begins project mayhem the evolution of fight club from a half therapeutic escape from reality into a paramilitary anarchist organization hell-bent on changing the world through destruction there's nothing wrong with having grievances with society we all do and we all should as the world is imperfect and having a desire to change it is well how the world changes but when you mix a noble desire like that with angst anger depression and a death wish this is what you get a man who thinks the world is a corrupt and loathsome place one that deserves a hard reset so civilization might blossom into something greater while you could argue that this might be a good thing what you have to consider here is that jack is making this decision on behalf of the entire world without caring what it will cost the untold number of people that his actions will affect in his dogmatic view of how the world is and what it should be he believes that the people will eventually understand that the destruction of the world as they knew it was not only necessary but a good thing and they'll be grateful for the world that jack has created but that's the problem with this revolution that jack aspires to create it's not a popular revolution it's not a decision made by the majority of a population it's a decision that's made by jack and the fanatical men who he's recruited and turned into mirrors of himself jack's plan to reset the world by collapsing its financial system might seem like an innocent enough idea at a glance but the chaos that will ensue as a result of this action will cause untold destruction rioting and deaths all done in order to satisfy his own view of how the world should be not to mention the many deaths of his compatriots that will occur as they attempt to wage a war against the establishment a sample of which were given with the death of robert paulsen now a lot of the actions taken by the members of project mayhem in the book and the film are the same but there's two key differences between the two that totally changes the message of this story and our view of jack as a harmless revolutionary those being the fact that in the novel jack murders two people himself and the different endings in the book jack as tyler kills his boss and the mayor's special envoy on recycling a man who was compiling a list of bars to raid that were hosting fight clubs which takes the virtuous revolutionary we see in the film and adds the murderer tag to that false moniker killing the recycling envoy can be construed as a revolutionary act as tyler kills him to keep him from obstructing his schemes but the murder of his boss was done out of pure spite and though there's not much justification for killing the envoy there's none for killing a man whose only crime against jack was being an annoyance so it's safe to say that our protagonist isn't the well-intentioned man of the people that we're made to believe he is in the film now as far as the endings are concerned the events that led up to them are both the same jack discovers that tyler is a part of him after he speaks to marla about him and afterwards he tries to stop the impending plans of project mayhem in the film when jack is facing tyler and decides to shoot himself in order to rid himself of tyler it appears that tyler instead of disappearing becomes a part of him as jack accepts him as a part of himself after which he watches his plans come to fruition with marla by his side seemingly signaling that project mayhem will continue on with a renewed jack at its head with marla as his consort however in the book the explosives that tyler rigged the buildings with are revealed to have been made with nitroglycerin and paraffin instead of nitroglycerin and sawdust a combination that jack has never had any success with a subconscious acknowledgment that even his alternate self didn't want his plans to succeed and instead of assimilating tyler into himself after shooting himself jack falls into a coma in this coma he fantasizes that he's in heaven and that the orderlies nurses and other staff of the hospital are angels that are catering to him with marla calling him occasionally but he never answers and the reason he doesn't answer is because sometimes those angels appear as a man with a black eye and a swollen forehead bringing him his pills and lunch tray or someone with a broken nose pushing a mop beside his bed and those men whisper in his ear that everything's going according to plan civilization will break and be remade anew and that they look forward to having him back so we're given two separate endings out of a similar situation a revolution that one man created out of a desire to change himself and the world around him a revolution that he no longer has any control over and though it's presented to us in the film is fairly positive in the end in the book it's treated more as what it is a chaotic cancer that spread from the mind of tyler durden a cancer that's attempting to consume the world in chaos and reduce it to ashes so those ashes might serve as fertilizer for a bountiful new world unaffected by the rot man has allowed to fester in our modern society and at this end with the revolution on the horizon who was tyler durden he was one half of the mind of a man languishing alone in the pale light of late night infomercials a man succumbing to the pressures of overwhelming depression anxiety and insomnia living a life of mundane corporate morbidity and consumerism jack psyche broke in too revealing the darker side of the conditions he was suffering from as tyler jack sought to piss on the parade of the mindless zombies and corporate fat cats of the modern world tainting their soups defiling their films and living a life in contrast to what the man expected him to live unfortunately this led jack to the cultivation of an organization that rallied downtrodden men with the promise of a new world free of the misery they've experienced throughout their lives a pure world where a man can look beyond the impositions of others and truly live as he believes we were intended to live as i said earlier in this video there's nothing wrong with wanting to change the world it's not evil to point out the faults in our society or to want a better life for yourself or those around you but it is evil to want to save your fellow man through destruction the world always needs change but do we really need more of that kind of change do we really have to watch many of our fellow humans die so some can have it better i think and hope not but jack and tyler do and that's what makes them more villainous than virtuous their willingness to sacrifice you your friends and your family so the so-called enlightened can enjoy a more prosperous world and that notion has and will always breed evil thank you all for tuning in to this episode of analyzing evil and i hope you've enjoyed what are your thoughts on jack and tyler did i miss anything let me know down below and leave a suggestion for a villain you'd like to see featured in a future episode while you're at it if you like this video hit that thumbs up button and make sure to subscribe if you haven't already a big thank you to all of my subscribers and to my patrons and a most vile thank you to those whose names you're seeing on screen now join the channel's discord server and reddit to interact with myself in the community and follow me on the social media platforms listed below to keep up with the channel as always thanks for watching and i'll be seeing you soon you

Channel: The Vile Eye

Views: 347,522

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Id: 3uMWqDiq1IQ

Length: 19min 54sec (1194 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 16 2022