The document provides an analysis of Fight Club through a Marxist lens. It discusses how the film criticizes consumerism and capitalism, portraying the main character as a slave to consumerist ideology. It analyzes how Tyler Durden represents a rejection of this system and a call to revolution. While the film has Marxist themes of class struggle and alienation, it can be argued that Tyler's vision is more anarchist than Marxist, seeking to tear down institutions without a clear alternative social system. In the end, the film leaves ambiguous whether Tyler's revolution would truly liberate people or simply usher in new forms of oppression.

1. A Political Analysis

2. What aspects of Fight Club
discuss or connote something
political?
2

3. What is the political statement
that the director is sending
through the film?
3

4. Types of Political Systems
• Democracy
• Republic
• Monarchy
• Communism
• Dictatorship
4

5. Marx
Marx believed that economics played a dominant role in politics, society, and
history . All economic systems create two social classes, with one possessing
greater power that is used to oppress the lesser class.
In the CAPITALIST system, the stronger but less numerous class was called
the BOURGEOISIE and owned the means of production, such as factories,
land, and capital. The weaker but larger class was the PROLETARIAT, whose
labour allowed the entire system to function and was the ultimate source of
bourgeois power.
Class conflict is inherent in capitalism because the bourgeoisie oppress the
proletariat, who become dissatisfied with the status quo and revolt against
the bourgeoisie to restore equality between the workers and the owners.
The Marxist lens emphasizes the role of economics and societal class in a
character’s status and explores how their class influences their decision
making. It also examines the interactions between characters from different
classes.
When applied to Fight Club, the Marxist lens reveals several clear
representations of Marxism in nineties America.
5

6. Marxism in a Nutshell
• Marxism is a movement that grew around
the philosophy of Karl Marx
• It is a reaction against Capitalism
• It seeks a fairer distribution of wealth among
the under classes
• It believes in the ultimate dissolution of
centralized government
• It is different from Anarchism, though they
share many of the same beliefs

7. Key ideas of Marxism
1. Individuals have lost their ability to make money for
themselves – they help others to make money by
working in a job. This is an unfair relationship as
their employers make more money from it than
they do.
2. The people in power seek to maintain this relationship
because it means they have a way of controlling everyone
(they can always refuse to pay you).
3. If only we woke up and realised this was the case, and
changed things in our favour, the world would be a better
place entirely.

8. Fight Club and Marxism
The narrator is a card-carrying member of
capitalist society, until he rejects the
aspirational ideals of his way of life and
chooses their binary opposite.
• Before, his home was a perfect replica of a
catalogue. After, he squatted in a derelict
house in a run-down area of town.
• Before, he cared about his appearance and
wore designer clothes; he fitted in. After,
he took care to disfigure himself; he stood
out.
• Before, he was a nameless individual. After,
he had invented multiple personalities for
himself.

9. The World of the Film
• ‘Jack’ works in a regular
job, lives in an
apartment and buys
Ikea furniture
• Fincher sets him up as
an everyman –
someone everyone can
relate to
• He is shown as being a
slave to a system where
everything has a price
“I flipped through catalogs and wondered: What
kind of dining set defines me as a person?”

10. Reification
• According to Marx, reification is the process by which
people become commodities, and is a natural
consequence of capitalist society. Fight Club portrays
reification several times throughout the film. For
example, the narrator’s job requires him to use a
formula to determine whether to initiate a recall on
defective products:
• “A new car built by my company leaves somewhere
traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car
crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now,
should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in
the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B,
multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times
B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we
don't do one.”

11. Reification
How Marxist is Tyler?
•Tyler uses the body fat of people to make soap
to sell.
•Project Mayhem takes people’s names and
they become ‘Space monkeys’. It’s only after
death that members have a name
•‘His name is Robert Paulson’
11

12. Fight Club is the gun to the head of
consumerist America. The pistol's cocked.
Say what you will about the explicit nature
of the fight scenes, or director Fincher's
tendency to trip up his storytelling with his
fixation on stylism -- he wants us to stop
reading the J. Crew catalogue, turn off
"Must See TV," and ask what the hell our
lives really mean.
- Robert Zimmer

13. Consumerism
• According to Marx, the bourgeoisie prevent the
proletariat from becoming aware of their oppression
and latent power by imposing bourgeois ideology on
society, which refers to the ruling class’s ideals of
normality.
• The ruling class uses ideology to persuade the
proletariat that their miserable condition is either
inevitable or compensated by future events. Marx
identified the primary ideology as religion, the “opiate
of the masses,” which justifies the temporal misery of
the workers by promising rewards and eternal benefits
in a heaven or afterlife
13

14. Consumerism
• Instead of religion, Fight Club identifies
consumerism as the modern American worker’s
opiate. When describing his life before meeting
Tyler, the narrator focuses much of his attention
on possessions.
• He says the pursuit of the next best product is
the current generation’s pornography, as “the
people who used to sit in the bathroom with
pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with
their IKEA furniture catalogue”
14

15. Consumerism
• The narrator initially finds his identity in his possessions, which ultimately harms
him in two ways. First, he becomes a slave to his possessions. Reflecting on his
shattered apartment, the narrator realizes that he had become trapped.
• ‘Look, nobody takes this more seriously than me. That condo was my life, okay? I
loved every stick of furniture in that place. That was not just a bunch of stuff that
got destroyed, it was ME! (off camera) I’d like to thank the Academy’
• There is no end to his pursuit of material possessions, and in the process, he
becomes a slave to his desires and his possessions.
• ‘The things you own end up owning you.’
• The second pernicious effect inflicted upon him by consumerism is the emptiness
and the lack of meaning in a life spent in pursuit of temporal possessions. His
purchases never gave him fulfilment or meaning, a fact captured in his assessment
of the refrigerator’s contents as “a house full of condiments and no real food”.
This acts as a metaphor for the bareness of his possession-driven life; he had all
sorts of fancy possessions that symbolized success and the ideal American
lifestyle, but they did not mean anything and therefore left him empty, without a
true identity, and in desperate need of transform.
15

16. The World of the Film
• He is a drone: an unmotivated worker going
through the daily routine of life
• His life is consumed by ‘shit we don’t need’

17. The World of the Film
• This state of affairs is
– according to Jack –
the fault of the
corporations (like
Starbucks)
• “When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll
be the corporations that name everything,
the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy,
Planet Starbucks.”

18. The World of the Film
• Fincher puts forward a cynical view of the world in
which people are at the mercy of big corporations
and have no individual power
• We are taught to consume from an early age to keep
the wheels of capitalism moving
• We are so desperate to keep the things that we have
that we mindlessly conform to this paradigm without
ever challenging it

19. Enter Tyler Durden
• “Fuck off with your sofa units and
strine green stripe patterns, I say
never be complete, I say stop being
perfect, I say let... lets evolve, let the
chips fall where they may.”
“Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and
I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white
collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't
need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No
Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been
raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars.
But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”

20. Enter Tyler Durden
•Tyler is Jack’s alter-ego. Tyler is
Jack as he wishes he could be
“All the ways you wish you could be, that's me. I look like you wanna
look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most
importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.”
“If you wake up at a different time in a
different place, could you wake up as a
different person?”

21. In Tyler We Trust
• Tyler is presented as emancipated: free from normal social
conventions
• He pays no taxes as he has no legitimate earnings
• He is committed to bringing the old order institutions (like
banks) down
• He wants all men to be free from normal social conventions –
like him:
– “It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to
do anything.”
• He wants anarchy - maybe not Marxism!

22. In Tyler We Trust
• “In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp
canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center.
You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your
life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the
Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny
figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty
car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.”
• In this speech notice the ruins of great financial centres:
Rockerfeller, Sears, etc and notice the intrusion of the
natural world (elk, forests, vines)

23. A Socialist State
• “You're not your job. 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 fucking khakis.
You're the all-singing, all-dancing
crap of the world.”
• The ‘all-singing, all-dancing crap of
the world’ is a reference to the
working class, the proletariat, the
normal people who bring
revolutions about...

24. What Tyler Wants
• Corporations to be torn down
• For man to get in touch with his primitive
(animal) side
• No more advertising, consumerism or money
• An end to the established order of rich and
poor
• All men to be truly equal

25. Quotes about Consumerism
• Tyler Durden: Do you know what a duvet is?
• Narrator: It's a comforter...
• Tyler Durden: It's a blanket. Just a blanket. Now
why do guys like you and me know what a duvet
is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-
gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we
then?
• Narrator: ...Consumers?
• Tyler Durden: Right. We are consumers. We're
the by-products of a lifestyle obsession.
25

26. What Tyler Wants
• “It's getting exciting now, two and one-half.
Think of everything we've accomplished, man.
Out these windows, we will view the collapse
of financial history. One step closer to
economic equilibrium.”

27. Is Fight Club a Marxist Film
Yes
•It presents a cynical view of
capitalism
•It champions the working
man
•We follow a group of people
who want to destroy financial
institutions and are invited to
share their point of view
•In the end: the terrorists
succeed
No
• Jack fights against Project
Mayhem – he is the
character we are invited to
empathise with the most
• We are shown the abuses of
power by Tyler – will his
world be any better?
• Although the terrorists
succeed, Jack/Tyler end up
dead (fair enough – they’re
terrorists), but also Marla
(who is an innocent
bystander)

28. The Final Word
• Fight Club has Marxist elements to it and we
can certainly use Marxist criticism to analyse it
• The film criticizes the capitalist world in which
we live, but the alternative it offers is not seen
to succeed
• Tyler is more of an anarchist than a Marxist, as
he does not believe in the social state
• But what do you think?