As we head deep in to Wedding season, the Hen nights and Stag dos are coming thick and fast. And so it was on Saturday when, following Live Earth, a well-intentioned mish-mash of artists who had flown around the world on private jets and driven to events in Humvees, and a watch of Jack Black’s silly but occasionally very funny Tenacious D in The Pick Of Destiny, I settled down to wait for Jen to return from a hen night.
Channel hopping, I happened across David Fincher’s genius movie Fight Club, starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. This is one of my all time favourite films, yet it is one I hadn’t seen for many years, particularly since I got really interested in some of the subjects that I waffle on about nowadays. Back then I was mostly occupied with doing my MBA, which meant I didn’t have time to philosophise, just learn lots of theories and hope that one day that I would understand accountancy.
So it was with a fresh eye that I watched the film, and found myself relating to it on a whole new level. The last time I watched it, I viewed Tyler Durden as an anarchist, spouting a lot of poppycock. Yet this time I understood, and sympathised with many of his views. Sure I don’t think it was necessary to commit acts of terror… I don’t feel the need to impose my views on others so forcefully.
And yet at the core of what Durden says is the idea that your identity rang true with me. That modern society pushes us to believe that who we are is a consequence of what we own, how much money we have in the bank and what car we drive. And yet all of these things are trappings that may reflect who we are, and we are no more complete as people if we have a big house. When coaching, I often ask people something like “what’s important to you in life?“, and the answers often start with material things, and yet with little investigation, they are replaced with feelings and emotions that are purely internal… peace, fulfillment, achievement. These “higher” criteria are actually achievable in many ways that don’t require any trappings at all. So this new viewing of Fight Club changed my view of Tyler from anarchist to unconventional life coach for the members of Project Mayhem…!
This to some extent is easy for me to say, I have a nice house and an array of unnecessary gadgets, yet they don’t specifically make me happier, the gadgets for example hold interest in me usually only until I have figured them out, or they have solved a larger challenge for me, often technically. The gadgets give me internal feelings, and I can get them from a number of methods, including sitting in the garden and playing with my son.
So for me, Tyler Durden was right… he saw the world from a pure perspective… he just had a funny way of translating that message of what was in his heart in to meaning for everyone else.
And then again, don’t we all?
