Fight Club is about an average man without a name; in the credits, he is referred to as "The Narrator". He lives a monotonous life where everything is "a copy of a copy of a copy". It isn't until the day where he meets Tyler, whilst traveling on a plane for a business trip that his life gets stirred up. Tyler is everything the Narrator isn't, and everything the Narrator wishes to be. The Narrator focuses on material things, like how much he can buy from an Ikea catalog,
while Tyler lives his life with the belief that "the things you own end up owning you" . Played by Brad Pitt, Tyler embodies the sex appeal that the Narrator (played by Edward Norton) wishes for,
and as he works various odd jobs to get by, he isn't tied down to a big corporation like the Narrator is. The big "twist" at the end of the film is that we find out that the Narrator and Tyler Durden are the same person. From a Freudian stand-point, Tyler represents the Narrator's id, which is all of his unconscious wants and desires .Throughout the entirety of the film, we see how the id, ego, and superego play out in the Narrator's mind, and how Tyler represents every desire that he has suppressed, whether that be from childhood or adulthood.
for people who suffer from testicular cancer). Freud would look at this as the Narrator recognizes the breasts to be something that his mother had, as they were his source of food as an infant, he finds comfort and solace in Bob because he has breasts just like his mother had.
While analyzing more of the ego,
Freud writes, "It is noticeable that [...] the ego
sometimes copies the person who is not loved and sometimes the one who is loved. It must also strike us that in both cases the identification is a partial and extremely limited one and only borrows a single trait from the person who is its object" (Group Psychology 439). We see this in the film as the narrator slowly picks up little habits that Tyler has and slips them into his conscious, every day life. Before he met Tyler, he never smoked cigarettes. After meeting Tyler, you see him slowly start smoking more and more throughout the film, even a scene where, a close up is shown of The Narrator smoking in work. It's important to note that there are only small character traits which The Narrator picks up from Tyler. His superego is still in tact, as he's fully aware of what is right and what is wrong. For example, there is a scene where Tyler puts a gun to a convenience store worker's head, and makes him promise that he'll go back to veterinary school, or else he'll blow his brains out. The whole time the convenience store worker is pleading for his life, the Narrator keeps begging Tyler to cut it out, because he knows this is a bad thing to do. However there is one particular scene where The
Narrator does find out that he and Tyler are the same person, and a close up of Tyler Durden is shown where Tyler states, "little by little, you are letting yourself become, Tyler Little".
Explain how meaning is constructed in film through analysis of visual and technical signification
I believe a good example of explaining how The Id (Tyler Durden) has an effect of The Ego (The Narrator) is the way that The Ego is presented. In the beginning of the film, The Narrator takes pride in his appearance, all buttons are done up, brushed hair, clean shirts etc. Later on in the film, once The Ego begins to pick up the habits of Tyler Durden, The Narrator is later seen at work wearing a bloody shirt, scruffy hair, bruised face and smoking a cigarette . Technically I also believe the lighting plays a role in the representation of The Narrator throughout, despite the face the films is shot in an almost vignette filter. However take a look at the two shots below, same environment, the left is before The Ego was affected by Tyler, the right picture is when Tyler was a big part of the Narrator's life.
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