Fight Club

Imagine the cold vacuum of the barrel of a Colt 22 caliber pressing to the back of your throat, the piercing pain of your knees smashing on the wet pavement, the rattle produced by the gun barrel against your teeth because of the earthquake shaking whom holds the gun. Try to imagine what it is likely to think of at times like this; of what comes to mind; what the asphalt can do to your pants; if the gun itself is clean; how many times a tooth can be beaten before it breaks.

Raise your hands, open them, and spread your fingers as much as you can. Now, take that hand to your forehead and start banging it with the tips of the fingers into your forehead, which after a while starts to hurt. If, where you are, it’s raining, your sweat starts mixing with large drops of water running from your forehead to your mouth... In which a stranger has entered a 22-caliber Colt pistol. You try to speak but the barrel allows you only to mumble something incomprehensible.

You are Jack’s uncontrolled sphincter, a microbe in the shit that makes up the world. You have trouble sleeping: narcolepsy and insomnia. You believe the best way to combat this problem is to crash into the chest of a dying man, so you start going to support groups of patients with lung and pancreatic cancer, because the misery of others make you forget yours.

You think of Sisyphus, Camus, existentialism, of steroids and of a couple of ways to commit suicide.

You are Jack’s identity gender problem and support groups are no longer sufficient. The world also is plastic. Your house is like an Ikea's catalog. You feel you are not human enough. So you decide to fill in a basement with desperate and alone men. 

You look at them, they are your deer, and they are members of the Club that you created. You look at them and say that the first rule is that you cannot talk about fight club. They nod and you add the second rule is that you cannot talk about fight club. And after a while your fist is busting the face of another man. And his sweat, his blood will remind you, finally, that you are a human, a man.

But do not forget the gun in your mouth; you are Jack’s weeping eyes.

Close your eyes.

BANG.

Everything is dark, as if the universe itself would have died with that shot. As if the world had been shattered.

But you open your eyes, and everything seems to be better than before. You get up and go home, call your mother to whom you haven’t talked in a long time and you tell her that you love her. You clean your kitchen. You begin to flip through the yellow pages looking for a guitar teacher.

Everything is fucking good. Because “only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit" (Palahniuk) and you just destroyed yourself.

Because you just saw Fight Club.

Director: David Fincher

Writers: Chuck Palahniuk (novel), Jim Uhls (screenplay)

Stars: Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter