Quick barely coherent fight club rant I threw into my Google docs because I couldn't sleep
I watched fight club for the first time very recently, haven't been involved in the community much but from my brief googling it seems the consensus is that the narrator has DID.
From a literal perspective of the movie I get it. People tend to interpret stories very literally, like something has to be either realistic fiction or fantasy. Tyler Durden isn't a ghost or some demonic entity, the narrator is just going mental. Metaphors are lost a little with the medium of film and I'd say the book is a lot better for this (though I haven't read it yet. I can't wait to, next on the list for sure!!). Metamorphosis isn't a fantasy, it's a metaphor—but if it was a movie you'd be looking at a literal insect and it just wouldn't work the same. The first person narration in the movie curbs this a little, but visual representations blur the abstractness of certain things.
Personally I interpreted it as being about severe sleep deprivation. The very start of the story (chronologically, I know we do the whole flashback thing) talks about "For six months. I couldn't sleep. \ With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy."
I don't think people realize how bad things get when you go without sleep for so long. You are half conscious all the time, your brain only functions to the extent that is strictly necessary to survive and appear functional to other people. You space out everything and get lost in your own mind. Its lonely in there, so you talk to yourself. If you talk to yourself for long enough, you start to feel like you're talking to a whole other person, and then you give that person a name—which is how you get Tyler Durden. Real people blend together and become one singular entity. You see that after the death of Robert Paulson with "in Project Mayhem, we have no names." You work on auto pilot, things happen around you and you're powerless to stop them.
For a few months back in 2023 I was convinced I had DID. I've always had sleeping issues—not insomnia, it was all intentional. I would sleep on average maybe 2-4 hours a night, i'd pull multiple all nighters in a row just to prove I could. It fucks you up, you get so confused and out of it that you don't know who you are. You forget your own name, same way the narrator was never really given a name. You lie so much you don't even know the truth anymore, he had so many different identities yet none of them was his own.
Then the self harm comes into it—fight club. Because YES, attending fight club was a form of self harm. It seems like most of the members got hooked out of just morbid fascination of "what the fuck is this joker doing hitting himself in a random car park." But the narrator was just feeling impulsive. Your brain never REALLY stops, you just get this unintelligible buzzing and it's fucking annoying trying to make sense of it. You just get this impulse to do random bullshit to cut through the noise. You go for a walk in the cold, you lie on the floor for no reason, you bash your head into walls—you realize you have free will, and maybe, just maybe, if you do some out of pocket stuff it'll shake the sanity into you. Right before the very first flight the narrator asks him “why?” and Tyler goes “I don't know. Never been in a fight. You? ...You can't know yourself if you haven't! ...I don't wanna die without any scars.” You feel less than human and just want to EXPERIENCE, you know? You're doing nothing with your life other than barely surviving, and you're grasping every which way to find SOMETHING. You live only in the right now, you can recall what happened yesterday but in the same way you can remember a story someone told you. You don't care what happens to you because you of the past and you of the future are completely different people—consequences are non existent. So you get reckless, and then you plant bombs in skyscrapers.
Anyway, this has all probably been said a million times before—but I really loved this movie and wanted to give my own perspective. The whole concept hit really close to home and I wish I watched it years ago. Book next!! I WILL read more over the summer trust.