A few months ago, I watched Fight Club for the third time. This movie never ceases to amaze me with its precise camera, incredible cast and clever direction. Fight Club is a straight ride into anarchy and madness that I enjoy a little bit more every time I watch it.
Until I saw the last five minutes. In my opinion, the last scene between Marla and Jack is either an incredible way of destroying the spectator’s assumptions, or a lazy Hollywood-style twist.
Let me explain, under a cut.
The easy way out
A common and quite valid interpretation of Fight Club is to understand the ending as Jack’s epiphany: first, the character begins his journey by literally burning his meaningless, consumerist life into ashes and joining the opposite pole of the moral and social compass through the creation of Tyler Durden. A big part of the movie tells the story of Jack’s growth as he slowly comes to peace with himself, until he realizes that he doesn’t need Tyler anymore (after the car crash). At this point, Jack is like Dr Frankenstein, freaked out by the extent of his creature’s evil. He finally understands that submission to social diktats or self destruction is a dead end, and find his salvation in love. The last image of Jack and Marla holding hands while the entire skyline crashes in front of them, revealing a clear horizon, can be interpreted as a metaphor of Jack’s newfound peace and hope for a brighter future.
It is a powerful and beautiful message. However, as such, it strikes me as a disappointing ending to such a visceral, dark, strong movie. I don’t have anything against “love-is-stronger-than-everything” kind of endings when they are relevant, but they are several inconsistencies throughout the last scene that got me to question the overall meaning of that ending.
Inconsistencies…
First, when Jack shoots himself in the head, therefore “killing” Tyler, we clearly see his left jaw exploding under the impact of the bullet. Blood ensues, Jack narrowly escapes death and lies on the verge of unconsciousness. Then his brainwashed minions appear, carrying a screaming Marla, and everybody is deeply shocked by Jack’s wound. Two men wonder how he can stand with such a serious injury. We have to remember that these people are not easily intimidated: they committed various acts of aggression and they have seen their leader hurting himself pretty badly on numerous occasions (hitting himself, burning his hand with acid…). So their reaction leads the viewer to believe that Jack’s injury is serious, likely life-threatening. Jack does look like shyt, and he has trouble speaking – of course, he blew up his own jaw. But when Marla and him are alone, and Jack tries to convince her that his feelings for her are real and that he is sorry for being a fukked-up idiot, his speech gets better and better until he doesn’t seem to have any trouble speaking anymore. This spectacular improvement happens in thirty seconds. Quite interestingly, the last image of Jack at the end of his speech shows the right side of his head – the “good” one, which isn’t bleeding. As if to show that he is not wounded anymore.
In a film so exquisitely written, these inconsistencies and hints prove the last scene is essential to understanding the overall meaning of the ending of Fight Club.
Furthermore, the last scene shows the buildings crashing in a row; almost all of the collapsing skyscrapers are visible from the same window, thus revealing a fresh new horizon to the protagonists and the viewers… This scene has always seemed sloppy to me, like a badly written script in a video game. Let’s think about it: we know Tyler and his men set explosives under ten buildings. There are many more skyscrapers in any major American city, so we should logically see other tall buildings behind those collapsing. For that matter, we should see other buildings between us and the line of collapsing buildings! Architecturally speaking, it doesn’t make any sense otherwise.
To me, this last image tastes like a dream, whereas the whole movie feels real, shytty real. So, I started wondering what was real and what was a fantasy. What if that last scene takes place inside Jack’s mind? This scene feels like a fantasy – Jack’s fantasy: killing the bad guy, winning the girl back and standing tall and strong, facing the future, while the camera shoots his back in a very traditional Hollywood move. Nothing about Fincher’s directing is traditional in Fight Club, except that last scene.
… or genius
If that final scene is not real, when does the transition between reality and fantasy occur, story-wise? That is the tricky part. Nothing else in the movie feels out of place, except the fact that Tyler’s “assignments” get less and less believable as the story progresses. Hitting random people in the street? Ok. Destroying antennas on several rooftops? Ok. Smashing cars? Why not. Drawing a giant smiley face with eyes on fire on a building? That must require a solid logistic, but maybe. Jack’s entire gang posing as staff attendants during a major city event starring the chief of the police and probably many local figures? How is this poosible? Building an army of faithful brainwashed space monkeys in the entire country and across all layers of society, including cops? Suspension of disbelief coming up! Finally, the masterpiece: infiltrating the headquarters of each credit company in the city and stuffing each building full of tons of homemade nitroglycerin, in total discretion. Seriously?
Maybe Jack has a very wild imagination, or maybe I am being delusional. There is probably nothing in the movie that could be read as a transition from reality to fantasy. I haven’t read the book yet, but it does seem to be crystal clear that the events told in the book were supposed to be real. Still, the storyline in the movie seems less straightforward, and I like to believe there is a wider margin of interpretation in Fincher’s movie than in the original material.
In the end, Fight Club appears to be more than an essay about the debilitating effect of consumerism and modern slavery. In my opinion, the movie forces us to confront our own madness by making us question everything we saw in the past two hours. Like Jack when he begins to doubt his own identity – and Tyler’s identity – we suddenly begin to question the reality of what we believed to be true throughout the movie when we reach the final scene. The “it-was-all-a-dream” trope is usually an awful cliché, but Fincher is more subtle than that, and he doesn’t shove the deception down our throat. Instead, he lets us wonder, and that is, to me the beauty of Fight Club.
but I think he's reaching with her nonexistence (or lack thereof).
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