What WOULD Tyler Durden Do?

He'd ask you what you were doing with your life. If you were happy in your "condo existence," watching sitcoms all day, eating potato chips, subscribing to weekly magazines. He'd spout some stuff about how advertising has you believing that you are destined for greatness, but that you're not. He'd tell you that you're made of the same decaying crap that everything else is made of, that you are not special, that you will die.

He'd say that you are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world. 

Then he'd probably pick a fight with you. You'd lose. And then you'd walk away, and probably never look back. 

So many people, myself included, regard Fight Club as one of those movies that is so awesome, it needs to be seen to be believed. We (and yes, I note my shift in personal pronoun here, I need to mention it, I'm a stickler for grammar) look at Tyler Durden and go, Damn, that shit is kickass. Guys work out to look like him, girls wish they could, um, be with him. We quote him for essays, yearbook write-ups, twitter stats (guilty on this last one!). We tell our teachers and friends that Fight Club is our favorite movie of all time, cause it sounds cool.

But by doing so, we miss the point, don't we? Fight Club, like anything that flows from the pen of Chuck Palahniuk, is a social commentary, and a cutting one. And yet sharp as it is, it still fails to slice through the fat and the fog surrounding our lives. Palahniuk's--and Tyler Durden's--words go in one ear and out our mouths in clever quotations.

Shame on us. If he could see us now, Tyler would look at us and say, "How's that working out for you, being clever?"

How sad that it's so difficult for us to have courage--not necessarily to blow up credit card companies, but to leave our material and constructed comforts behind. Look at me, having just enough courage to notice it and to write about it. But action? Oh, leave me out of that, please. I gotta go do my homework and watch Entourage.

Although maybe, once in a while, when we're about to do something inane, mundane, mind-numbing, something so ordinary that we never stop to think about it anymore--like controlling our lives--we should. Stop, I mean, and then maybe ask ourselves, "What would Tyler Durden do?"

*note: Image borrowed from http://screenrant.com/1999-movies-year-in-review-titles-f-z-niall-30115/. :)