I watched “Fight Club,” a thriller/action movie that was based on the book by Chuck Palahniuk and released in 1999. A man is suffering from insomnia and bored with his corporate life, so he begins to attend support groups for maladies that he does not have in order to express his emotions and be listened to. He is disturbed when a woman named Marla begins to do the exact same things as him, and confronts her about her lies. He meets a soap maker named Tyler Durden on a plane, and moves in with him after his apartment explodes. The narrator and Tyler start a fight club that gradually turns into more crime.

This movie is extremely trippy and confusing, you have to pay close attention to catch many details and understand the story. It’s interesting but unbelievable, and it has you second guessing everything you think you understand about the plot and characters. I watched this with my roommate, and we had several theories about what was really happening as the movie went on. I would recommend going into this movie blind so you get the full experience of bewilderment.

I like the acting and character details, but not so much the characters themselves. I liked the cinematography and setting, and the wardrobes. I can see how this movie is a satire on masculinity, and how the fight club can be interpreted as an allegory for homosexuality. I don’t really understand why this movie is so popular, but maybe it’s because it was so controversial and unique.

Spoilers ahead! The movie’s plot twist is that the narrator and Tyler Durden are the same person, and that the narrator has just been imagining his other personality as another person outside of his own body. I’m not sure if that would qualify the narrator with dissociative identity disorder (DID), bipolar, schizophrenia, or some mixture of the three. The narrator does not remember acting as Tyler or realize that people cannot see Tyler until the end. Tyler is a doppelganger of the narrator, because Tyler is a culmination of all the traits the narrator wished he had but was too scared to claim. The narrator sees Tyler as a whole other person with his own physical appearance, style, and personality traits, but he is literally imagined from the narrator’s brain. My roommate and I actually suspected pretty early on that Tyler was not a real person, but we were also confused on whether Marla was real or if part of the fight club might not be real.

TW: gore, violence, nudity, sexual content, vulgar language