Fight Club

So I saw the movie Fight Club for the first time in its entirety, and I really, really liked it. I don't think it's a movie Christians are supposed to like. Not because of all the violence and sex and profanity, necessarily, but because its hero, Tyler Durden, is awesome and larger-than-life, and he's unapologetically nihilistic, disestablishmentarianist, uninhibited, destructive, hormonal, and everything Galatians 5 is not.

I spend a lot of time with movies like these thinking, "Fuck it! Why not?" and wondering whether I should feel guilty for that.

I suspect a lot of guys identify strongly with the movie. In a lot of ways, it was like Wild at Heart. Its message was primarily an anti-consumerist one, but to the males in the audience, it said, you've been emasculated by society, your idea of an adventure right now is to order something new and different from IKEA, and it's time to break through the constructed walls you've set up and do something awesome and feel pain and feel alive for the first time. I don't think that's inherently a bad message. It smacks of the attacks the New Testament brings against legalism and artifice. And it reminded me a lot of Wild at Heart. But the issue I had with Wild at Heart was that it glorified the means, and not the end. Jesus is more or less your safari guide to a life of adventure. Sure, it's great to be wild and adventurous and pursue things with, what was that overused phrase, "reckless abandon," but where do you go with it? What happens when you need some discipline to attain something great?

I know there are a lot of compelling reasonable reasons not to identify with Fight Club and not to admire Tyler Durden, but I'm a pretty impulsive person who can forget why I try to live how I try to live pretty easily because I identify easily with stories and characters. I have an active imagination that leads me to identify strongly with other perspectives more than to judge and distill their merit. I read Through Painted Deserts and I really want to take a spontaneous, unplanned road trip. I read Ender's Game and I feel like Ender, too smart and too capable and too destined for a normal life. I read The Sun Also Rises and I think I'm disillusioned and feel like sitting around somewhere like Spain idly, fishing and drinking because there's nothing better for me and my Lost Generation to do. So when I watch or read or think about an appealing character or story that brings along an un-biblical philosophy, it's hard for me to get off the bus and to re-center myself by remembering Christianity -- to me, it just feels like swapping one philosophy or paradigm or system for another.

Maybe that's why in 2 Timothy 2, Paul writes to Timothy to "remember Jesus Christ." It seems obvious in biblical context, usually because we've been reading the Bible or we're surrounded by Christians when we take a look at 2 Timothy. But maybe Timothy was like me, and maybe Timothy had times when he was hanging out with the gnostics, and they were talking about how God was transcendent beyond the confines of this physical world, which is just a construct anyway, and maybe Timothy knew that logically, metaphysically, it was crap, but found himself nodding along and agreeing anyway because it was compelling and answered some questions for him. But the person of Jesus, the way He walked and saw the world, and sees the world, and shares His perspective and His love and His character is incredibly gripping too, in a way that an ethical paradigm or a religious practice is not.

Maybe the best way to forget Tyler Durden is to think of Jesus. Maybe that's why Timothy and I both needed to hear what sounds so unnecessary to say -- "remember Jesus Christ."