Consumerism in Fight Club

Besides the whole double personality plot twist, I consider Fight Club as a movie that expresses an attitude of anti-consumerism. The narrator represents the typical Americans who take buying goods as an indispensable form of pleasure. In the very beginning of the film, the narrator suffers from insomnia and there is a scene when he idly browses IKEA’s furniture set. For him, it is the furniture that he buys for his decent condo that proves his success and defines who he is. He is willing to follow boring routine to do repetitive work in order to secure his economic status. On the contrary, Tyler Durden is free and charismatic in the sense that he is not a slave for material goods. He lives in an abandoned warehouse, yet he is never constrained by material insufficiency. He sells soap made from human fat as a mockery to those rich people. The fact that the narrator bombed his own apartment and chooses to live in the shattered house with Tyler (although they are actually the same person) can be seen as his solution to his previous excessive dependence on consumption. He frees himself from the endless consumerism loop by becoming Tyler who owns almost nothing but his free will.