Fight Club is a Satanic film.
Tyler Durden is a complex antagonist who is more interesting than the putative hero. He echoes Milton’s Lucifer in Paradise Lost. Tyler is the wise trickster god Loki, who sets Valhalla aflame. He is the teacher who brands the Mark of Cain upon students while informing them of the whys and wherefores of the world.
For Satanists, Tyler bears an obvious resemblance to the concept of Satan: “an exteriorized extension of [one’s] own potential, …an alter-ego…[a] creature, [a] demon, …a mirror image of the potential [one] perceives in [one]self”. (LaVey quoted in Popular Witchcraft, 1973)
Beyond the Tyler Durden / Satan comparison, Fight Club also explores deeper Satanic themes. Works by Nietzsche, Hesse, and Jung all have acknowledged resonances with Satanic philosophy. (The Church of Satan Reading List) These works also mirror key aspects of the narrator’s journey in Fight Club: from an alienated, repressed, and divided self; through a nihilistic awakening of destructive creativity; to a carnal, individuated affirmation of life.
Demian, Herman Hesse’s 1919 novel, bears striking similarities to Fight Club. Both stories begin with protagonists who face crushing alienation. Fight Club’s narrator (aka “Jack”) suffers from months of insomnia, which has left him a listless consumer-zombie, emotionally disconnected from his surrounding world. Similarly, Demian’s young protagonist Emil becomes alienated from his family until he is thrown into the completely unfamiliar and disconnected world of boarding school. Both characters face a disorienting nihilism that sets up a need to grow.
Unfortunately, each character is also deeply repressed. Emil struggles with a traditional Christian, carnal-denying upbringing, while Jack is such an empty follower of consumerist religion that he views the only woman in his life as an enemy, rather than a potential partner. Frau Eva and Marla Singer both represent their protagonists’ repressed feminine qualities (Jung’s anima) in their respective stories. Each provides a missed opportunity for carnal redemption and individuation.
Jack and Emil are soon unwitting navigators of their own dreams. Jack eventually learns that he has spent his sleeping hours living as another person. At times he views the waking world through both personalities. This disintegrating barrier between the waking and sleeping world is exactly what Emil experiences along his journey. Each character lacks the self-awareness to see that messages from their unconscious repressed selves are slowly flooding the dilapidated structures of their lives.
In both stories, mentor figures emerge from unconscious depths. Max Demian and Tyler Durden are inner voices, or daemons, conjured from dreams into the protagonists’ waking worlds. As Jungian archetypes, Max represents the promise of an integrated self, while Tyler combines this promise with lengthening shadows. Each embodies the “tutelary divinity” archetype found in Satanic symbology.
Diagnosing the nihilistic sickness of their protagonists, each story imparts a version of Nietzschean philosophy as a cure. Tyler restates the value of suffering in the Will to Power: “I say never be complete; Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing; Stick with your pain, don’t deal with it like those dead people do”. He wants Jack to understand that pain and suffering are necessary for life-affirming growth and change.
Demian expresses this concept through repeated allusions to the Gnostic god Abraxas. Emil receives a message in one of his waking dreams stating: “The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world…” Frau Eva later encourages him to find beauty in the difficult struggle to be born.
Like Tyler Durden, Max Demian predicts a society ripe for collapse. After such a collapse, the world will be reborn and ready for true individuals to live in fulfillment. While Max sees it as an inevitability, Tyler sees himself as the necessary agent of change: “You want to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs.”
Even Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence makes an appearance in both stories. Frau Eva advises Emil: “…there is no dream that lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular one.” (Demian, emphasis added). Tyler’s view reflects interpretations of Nietzsche which see the concept as a call to live one’s life as if it will eternally recur: “If your life were to end right now, how would you feel about it?”
The penultimate violence in both stories represents the internal battle of the divided self. On the front lines of war, Emil notes that the violence and hatred he sees from fellow soldiers was not directed at the enemy, but rather at “the soul divided within itself, which filled them with the lust to rage and kill, annihilate and die so that they might be born anew.” Fight Club’s final two battles, one physical and one mental/manipulative, literally show a divided self-struggling to gain internal control. Additionally, Tyler’s plan for Project Mayhem may be seen as an exteriorized manifestation of an internal desire for death and rebirth.
In this sense, Tyler Durden embodies Nietzsche’s most treasured symbol — the Greek god Dionysius. Nietzsche saw in the death of Dionysius the the antithesis of the pallid and incompetent Christian crucifixion. Similarly, Tyler’s destruction is a promise of new and recurring life for Jack.
By growing beyond their mentor figures, yet incorporating their lessons, Jack and Emil are each ready for the individuation of an integrated self. Both protagonists end their stories with the promise of a new future, having merged their personas with their other archetypes (Tyler/Max and Marla/Frau Eva).
At the end of Fight Club and Demian, Jack and Emil stand at the precipice of new worlds. Their journeys as individuals have only begun. The following quote easily could have been said by either character at the end of their respective stories:
Everything that has happened to me since has hurt. But sometimes when I find the key and climb deep into myself where the images of fate lie aslumber in the dark mirror, I need only bend over that dark mirror to behold my own image, now completely resembling him, my brother, my master.
—Hermann Hesse, Demian
