What Would Tyler Durden Do?
#95, June 26, 2002
My son Tyler just graduated from high school. I watched from
the west-facing bleachers of the Petaluma High football field. It was warm,
growing hot, but with the promise of a cooling breeze. When they started
playing “Pomp and Circumstance”, I got a teary-eyed.
My thoughts were full of the typical valedictorian speech
clichés about standing at the threshold of the future, about inheriting the
world, about all that lies ahead. Three hundred beautiful youngsters: family
jewels, flaws cloaked by their amethyst and pearl gowns, arrayed on an emerald
field in the diamond sunlight under a sapphire sky. Enjoying the last lingering
safety of the safe-deposit box.
And beyond that safety, what? What great struggle will
define their era? One view is expressed by Tyler Durden, Brad Pitt’s anti-hero
of the film “Fight Club”: “Our generation has had no Great Depression, no Great
War. Our war is a spiritual war. Our depression is our lives.” Durden breaks
out of his insomniatic depression through ferocious underground fist fighting,
then wages his spiritual war in a sick, explosive scheme to bring down the
bastions of consumer capitalism.
The explosion is a fitting metaphor for the world facing
today’s graduates. The explosion in technology, leaping from the first PCs and
Apples at their birth to the hyper-real, always-on connectivity of the
Internet. Exploding population, sexuality and sexually transmitted diseases,
human opportunities and impacts. The explosion in consumerism, globalization,
and world trade. The explosion of the World Trade Center, Afghanistan and
Palestine, and Baltimore. The sum of all fears.
The cynical darkness of Fight Club was pre-911. Perhaps the
new War on Terrorism will instill the graduates with a sense of mission.
Perhaps they will leap at a chance to fight the fanatic followers of Saddam, to
wage the next battle in the war to prolong our oil addiction. Never mind that
the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned the President about a five-year campaign
involving a quarter million troops, bloody urban battles. In response to these
concerns, according to AP reports from two senior official, Bush said: "I
don't know what they're talking about." This is the same President who,
when confronted by his own EPA’s report on the nasty realities of global
warming, blew off “the bureaucrats report”, and counseled us, in effect, to
“get used to it.”
Just maybe, though, our graduates will see that the
President has no clothes. Perhaps, for lack of a credible leader, our graduates
will not let themselves be lead down dead end paths. Maybe those kids, most of
whom have had materially everything, will discover that everything will never
be enough. Tyler Durden, Lao Tsu disguised as psychopath, speaks wisdom to his
lost soul mate: “You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the
bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet.
You're not your ****ing khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the
world!”
Fight Club Tyler would counsel Petaluma Tyler to explode the
chains of materialism: “The things you own end up owning you.” Tyler would warn
Tyler against advertising, which “has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs
we hate, so we can buy s*** we don't need.”
If you live without thought to how you will contribute to saving the
world, he’d say you’re “polishing brass on the Titanic.”
When I first saw the trailers for Fight Club, I thought it
was another macho-man violence-ploitation film. I vowed to never see it. But my
22-year-old daughter made me watch it. Twice. She calls it “the spiritual
movie for my generation.” I can see
why. Beneath its violent and creepy exterior, Fight Club is shouting “wake
up and live!” If you accept it as metaphor, it informs you that you can
discover who you really are and what you are meant to do.
So graduates, when you go out into this troubled world, consider
some bumper sticker wisdom, and ask yourselves, “what would Tyler Durden
do?”