I am Jack’s gonzo theory about true identities in David Fincher’s Fight Club.
At least, that’s where we enter the conversation thanks to a seriously detailed breakdown of the existences of the characters in Fight Club that were posted to the Web site JackDurden.com. (Note: the site’s currently down, thanks to a Twitter referral by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk. I’m not 100% certain that’s a vote of confidence in the theory, or just a playful link for fans of the material to, as he says, "have fun.") So what’s the main thrust of the argument? Obviously, stop reading this is you haven’t yet seen or read Fight Club, and still want to go into the story unspoiled.
The site maps out all of the reasons why Helena Bonham Carter’s antagonistic love interest, Marla, is a figment of Jack’s (Edward Norton) imagination… much like Tyler (Brad Pitt) exists only in Tyler’s mind. They are all one person. They are all "Jack," our story’s narrator.
The evidence seems to be everywhere in Fincher’s movie, starting with the way that Marla dresses in similar clothes to Tyler, and shows up in places women normally wouldn’t appear. Like, for example, a support group for people with testicular cancer.
There’s a key scene that the author, identified by Chuck Palahniuk as Jeffrey Kalmikoff, returns to repeatedly when making the point that Marla’s gender swaps with Jack’s gender over the course of the movie. The scene takes place in a Laundromat, where Marla takes "multiple pairs of men’s jeans" out of a Speed Queen dryer, then promptly sells them at a vintage clothing store. As the site suggests this is the point where Jack is becoming Marla, "selling" his masculinity (pants) in a figurative manner.
Do you buy it? There are literally dozens of other examples that JackDurden.com points to in an effort to illustrate the notion that Marla doesn’t exist, and that she’s just as much a part of Jack as Tyler is/was. Some of them are a stretch. Others had me scratching my head and itching to go back to Fight Club and see how much of it was included by David Fincher intentionally. The share by Palahniuk has to be read as a ringing endorsement. I’d love to hear Helena Bonham Carter’s opinion of this bizarre Fight Club theory. Think she has read it yet?
