so maybe i’m slow, but i watched fight club a few days ago with some friends and even though i’ve seen it at least five times before, this time something clicked. as the movie was nearing its end and i was answering a barrage of questions from one of my boys (tanner) who’d never seen it before, i had several epiphanies.

fight club is a movie about a young man who was in the process of slowly making his way up the corporate ladder. and although he was progressing quite nicely, he was having a terrible time. he was having such a terrible time, in fact, that the stress was beginning to effect him physically and he had become an insomniac. at some point during his insomnia, his subconscious had begun to take over and he had developed a second personality. the twist is that this macroscopic alter ego (named tyler durden) actually began to do the things that our protagonist (who remains unnamed throughout the film) wanted to do but was too afraid to go through with. tyler proceeds to develop and organize an entire underground organization, called the fight club, which begins wreaking havoc and all sorts of chaos on cities all across the united states.

the kicker is that tyler’s ultimate goal is a forced collapse of the american economic system by explosion. the fight club’s most loyal members, nicknamed “space monkeys”, rig the bottom of several financial buildings with homemade explosives and set them all to detonate simultaneously. the movie ends with our narrator (also the protagonist) reclaiming his full consciousness by dispensing with his alter ego, tyler, and accepting responsibility for his actions. and then we get to watch all the financial buildings in the skyline collapse into themselves.

what’s interesting to me is that the movie was produced in 1999 and the book was written three years earlier than that. maybe chuck palahniuk (the book’s author) forsaw our current economic crisis as many other economists did. whether or not he did, i doubt he would thought it logical for us to just rebuild those same buildings exactly the way they were built before.

but isn’t that exactly what we’re doing?