Tyler in Fight Club is positioned as an object of desire and identification. For Jack, alienated by contemporary consumer culture, Tyler represents an ideal of untrammelled power. He wants to become Tyler and is seduced by his aura. There is an ostentatious homoerotic dynamic to this relationship, which the film propels.

One night as they're manufacturing soap, Tyler kisses Jack's hand and then burns the imprint of his lips into Jack' skin with pure lye.

If pain is the most expedient route to feeling alive, then the flirtation with self-destruction is what bonds Tyler and Jack.

Tyler Durden: Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers failed what does that tell you about God?

Jack: I don't know.

Tyler Durden: Listen to me, you have to consider the possibility that God does not like you, that he never wanted you, in all probability he hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen to you.

Jack: It isn't.

Tyler Durden: We don't need him.

Jack: I agree, we don't need him.

Tyler Durden: Fuck damnation man! Fuck redemption! We are God's unwanted children so be it. It 's only after we've lost everything that we are free to do anything.

An innovative theory of cinema emerges from the fragments Artaud wrote at the time of "The Seashell and the Clergyman" and "The Butcher's Revolt". [9] Artaud perceives filmic representation as an abyss. His scenarios project an atmosphere of darkness, blood and shock on the border between these elements. An endless doubling is present in this condition; divisions are shattered between reality and fiction, between danger and entertainment. Artaud's theory inhabits a liminial space, charting the trajectory of what he termed "the simple impact of objects, forms, repulsions, attractions". [10] His crossing of textual borders implies a negative volition – the image remains in the realm of the image, resisting annihilation. Diversity creates not dissonance but a higher symphony. In the collapsing of divisions, Artaud's film theory moves toward a fall into catastrophe, towards that which cannot be presented/represented. The image aimed at, and the spectator viewing, would be in a state of magnetic, negative interaction. The film image would be absolute minimalistic and expressive, at its most resistant to the process of representation. The film viewer would be the exposed subject of what Artaud called "the convulsions and jumps of a reality which seems to destroy itself with an irony in which you can hear the extremities of the mind screaming." [11]

Artaud conceptualized cinema as literally a stimulant or narcotic, acting directly and materially on the mind. His film work attempts to confront and tear the image from representation and position it in proximity within the viewer's perception/interpretative sensorium. In Artaud's film language elements are suppressed or subtracted in order to be articulated. Narrative is disrupted, while the image is broken down to compact visual sensation. Artaud stressed the necessity to "search for a film with purely visual sensations in which the force would come from a collision exacted on the eyes." [12] Artaud termed this process "raw cinema". [13] While probing the unconscious and dreaming, it would simultaneously demand a more immediate physical relationship between filmic image and viewer.

Fight Club presents an action film but concerns interiority –analysing the fluctuant, unstable human state. It forces the concepts of subjectivity and identification to extremes to suggest that identity is fragile and autonomous, helping us to understand the disorientated, directionless contemporary condition. Ultimately Jack is so filled with self-hatred and repressed anger that he's desperate to evacuate his own persona and occupy "an-other" consciousness.

Fight Club exists in a realm between fantasy and reality. The film achieves this primarily by exploiting the mysterious nature of insomnia. With Jack's relationship to sleep so precarious, it is impossible to distinguish between his conscious and unconscious states.

Jack: With insomnia nothing is real.
Everything is far away.
Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.

The narrator's divided conscious deepens into a mystical reverie. There is a visual hallucination born of situations of extremity. It is located just on the edge of vision. Consciousness is inextricably associated with emotions and variable in degree. Experience exists on many levels of consciousness.

Jack's repeated references to his own confusion heighten the surreal space in which large sections of the film exist. In addition, the relationship between Tyler and Jack remains ambiguous until the end.

Jack: If you wake up at a different time in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?

Even when it is revealed that Jack and Tyler are indeed the same person, the viewer is hesitant to accept the fact that Tyler doesn't really exist.

. . . the opening
of our consciousness
towards possibility
beyond measure.
~~ Antonin Artaud [14]