Editor’s Note: In honor of the 10-Year Anniversary of the release of Fight Club and the release of the special edition Blu-ray this week, we’ve decided to go back into the FSR archive and resurrect one of our favorite Fight Club articles of years past. In this article, Dr. Cole Abaius compares the themes of Fincher’s brutal film to those of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Trust us, this is not a joke. This article originally posted on September 22, 2008.

Perhaps the most well known love story of all time, “Romeo & Juliet” has been adapted several hundred times and has even more imitators that attempt to recreate the magical, star-crossed romance in paltry homage pieces. However, there is one film that rises above the others as the best version of “Romeo & Juliet” since “Romeo & Juliet.”

That film is David Fincher’s Fight Club.

Just go with me on this for a second. Oh, and there might just be SOME SPOILERS for the three people who haven’t seen it yet.

The Breakdown

Man hates life. Man’s Condo explodes. Man goes to live with an insanely destructive nihilist who starts an underground fighting club and creates chaos all over the city. Along the way, he engages in an unhealthy relationship with a suicidal woman that he meets at a Testicular Cancer Anonymous meeting.

The Stretch

If this doesn’t sound like “Romeo & Juliet” right off the bat, I’m not sure what does.

Jack (the narrator) obviously represents Romeo – a bored male in love with collecting cheap Swedish furniture and obeying his corporate masters. This love, like Romeo’s love for the Swedish-born Rosaline, is a shallow one, that Jack must overcome in order to know true love with his life-partner, Tyler Durden.

It’s fairly clear that Jack and Tyler’s meeting on an airplane mirrors the Balcony Scene in “R & J.” Both are elevated above ground, and in both, the speakers’ lines form a Shared Sonnet – the ideal poetic structure for discussing both love and soap.

Thus, Tyler Durden represents Juliet. The two characters share the same lust for anarchy and lute music and have never been in a fight until they find love. It’s also well known that Brad Pitt was Franco Zeffirelli’s first choice for the role of Juliet in his 1968 adaptation, but Pitt was only five years old at the time so Olivia Hussey stepped in to fill the void.

This connection also becomes obvious later in Juliet’s storyline when she shaves her head and attempts to blow up the major Credit Lendors of Verona using homemade napalm.

Bob, the lactating support group friend is the story’s Tybalt. Both were revered fighters in their prime and now serve no purpose but to agitate Jack and Romeo. Bob also dies, as Tybalt does at the hands of Romeo, as a direct result of Jack’s actions. Both deaths spur on dramatic shifts in each story – forcing previously unaligned characters to choose sides and forcing the protagonists to rethink the path they are headed down. Much like how Tybalt’s death forces Romeo into exile in Mantua, Bob’s death sparks Jack’s departure to retrace Tyler’s plane flights all over the country.

Also, Bob’s Bitch Tits represent Benvolio, the comic relief of the story. Unfortunately, a sizable monologue about Queen Mab – Bob’s Bitch Tits’ only line in the movie – was cut due to time constraints.

Perhaps the most important figure in the story, Marla Singer, represents Suicide, a common theme in “R & J.” At the beginning of Fight Club, Marla is all Jack can think about, but instead of going after her, he seeks out the foolish man-love of Tyler Durden. At the beginning of “Romeo & Juliet,” Romeo waxes dramatic about suicide after being scorned by Rosaline, but chooses to seek out true love with Juliet instead.

Ultimately, and spoilerifically, Jack ends up choosing Marla over Durden in the same way that Romeo chooses suicide when he believes his life with Juliet cannot be realized.

In another thinly veiled reference, Juliet’s decision to take a dagger to her bosom is yet another obvious homage to Bob’s Bitch Tits. In fact, Shakespeare’s ability to foresee and allude to future works of art is one of the reasons he’s considered a genius.

Jack and Tyler being the same person may seem to complicate the comparison, but, yet again, it seems obvious that the consummation scene in “Romeo & Juliet” is an almost shot for shot twin with the scene in which Jack realizes that he’s Tyler Durden. In both, two people ceremoniously join together as one in a hotel room with slightly homosexual overtones while confusing the lark for the nightingale.

If read in this light, it becomes clear that Shakespeare’s Juliet might actually be a schizophrenic hallucination that Romeo creates after diving deep into depression over Rosaline’s rejecting him. It also means that Jack represents both Romeo and Juliet as does Tyler Durden. Confused yet? Neither am I.

If all of this is the case, though, the endings don’t quite line up. Jack chooses Marla just as Juliet chooses suicide – but in a very real sense, Jack survives the end of the story despite the bullet wound in his neck (Jack’s Neck clearly represents Juliet’s Bosom). However, in my scholarly research, I found an alternate version of “Romeo & Juliet” by Shakespeare in which Juliet is jolted back to life by an earthquake and stands on the edge of a cliff, watching the Capulet and Montague estates topple to the ground while “Where is My Mind?” by The Pixies plays in the background.

The Recap

Jack is Romeo and Tyler Durden is Juliet, engaging in a disturbing “menage au four” with himself. Marla is Suicide – a dark, dangerous release from Jack’s earlier love. Bob and His Bitch Tits represent Tybalt and Benvolio respectively – both fight skillfully, doth protest too much, and are killed ironically. And the author of “Fight Club,” Chuck Palahniuk, like Shakespeare, may have never actually existed.

Even though Chuck Palahniuk and David Fincher have never admitted to it in any interviews, when the two stories’ elements are critically reviewed, it seems almost too obvious (to any intelligent film critic) the connection between Fight Club and William Shakespeare’s classic tragedy of love.

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Every week, I provide an outlandish commentary on a classic film, and you pretend I’m competent at my job. We all win, so feel free to play along at home!

I got tired of everyone talking about how this movie is such a great social commentary on the United States’ inherent xenophobia. We should all learn a lesson of peace and forgiveness and understanding for our neighbors while shopping for Grape Nuts and Tevas and bras to burn.

Well, enough. Today, I’ll show that The Day the Earth Stood Still is actually about how kick ass the United States is for having a ton of nuclear weapons and how shooting first and asking questions never is the right attitude to have toward strangers.

Just go with me on this for a second.

The Run Down

Alien lands in Washington. Authorities shoot alien. Alien recovers, goes into hiding, solves a complex physics equation and demands an audience with the leaders of every country in the world to deliver an important message. Somewhere along the way, alien falls in love and has robot kill for him.

The Stretch

Since the US government shoots the devilishly handsome, human-looking Klaatu almost as soon as he pops out of his sweet spacecraft, they’re obviously the bad guys of the story, representing hubris, machismo and fear of the unknown. The story is a morality play of Twilight Zone proportions, especially considering that the being we keep trying to kill is only trying to bring us a message of peace and understanding.

That’s one way of looking at it. The wrong way.

In reality, Klaatu is a citizen of a technologically advanced society visiting a less-advanced world to tell them that if they continue building atomic weapons, his planet will have to annihilate them to secure their own safety. Sound familiar? Of course it does. It’s the message the United States was sending other nations during the Cold War. We can have nukes, but you can’t, and if you try to get them, we’ll nuke you. With our nukes. Thus, the handsome alien, while shaped nothing like the country, actually represents The United States.

Here’s where it might get confusing. As a backward society that lacks the most technologically advanced weapons in the universe, The United States represents every other country in the world but the United States (specifically Communist Russia). A smug, know-it-all, dominant force has entered the country telling its citizenry that it will be destroyed if it seeks to have more power, much like every foreign power the United States bullied into discontinuing a nuclear power program. Therefore, The United States is Not The United States.

Since the film was made in the 1950s, it seems clear that Klaatu’s love affair with Helen mimics the United States’ growing love affair with Popular Fast Food Chains. At first, Helen is off limits, something that a younger, more reckless Klaatu would enjoy if he drove a Hot Rod, but after engaging in a semi-inappropriate relationship with her son Bobby (who obviously represents Frozen TV Dinners) Klaatu realizes that the health risks involved in eating too much fast food are outweighed by the convenience and the way she feels on his lips.

Gort, the robot with the heart of gold, represents The United States Economy. Steadfast, he stands tall and strong against the onslaught of The US Military (which represents The Soviet Military), never wavering even in the face of outsourcing or foreign competition. He’s also able to liquidate tanks and people with a really nifty eye-laser. Just like the real economy.

Near the end of the film, Klaatu (The United States) teaches Helen (The Fast Food Industry) how to control the robot (The US Economy). Thus, the mantel of power is handed over to a growing corporate interest that, to this day, runs the nation’s fiscal policy with a ground-beef fist.

Perhaps that is the most chilling message of all.

Finally, the iconic phrase uttered by Klaatu to stop Gort from killing – Klaatu Barada Nikto – is probably Latin for “Klaatu is true in the nighttime”. Since Klaatu represents The United States, it clearly means that US military action is correct in the darkest of times or, a more literal translation: anything the US government does is justifiable during wartime.

Thus, you have the true message of the film.

The Recap

Klaatu, with his weapons of mass destruction, represents The United States. The United States, fearing outsider invasion, represents Soviet Russia. Helen, who is fast and convenient but bad for your health, represents greasy burger joints. Her son Bobby, who is easily attainable and ready to eat after three minutes on High, represents microwavable meals. And Gort, programmable and armed with a laser, represents the US economy.

Peaceniks would have you believe that the film is a statement condemning the United States for being a fascist, military-driven complex that wants to blow up the planet. In reality, the movie praises the United States (via Klaatu) for being handsome and for pleasantly warning a backward people that they’ll be bombed back into the stone age if they attempt to subvert US superiority. Klaatu could have easily aimed a high-powered laser at Earth, reducing it to space dust, but instead,he bravely (and handsomely) chose to use bureaucracy to give world leaders an ultimatum of peace. Bloody, violent peace.

Not content with just one social message, the film also predicts the rise of the fast food epidemic that would one day overwhelm the nation with obesity and cause Morgan Spurlock to eat nothing but hamburgers for thirty days. Clearly, any film that could predict what society would look like over fifty years into the future deserves the label of “masterpiece”, and The Day the Earth Stood Still achieves that feat.

Give it a second look, and the connections will become obvious.

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