"Are you also divergent, friend?"
Theory: Fight Club and Twelve Monkeys are part of the same story, and Brad Pitt plays the same central character. Fight Club takes place in the mind of Pitt’s character (Jeffrey Goines) in Twelve Monkeys while he is committed to the insane asylum.
Jeffrey’s obsession is with the “system” that controls and indoctrinates the population.
“There’s the television. It’s all right there – all right there. Look, listen, kneel, pray. Commercials! We’re not productive anymore. We don’t make things anymore. It’s all automated. What are we *for* then? We’re consumers, Jim. Yeah. Okay, okay. Buy a lot of stuff, you’re a good citizen. But if you don’t buy a lot of stuff, if you don’t, what are you then, I ask you? What? Mentally *ill*. Fact, Jim, fact – if you don’t buy things – toilet paper, new cars, computerized yo-yos, electrically-operated sexual devices, stereo systems with brain-implanted headphones, screwdrivers with miniature built-in radar devices, voice-activated computers…”
Tyler Durden leads an anarchist army to tear down and destroy the “system”.
“God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
However, the connection is more interesting that that, delving into some deep psychosis, into multi-level personality schisms: Jeffrey (Brad Pitt) imagines that he is someone else (Fight Club’s nameless narrator), and that person is imagining that he is in turn another identity (aka: Tyler Durden, Pitt again), only free to live out his hyper-violent cathartic fantasies. He imagines that he is someone else, imagining that he is himself. Leading the army, destroying the system, “looking like he wants to look, f***ing like he wants to f***.”
…
I love stuff like this.
