Where Is My Mind? is a perfect song for Fight Club, and there’s a good reason why. Despite the fact that the book and the movie have some serious differences between the movie shows in a much better way just how the Narrator begins to lose his mind throughout the entirety of the movie, and it leaves a lot better explanation of just what’s going on with him and why Tyler seems like such a controlling force in his life. You get the sense that he’s the kind of guy that just follows along with pretty much anything, unless he’s the guy doing the leading.
That didn’t make much sense did it? Well if you think about it and the title of the song you might get the gist of what the movie was really about. There are of course a lot of theories and discussions that would deny the validity of many others but the truth of Fight Club is that it’s about a man that was needing to change his life and simply couldn’t do it on his own. Tyler even told him in the motel room, basically laying out the whole plot of the movie as he finally went from being a mindless consumer to an awakened leader that sought to bring like-minded people together for a type of awakening that he believed the world needed.
The problem with an awakening is that many of those that are still stuck in the dream will gladly fight to preserve the world they know and call those that would take it from them anarchists. IN this case however the Narrator is a man that simply lets go of that more primal version of himself and lets it run wild. He doesn’t see this individual as what he really is, but instead what that part of him wants to see. It’s the side that is free, that is unencumbered by the need to have material things, to experience life from a distance. Tyler Durden is there and in your face and without any apologies for anything he does.
This dangerous sense of what it means to be truly free is something that has been tempered again and again throughout history and while it is an attractive and compelling aspect of life it is also one that carries with it a great price that has nothing to do with the laws of mankind or the consequences that might come as a result of simply being yourself. The price for living free is finding out that the world simply doesn’t care. If a person wishes to live and die freely then they must know that the world won’t care about them one way or another. Tyler is resigned to this, he thrives off of it, and he seeks to teach it to others in a way that is no less dogmatic than the world he is seeking to rebel against. So really, Where Is My Mind is a perfect song since if you aren’t rebelling against one facet of life, you’re rebelling against another. Sometimes it’s hard to know just which side you land on from day to day.
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