Chuck Palahniuk & The Commodification of Human Behaviour

Chicken or egg? I forget if it was Fight Club or Chuck Palahniuk that came first in my life. Is it that we get immersed with the creator to give the creation our attention or the other way around? 

With that rhetorical question, I recently rewatched Fight Club in preparation (unintentionally but that’s how it felt) for another interview with Chuck Palahniuk. 

Commodification

The first thing that struck me was how Palahniuk would describe what he does as exploring the commodification of human behaviour. A philosophy quite transparent in Fight Club where the main character tries to pull himself out from being the mindless consumer whose worth revolves around the stuff he owns in his condo. A premise for looking at a world where one’s possessions starting to own him. An argument could be made that most people are being used by their smartphones and their apps instead of the other way around. They just don’t realize Facebook’s ads know exactly how to make them consume things they don’t need to impress people they don’t care for. 

Too far

Palahniuk’s isn’t a person I’d associate as a people pleaser. I don’t think it’s possible when one writes books so raw that seem to dig into the human psyche. He’s frequently been asked to leave writers groups and battled with editors and producers on the details of his stories that would make people uncomfortable. I don’t think because they are so unrealistic but because they hit so close to the part of the human psyche that many are trying to deny themselves and wish others wouldn’t know about in themselves. 

To which, I rather admire Palahniuk’s views of choosing to take things “too far”. The rationale being that you will beat yourself up in the future for not having gone too far in the past. For not taking a story “too far” or whatever the creation or life choice might be. Within the realms of not harming others of course. But most things we consider to be “too far” are probably the things that need to actually be done and pushed past the web of social constraint. 

The alternative of not pushing something too far will most likely result in the internal dialogue with one’s future self-reflecting and thinking “why was I so gutless?” Palahniuk’s view is that a creator isn’t trying to be liked but to be remembered. One will not be remembered for work that never pushed anything past limits. 

Hospice & What Makes us Human

Palahniuk used to volunteer in a hospice home at 23. Whilst there, he would attend the support groups of his patients and that’s where the Fight Club scene with the support group came up. 

The members of the support group mistook him to be dying of the same diseases they were and that’s where he started to gain a perspective of being the sole healthy guy among the dying. It’s where he learned to cherish the wonders of life.

He also had the task of entering the homes of the people he cared for to clean out their belongings. Specifically, to trash bag all the ‘secrets’ they had stowed in their home that made them who they were. Things like dildos, blowup dolls, and objects his patients were embarrassed/ashamed of their loved ones finding when they’d eventually come to clean out their home. 

Palahniuk puts it that he was essentially cleaning out the key things that made the apartments uniquely someone else’s. Because, aside from the secrets he’d be clearing out, the apartment would appear to be normal. Average. A place with the basic things society and culture would deem acceptable for a human being to have and be considered normal. 

The reality is that everyone has secrets…things they might consider a darkness. These were the things that made them truly human... it just went against the "third wheel” that is culture. But that showed Palahniuk how everyone has their own “thing". How we aren’t all that different in that we have things that make us uniquely ourselves but most keep it as secrets because they are too afraid to show others. Thus, creating a need for creators like himself to create places in his stories to show how normal it is and how it’s all a part of being human.