You Are Not Your Fucking Khakis

Earlier this evening I was at one of the campaign offices helping out for the up coming election, and I had a chance run-in with my usual barista from Starbucks, who happened to live nearby. When he saw me he called me, "Grande dark roast, black, with a plain doughnut!" my usual order. And it stuck me as odd that this is all I was, my usual order, a commodity. But I realized that this has happened to me before, and I have done it as well. Once I was referred to as "waffle with a double hash brown, covered and chunked, with a black coffee," my usual order at Waffle House. And even many years ago I encountered a guy I always saw at the gas station I worked at, and I called him "Skoal Berry guy." We probably have all had an experience like this, whereby we are defined by commodities in our lives.

But this evening it finally clicked, this is exactly what Fight Club is critiquing. "The things you own end up owning you." Commodities should not define us, and yet we not only let them define us, we welcome them as the definitions of ourselves. Anyone can see it on Facebook, where someone defines themselves by what they post on their wall. It is quite a strange phenomenon.

This might be why some of us enjoy old classic films or books. The main character walks into a diner and the waiter says, "Why hello Marty, will it be the usual today?" The usual doesn't define the character, but his name (let us ignore what the blue caterpillar's ontological question of "who are you?"). What happened? Branding is what happened, and it has been one powerful form of advertisement and lifestyle definition.

I'm not even exaggerating when I say branding is "defining lifestyle." Once for a professional practice class I and a couple of classmates interviewed the president of an advertising agency, and she told us, "We don't do advertising, we sell a brand, and we sell a lifestyle." I take that verbatim from the report I wrote. And when you ponder this phenomenon, you realize that it is really happening. I would remember this one guy by the two newspapers he bought everyday. Brand. I was once remembered for a Columbia fleece jacket I wear. Brand. A man might remember a girl for having the Victoria's Secrete brand PINK written on her ass ("some guy's name written on my underwear"). Brand. No one hires Frank Gehry to design a building for them because he is experimental, but rather they want the Gehry architecture brand in their city. Brand. This is how we are being defined; the very thing Tyler Durden fought against.

Remember that one scene in Fight Club where the narrator calls Tyler from the payphone, and he says, "We met on the plane." Tyler is silent. "We had the same brief case." Silent. "The clever guy." Then Tyler remembers. Tyler doesn't define you by a plane ride or your brief case. He believes you should be defined by who you are, and you have to find who you are by hitting rock bottom and letting everything go.

This is the main message being presented when Tyler says, "You are not your job. You are not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis." It's all about definition and identity, and that's at the heart of Fight Club. When Tyler says, "I see so much potential, and I see squandering," he's realizing that Fight Club had become a thing to define yourself by. He gathered this by noticing people talking about Fight Club, which makes Fight Club a brand. It eventually became Project Mayhem so that Fight Club didn't become a franchise, but and army. So that these men may identify with each other as brothers, unbiased, not unique, a part of the same organic compost heap. It's not about being special, which is what brands make us think we are. You wear Gucci sunglasses and you feel like a unique and beautiful snowflake, which you are not. You buy Prada or Aldo shoes and you think you are special. No, you're branded.

What we are looking at today is an identify crisis. We are looking at people who have no idea who they are. They know more about the stars and celebrities on TV than they do about their own families. So that advertisement firm doesn't sell a lifestyle, rather they sell an identity crisis. And what a strange thing it is that "branding" and "to be branded" (as in with a white hot iron) are homonyms.