Can We Talk About Fight Club?

Tyler Durden said:

Listen up maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

But is this true? Scientifically, there is nothing different about the carbon and other molecules that make up my body from the carbon molecules in all the plants and animals that have ever lived.

Yet, Tyler Durden is wrong. Or at least, what he says doesn't match well with Yoda:

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter!

That is one of my favorite lines. I quoted this one day a long time ago in my college Biology 101 class at Quincy University. Dr. Natalini was talking about the chemicals that the body and brain were made up of and that they were relatively common and unimportant. Without being quite so shocking, he was basically stating exactly what Tyler would later say in the movie.

But I knew that Natalini was a Star Wars fan. I also knew that the university was a Christian institution and there were devout students in the room who were my friends. So I raised my hand and asked him what that meant in light of what Yoda said. If he'd had a comeback for that, I would have thought up something about the Bible and God, though I wasn't what I consider a Christian at the time.

He looked at me like I was crazy, paused silently for a moment and continued on as if I hadn't said anything. But then again, he did that a lot. Thanks Dr. J.

As a reminder, you have been warned not to talk about FightClub. But you can still buy the DVD.