How 'Fight Club' Taught Us All to Distrust Flying
After 25 years, it's time 'Fight Club' got its due as a travel movie.
Fight Club, David Fincher’s 1999 portrait of a very particular kind of turn-of-the-millennium disenfranchised middle-class masculinity, does not immediately scream “travel movie.” And yet, it’s loaded with air travel, from the moment the nameless Narrator (Edward Norton) meets the enigmatic Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) on an airplane, to the jet-setting montage near the end of the movie, just before he realizes (spoiler alert) they’re the same person.
In celebration of the 25th anniversary of Fight Club that passed just a few weeks ago, we’ve decided to declare the movie an unsung travel classic, whose perspective on air travel, among other things, played into the ominous notion that there was something under the surface, that the world ran on systems that were unknown to us, that we only perceived the tip of the iceberg of what was really going on. If we could only understand, we could gain control of our lives. And if that doesn’t sound like air travel, what does? Like the Narrator, we hung on Tyler Durden’s every word. But many of those words, it turns out, are total nonsense.
Now that the movie is in the travel canon, we’ve decided to revisit a few of its more outlandish claims about the industry. Take, for instance, the scene when we first meet Durden, unaware at this point that he is simply a figment of the Narrator’s imagination who exists only to play up all of his petty grievances and anxieties and suspicions about how the world really works. While the Narrator sits in his coach seat simmering in disdain for his fellow man, Durden appears in the seat next to him, and starts expounding on the ways in which the airline industry exerts its control over its passengers.
“You know why they put oxygen masks on planes?” he asks. “Oxygen gets you high. In a catastrophic emergency, you’re taking giant panicked breaths. Suddenly you become euphoric, docile. You accept your fate. It’s all right here,” he continues, pointing to the emergency manual. “Emergency water landing—600 miles an hour. Blank faces, calm as Hindu cows.”
It’s delivered with such conviction that you can only believe it. But it’s not true. According to The Telegraph’s debunking of this particular theory, the inside of an airplane is kept at a certain level of pressure with a certain mixture of breathable, oxygenated air. If the hull of the plane is damaged and the inside depressurizes, the oxygen masks are there to help the passengers and crew breathe properly while the plane descends to a lower altitude, equalizing the pressure. In fact, ignoring the mask is what would get you “high,” in a sense: Lack of oxygen flow to the brain causes hypoxia, during which you’d feel, theoretically, euphoric and giggly instead of stressed out like everyone else.
Later, the Narrator stands glumly in front of an airport security agent as the man explains that his luggage has been confiscated, and introduces him to the term “throwers” in reference to baggage handlers. The narrator’s bag was vibrating, so the airport has to examine it as a possible bomb threat—but, more than likely, it’s just a sex toy.
Does stuff like this actually…happen? To find out, we spoke to TSA spokesperson Lisa Farbstein, who was kind enough to describe the inner workings of the screening process over email: “If a bag (carry-on or checked) does trigger an alarm, TSA needs to inspect the contents of a bag, regardless of whether the contents are vibrating. If the X-ray image indicates that there could be a possible explosive inside, then explosives experts are contacted to respond to and handle the situation to a safe conclusion. If the X-ray image indicates a possible prohibited item that is not likely an explosive, the bag will be pulled to the side to inspect the contents.”
That’s all well and good, but what about more… personal items? Farbstein has good news:
“Travelers are permitted to travel with adult toys. They are permissible to transport in either a carry-on or checked bag. No issue there.”
So, was it Fight Club that made us all suspicious of the airport? It certainly didn’t improve our perspective on the experience. Perhaps it just validated our feelings about all the small indignities we’re made to endure for the privilege of flying on an airplane a couple times a year. Variations of “does oxygen get you high” and “what do airplane oxygen masks do” still pop up all over “Ask Science” and “Today I Learned” subreddits decades after the movie was released. We bundle our jewelry and expensive electronics in socks and packing cubes as if that will make it less likely they’ll be damaged by a careless handler. We hide more embarrassing items under stacks of clothes as if that will keep them from being discovered.
Farbstein is more optimistic. “People recognize that a movie of that nature is fictional,” she said. “A good entertaining story, but not much more than that.” Take that, Tyler Durden.