Myths of Meaning: A Structuralist Reading of Fight Club and WALL-E

“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?” (Ecclesiastes 1:2-3, KJV)

The above declaration that opens the book of Ecclesiastes captures the human anxiety that all the pursuits of man, such as wealth, comfort, goods, are fundamentally meaningless. This primal and persistent fear of the emptiness of human efforts has existed before this theological text and continues in succeeding narratives/myths to this day. Many modern myths hold this anxiety as a foundational element in an attempt to approach the loss of identity and sense of existence in our capitalist society. 

This essay adopts the methodology detailed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his work “The Structural Study of Myth” to analyse two contemporary narratives as modern myths: David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E (2008). The structural analysis that Strauss advocates for requires us to move beyond the diachronic reading of the myth to a synchronic study of the smallest units of the myth, the mythemes. Lévi-Strauss defines these myths as ‘bundles of relations’ and by grouping these mythemes by the diachronic and synchronic mode simultaneously, the underlying structures and systems of the myth are uncovered.

Fight Club and WALL-E are two seemingly disparate films of seemingly disparate genres intended for different demographics that were released within a decade of each other. The uniting factor central to both films is the opposition between stasis and struggle. My analysis studies the isolated structure and binaries in both films and concludes with a comparative study of both, illustrating an underlying common structure that permeates both myths. 

Fight Club tells the story of a man’s psychological crisis when navigating between his individuality and the imposition of society. It highlights the failure of capitalist culture to provide room for an authentic identity. The central conflict of this narrative is presented through the duality of the unnamed Narrator and his alter ego, Tyler Durden, both representing the binary of expectation and desire. In a way, both characters are subject to a larger, abstract figure: the former to capitalist society and the latter to instinctual and impulsive behaviour. The Narrator embodies the extreme of conformity and material wealth, where his identity lies in his possessions (e.g. furniture). In opposition, Tyler Durden embodies the extreme of rebellion instinctual experience, where he has rejected materiality and propagates a lived experience of physical engagement and disruption. The mythemes cluster below illustrates the tension between both extremes and the binary of stasis and agency: 

Stasis	Agency
Narrator defined by his furniture (IKEA)	Tyler rejecting material possessions
Narrator’s job (calculation of death costs for profit choice)	Tyler’s job of selling soap (made of human fat)
Narrator attending support groups for emotional needs	Tyler advocating for ritualistic violence
Narrator seeking validation from corporate figures (through attire and demeanour)	Project Mayhem’s attack on corporate entities

Through the distribution of relations in these two columns, my analysis arrives at the conclusion that the myth of Fight Club has to do with the conditions of modern society, where workers are promised rewards and returns for their labour which is supposed to make them free, only for their agency and freedom to be silenced by their work. It has to do with a culture that believes capitalism is the key to a meaningful and free life, to then be introduced to the reality of bondage and meaninglessness that follows. The Narrator’s choices reflect the conformist attitude he has adopted (and by extension, citizens of modern capitalist society) in sticking to acceptable manners of clothing, behaviour, and the centrality of his occupation in his life. The emotional emptiness and lack of meaning that follows, he tries to fix by attending support groups for people who are close to death. This fails as the fix is only temporary and fails to address the deeper issues of his existence.  

In opposition to him emerges the character of Tyler Durden, someone who is inherently attracted to disorder and rebellion. How Tyler conducts the ‘fight club’, makes soap from human waste material (transforming waste and discard into the essential), and leads the people around him to take down the very entities that the Narrator seeks validation from, reflecting the element of agency that drives his character. Tyler symbolises the underrating of modern capitalist culture while the Narrator stands for the overrating of it. Both parties stand for opposite ratings of the culture in a manner similar to how Lévi-Strauss tables the Oedipus myth, with the overrating of blood-relations and underrating of blood-relations.

It should be noted that in this particular narrative, the ending offers a sense of resolution which is a result of the Narrator progressively leaning towards the ideologies of Tyler and involving himself in Tyler’s activities. The film’s climax, where Tyler is revealed to be an alter ego of the Narrator, adds another layer to our understanding of contradictions and oppositions within a person (or myth), where the same human aspires for stability (stasis) as well as impulse (agency). 

The film WALL-E approaches the state of stasis through an anthropological and ecological plane, where unchecked technological development results in loss of human thought and meaning/purpose as a technological culture overpowers human nature. This opposition between culture and nature is the central opposition in this film which tells the story of a robot that lives on a deserted Earth. In this narrative, humans reside in a spaceship, a system where all labour and choices are left to be made by a corporation’s artificial intelligence. The result of this being a human existence which is basically sedentary, as a species who’ve voluntarily given up individual thought and purpose to a technological entity that makes better ‘logical’ decisions.  

This myth performs a crucial switch in its approach to the technological-human binary by having the robots WALL-E and Eve display human characteristics and the humans themselves display technological conformity. Thus, the myth functions with a central opposition of struggle/agency (WALL-E and Eve fighting for the life of a plant) and stasis (human existence in the spaceship). The mythemes cluster below highlights this central binary: 

Stasis	Struggle
Sedentary human existence in a spaceship	Robot’s active cleaning role on Earth
Human’s blind adherence to A.I.	Robots’ struggle to claim ‘living’ plant
Earth lying barren, trash everywhere	WALL-E preserving cultural artifacts
Original corporation’s directive to abandon Earth	Eventual return to Earth and propagation of life by humans

These mythemes direct us to what the myth of WALL-E sheds light on, the meaningfulness and value of human agency that comes from the struggles of existence with nature (human and of Earth). I have differentiated the above mythemes to contrast the overrating of culture (technological) on the left and the underrating of culture (technological) on the right. The myth thus grapples with the human impulse to deny any effort required for life and the laws and purpose of nature. The ‘unintentional’ life that humans live aboard the spaceship, one where all adhere to a powerful computer, stick to a corporation’s directives, and abandon their home planet, illustrates the affinity towards stasis that humans possess (true now more than ever). This human impulse is brought in opposition to the life that is Earth, one where one must ‘labour under the sun to gain’, a fundamental condition of existence, a law of nature. It is interesting that the robot WALL-E embodies this ‘natural’ ideal through its efforts in preserving human artifacts, cleaning up trash on Earth, and fighting for the life of a singular plant. The myth’s resolution, where the humans make it back to Earth and resume farming and physical toil, leads us to the significance of the natural over the technological, of human struggle over technological stasis. 

My structural analysis of both myths reveal the structural similarities that exist in Fight Club and WALL-E, a homology that supports the hypothesis initiated by Lévi-Strauss. These seemingly dissimilar narratives thus share a common underlying structure where the myth functions as a critique of ‘modern’ life and dedicates itself to resolving this profound contradiction. The overrating or over-reliance on structures of comfort or materials can leave a void in humans of a psychological as well as collective nature. The opposition between passive stasis and active agency is what unites both narratives. In Fight Club, the stasis is a human existence led by commodities and consumerism and the struggle is the internal mode of agency, a physical and violent assertion of will. In WALL-E, the stasis is the sedimentary state of human life under technological control. The struggle here then becomes the re-initiation of human life through labour and agency that is the result of their battle with technology. The consolidated clusters of mythemes (with other clusters not covered earlier) given below reflect the deep homology between both myths: 

Mythemes	Stasis (WALL-E)	Struggle (WALL-E)	Stasis (Fight Club)	Agency (Fight Club)
Human Condition	Sedentary human existence in a spaceship	Robot’s active cleaning role on Earth	Narrator defined by his furniture (IKEA)	Tyler rejecting material possessions
Relationship to Authority/Systems	Human’s blind adherence to A.I.	Robots’ struggle to claim ‘living’ plant	Narrator’s job (calculation of death costs for profit choice)	Tyler’s job of selling soap (made of human fat)
Environment/World	Earth lying barren, trash everywhere	WALL-E preserving cultural artifacts	Narrator attending support groups for emotional needs	Tyler advocating for ritualistic violence
Power/Change	Original corporation’s directive to abandon Earth	Eventual return to Earth and propagation of life by humans	Narrator seeking validation from corporate figures (through attire and demeanor)	Project Mayhem’s attack on corporate entities

The comparative structural study of both myths displays the role of stasis and struggle in modern myths, conforming to the function that Lévi-Strauss places on myths, its ability to provide a logic that can handle the contradictions and paradoxes of society. We see this in his analysis of the Oedipus myth where he states: 

“The myth has to do with the inability, for a culture which holds the belief that mankind is autochthonous, to find a satisfactory transition between this theory and the knowledge that human beings are actually born from the union of man and woman. Although the problem obviously cannot be solved, the Oedipus myth provides a kind of logical tool which, to phrase it coarsely, replaces the original problem.”

My analysis of both narratives shows us how both modern myths perform in a structurally similar manner, where the idea or illusion of comfort is first destroyed, and a foundation is set for meaning. The resolution that both myths offer is a direct answer to the timeless critique of vanity, the Ecclesiastical declaration with which I began this essay. The mythical framework of both films demonstrates how meaning or value is not found from what one gains but from the act of working and agency that comes with it. The struggle to reclaim agency drives both narratives, the violent exertion of will in Fight Club, and the purposeful toil on Earth in WALL-E. These modern myths thus establish their operative value in creating a world where struggle succeeds over stasis, thereby giving us the logic/framework to comprehend meaning and its absence.