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Kinky Character Crushes: Tyler Durden

There are plenty of hot characters in literature to drive a girl mad. Of course, some only turn you on once they get transmogrified to the silver screen, to be played by gorgeous hunks of man-meat like Edward Norton or Brad Pitt, but doesn’t that really just make their original appearance in literature that much more sexy? After all, without the book you could never have the movie.

Chuck Palahniuk’s Tyler Durden (of Fight Club) is my number one Kinky Character Crush.

Aside from the fact that he is the nameless narrator’s alter-ego, doing and being everything that he cannot, Tyler is strong, powerful, masculine. He seduces and destroys like a revolutionary Calvin Klein model. He spouts facts, figures, bits of trivia to get your attention, then moves in for the kill with thoughts of underground armies that he will build from the ground up. He’s got ideas. He’s going places, even if his ultimate destination is probably Hell.

Much of the success of Fight Club, the film, was a misplaced masculine standard: men and women both swooned over a sweaty Brad Pitt, completed with shaved head and bulging biceps. (As a side note: is it really just a coincidence that a similarly buff Edward Norton, Pitt’s co-star in Fight Club, also won acclaim for his work in American History X?) Fictional Tyler Durden combined dark edges and sexual voracity to create a lover AND a fighter. A champion, no matter how disturbed. A man’s man and a bad-boy that women could obsess over taming.

Tyler may not be the thinking woman’s ideal man, but he certainly comes close. After all, the man has both ideas and ideals. He’s motivated (even if it is by insanity), and he’s everything his alter ego—the ineffectual “Jack”—lacks. Tyler is the opposite of everything people find to hate about themselves. He is hedonistic yet driven, which is infinitely sexy. It’s no wonder both men and women find themselves attracted to this nihilist in a tropical shirt.

If Tyler is everything women want and men want to be, it is perhaps most strikingly because he’s dangerous. Though the real point of the book and film isn’t the fight clubs themselves, nor the violence that is unleashed and then honed within, there is no doubt that Tyler is a dangerous character. He’s a fit revolutionary, someone who isn’t afraid to fight with his bare hands or use his wits to manipulate others into doing it for him. He is that deadly combination of beauty and brains, the sexiest of them all.

Even though Tyler is rarely seen committing violence towards others in a typical/stereotyped way (i.e. beating his girlfriend, starting bar brawls), it’s obvious that there is something primal within this man, something troubled, something screaming for escape. Why else would he start his legacy, the fight clubs? And isn’t it all, really, about a girl named Marla Singer?

It’s all just sex and violence, that fatal Freudian duo.

We may know that’s not all there is to life, no matter how easily sex and violence take each other’s hands, or how often people insist on Freud’s genius. There is something more to the equation than simple wham, bam, thank-you-ma’am. Instead, it’s the thrill of the chase, the hunt, the bloody endgame, submission, surrender. The biting and scratching are the best parts, because they make the caresses so much sweeter by comparison.

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Laura Roberts is the editor of Black Heart Magazine and the author of Rebels of the 512.

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