Establishing a Timeline: Baseline - Meeting Jack

The movie begins with the end and relies on a number of flashbacks that serve to reconstruct the story of Jack's experience. Once we've seen the movie we can establish that at the beginning, Jack was for all intensive purposes, a "normal" person. We know little of his early life but we do learn that his father abandoned the family when Jack was quite young. Later in the film Tyler remarks that fathers are like Gods and if our fathers abandoned us, then what does that say about God? We can surmise that Jack lacked a father role model in his formative years and further speculate that his mother may have tried to take this on. This may have produced a double form of abandonment if the dual roles of nurturer/provider left his mother with little time to give to Jack. None of this would necessarily be enough to produce significant trauma but like Achilles and his heel, it may have left Jack with a weak spot in the shielding armor of his persona/personality development.

Jack describes himself as a "30 year-old boy" who is a "slave to his IKEA nesting instinct". Jack displays his home to the viewer, including the cost of each item. At one point he ponders, "Which dining room table best represents who I am?" Within a Jungian framework it's important to understand that a house/home serves as a symbol of the self. In displaying his home to the viewer, Jack is also displaying the image he has carefully crafted and invested in. It's a nice home: Clean, straight, orderly, well-orchestrated and magazine-perfect to the point of near sterility.

Jack also laments the materialization and consumer mindset of modern life, suggesting that mass marketing and commercialization is due to soon move into the outer limits of the larger universe -- Starbucks billboards on the moon. Jack sees the shallowness and lack of purpose in his life. This creates a sense of emptiness in him with an accompanying hunger for something more meaningful. This makes Jack discontent and perhaps ripe for a life crisis, but it doesn't make him schizophrenic.

Meantime, Jack also has a job -- working for a large automobile manufacturer. In a later scene in the film we see Jack surveying a car made by the company he works for. The car had been involved in a horrifying crash and an entire family had burned to death in the interior as a result of a suspected manufacturing fault. Jack lingers over key details of their final anguished moments. As an employee, it's Jack's task to assess whether it will cost the company more to issue a recall and fix the fault than it will to settle with the grieving family members of the people who die in their faulty vehicles; an impartial mathematical formula is imposed to determine the value of human life. We should not overlook that as a result of it's prestige and power, the auto manufacter serves as a patriarchal authority figure with the apparent ability to determine the worth of human life. We could easily imagine Tyler's voice here: Fathers are like Gods and if our fathers abandoned us, then what does that say about God?

In most every individual I've encountered since my own experience there has nearly always been a triggering event or series thereof that seems to precede the fragmentation crisis. In Jack's case, the trauma of seeing that car, identifying with the anguish of the human family it once contained, and the impartial regard for human life exhibited by the patriarchal authority figure of his employer seems to have served as the triggering event that foreshadowed the collapse of his ego...

See also: Spirituality & Trauma