 Why does Jack stop going to meetings for the terminally ill?
The film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth. Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's reeling, punch-drunk worldview. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding: They cling to each other and sob. But Jack's idyll is rudely disrupted by--wouldn't you know it?--a woman. When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club, in which young males gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be pounded) to a bloody pulp. "Self-improvement," explains Tyler, "is masturbation"; self-destruction is the new way. "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he says. Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think they've broken new ground in Fight Club , that their metaphor for our discontents hits harder than anyone else's.
 A woman, Marla, starts coming to the same meetings. Marla is not terminally ill.
 His apartment explodes, and he must move out of the meeting area.  He dies from a terminal illness.  Bob, from the testicular cancer group, has become too clingy.  A woman, Marla, starts coming to the same meetings. Marla is not terminally ill.