10 Movie Villains You Didn't Realise Actually Won

3. Tyler Durden - Fight Club

Making soap, punching fools and sticking it to the man, Tyler Durden is anarchy with abs. Throughout Fight Club he leads the unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) down a violent rabbit hole of repressed anger and desire into a world of fighting and corporate espionage. Along the way he recruits and trains an army of equally despondent people to help him achieve his goals.

Unless you've been locked in a cupboard for over a decade you'll already know that Tyler and the narrator are revealed to be one and the same. The split personality trope has become as common in cinema as evil Russians and zombies but Fight club handled it in such a clever way that it has rightly achieved cult status. In the gripping conclusion to the film we learn that Durden has ordered his minions to level skyscrapers housing credit card companies. The ultimate middle finger to capitalism it ensures (at least in the film's universe) that credit history will be erased and everyone will be brought to the same level.

This forces the narrator to directly confront his evil alter ego and after beating himself/Tyler half to death, the narrator ends Durden's tyrannical rule over his mind by shooting himself through the face symbolically killing that part of him. In reality, this doesn't really end the destruction of an entire city block - Project Mayhem ends up being successful regardless. Durden's legacy is cemented and whatever the narrator chooses to do next his life has been irrevocably changed which was the point of creating this violent alternate personality in the first place. The personification of his id may have been banished, but not before it achieved everything it wanted to.