20 Things You Didn't Know About Fight Club
3. The House At Paper Street Doesn’t Exist
So Tyler Durden is a dissociative personality, Jack’s ‘evil twin’... but he’s not the only thing in the movie that isn’t real. Remember Jack’s diatribe about insomnia making everything unreal, and how sleeplessness is practically a character in the film?
Let’s start with the Paper Street house, the huge, dilapidated old building that Tyler Durden lives in, and that Jack moves into after his condo explodes. Although the street name isn’t referred to in dialogue, Fincher makes sure we know it: we get a very deliberate close-up of Tyler’s business card - the one with the two identical angels facing each other - and later on, we see a street sign for Paper Street.
The thing is, in mapmaking terminology, ‘paper streets’ are roads that only exist on maps, not in real life: they’re made to trap people duplicating the map without permission from the copyright holders.
Not only that, but when Tyler and Jack are screening potential Project Mayhem members on the front porch we see the address of the Paper Street house by the door: 1B, when the address on Tyler’s business card was 537.
It’s a format usually used with apartment or hotel room numbers. Remember what Tyler says to Raymond K Hessel? “Because they give sh*tty basement apartments letters instead of numbers.”
We know Tyler’s not real. Why should his house be real? Jack’s been living in a hotel (Room 1B?) since his condo exploded: the Paper Street house and its comedy wiring and plumbing doesn’t exist.