The Narrator only shakes off Tyler in the end in favour of Marla because Marla is everything Tyler was - honest, interesting, intimate - while also actually happening to be real. Or so you're encouraged to think; in actuality, there's every reason to believe Marla is just as imaginary as Tyler Durden. In the film, you very rarely see Marla interact with anybody other than the Narrator/Tyler, and when you do it could be easily explained away by imagining the schizophrenic Narrator doing the talking in her place, just as he does with Tyler. There are other clues: the way Marla at one point appears as the Narrator's imaginary 'power animal', the way she represents the motherly yin to Tyler's fatherly yang, the way nobody even questions or acknowledges the fact she turns up to a testicular cancer group. The one time Marla is handled physically by anyone other than the Narrator/Tyler comes at the very end, when she's escorted by the Project Mayhem crew to be with the Narrator. But by then the Narrator's viewpoint - as a man who's just shot himself in the head - is questionable anyway, if it hasn't already been for the previous two hours. If you do subscribe to the theory that Marla is another figment of the Narrator's imagination (which would at least explain how she can walk through heavy traffic unharmed), the point is that - after seeking company amongst men and trying to find himself through violence - at the close the Narrator opts to reject all that for a chance at pure, simple love. And he does it by pretty tragically swapping one fantasy for another.
Lover of film, writer of words, pretentious beyond belief. Thinks Scorsese and Kubrick are the kings of cinema, but PT Anderson and David Fincher are the dashing young princes. Follow Brogan on twitter if you can take shameless self-promotion: @BroganMorris1
