I know I am breaking the first rule!
Based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk and directed by David Fincher, the movie Fight Club is on everyone’s mind, maybe due to admiration but often due to disgust but no one can deny the impact this film had on this generation. It has a cult following, it provided fuel to a generation of thinkers and misfits.
Caution: This movie is not for the faint-hearted! If you are happy with your life, living in a bubble of comfort and consumerism, please do not watch this movie. It will break you unless you are looking for solutions, to the questions you can’t conceive, watch this movie.
On the surface Fight Club is the perfect bro-movie. It has lots of bloodshed, scenes of brutal fights and destruction of property. However, if you look beyond what is shown, the movie will keep you up at night thinking about every decision you have made so far. This movie portrays the horrors of living in a rationalized world and it’s dehumanizing effect on our brains. It shows the effects of consumer capitalization turning everyone into brain dead zombies. In fact, the director has put a Starbucks cup in every scene of the movie.
“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we do not need. We are in the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war! Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t.We are slowly learning that fact and we are very, very pissed off.”
Just like many who cannot forge a human connection, we just fill our lives with stuff. We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like! The movie talks about how materialistic the world has become.
“The things you own end up owning you.”
When Brad Pitt read the script of Fight Club, he related to the feeling of having an existential dread of having everything the society told him to want yet feeling empty. We have all been stuffed into boxes. We are told to want the same things, work the same jobs, settle for the same life. Conformity has become a way of life and there countless who are trapped due to it.
“It’s only after we have lost everything that we are free to do anything.”
How often do we seek validation before making any decisions? Whether we agree or not, we often care more about what others think than what matters to us. We are taught to cut beautiful parts of ourselves to fit better into society. We do things to make them happy, but they don’t really care!
While watching the movie, see the metaphor it is trying to imbibe. The characters in the movie resort to domestic terrorism, to punish society as an act of petty revenge. This depicts the extremes a human can go to feel something, anything!
“A mind that is stretched by experience cannot go back to its old dimensions” – OWH Jr is the best way to describe the results after watching this masterpiece. I first saw the movie for the gory action scenes, grim aesthetics, & twist endings but I took back so much more.
Art Work – azulasupremacist
My dreams are big. My mistakes? Bigger.
