Fight Club Essay Research Paper The movie

Fight Club Essay, Research Paper

The movie Fight Club, actually more than just a movie, although it made a great achievement in the film industry, also the movie had a great impact on the social system. According to most of the reviewers, the success of the film lies behind the fact that almost every American man over 25-years of age is going to inevitably see some of himself in the movie: the frustration, the confusion, the anger at living in a culture where the old rules have broken down and one makes his way with so many fewer cultural cues and guideposts. At heart ?Fight Club? is really a horror movie about consumerist discontent.

First of all Fight Club was one of the most direct crisis of the modern society actually nowadays the post-modern society. We can visualize the clear criticism of the movie from the words of Jamey Hughton ? “Fight Club” is the kind of breathless experience that chews you up, spits you out, and leaves your senses jaded and disorientated with exhilaration.? Secondly Fight Club was a real evolution of the modern ideals, the emergence of modern atomized individual and consequently urban alienation. Finally, the movie points out male-female roles and the place of violence in the male identity.

The biggest deal of the movie was on the modern society, which is recently turned out just a consumerism. During the movie this new trend is symbolized always by the replica of Tyler Durden ?You are not just what your job is? and the emphasize reached the peak at the scene where Tyler made up the mind of the supermarket employee, by using his gun, to change his job, in fact to be what he wants to be. This dialoged was completely dedicated to the shaping power of the Consumer Culture. The movie is about what happens when a world defines you by nothing but job, when advertising turns you into a slave bowing at a mountain of things that make you uneasy about your lack of physical perfection determined by the consumerism. (As displayed in the scene where Tyler asks after seeing the Celvin Clein advertisement ?is this what a man supposed to looks like? with simultaneous irony and sincerity, of the self-perceived emasculation of working-class white men) And how much money you don’t have and how famous you aren’t. It’s about what happens when you’re hit by the fact that your life lacks uniqueness; a uniqueness that we’re constantly told we gained through the enculturation process. At that part Fincher was underlying the unseen patterns of the society: ?you are not free; since you are not free to choose: Sure there is choices in front of you but the results are determined by the supreme power of the Hegemony, gain more money to obtain acceptance from the society.

However that was not the only criticism, during the movie the director took us to the realm of the commodification, especially in the scene where Jack buys his new furniture like all of his cooperates made. The scene was very impressive since it made us feel the pace of the consumption, the impacts of the advertisement, which are offering us impossible: fame, beauty, wealth, immortality, life without pain, on the consumption patterns. He looks at Ikea catalogs and wonders what dinner set defines him as a person. Jack was consuming at the same speed with the advertisement and was not able to stop himself, even though he hardly needs the things he bought. At that point we have seen the emergence of the Marx? concept the commodity fetishism. Moreover, as he says ?now I have everything what a middle class man can? he points out that the whole event was nothing more than the ?conspicuous consumption?.

After the improvement of the new industrial era and consequently the invention of new transportation facilities, the modern society created it?s own atomized single individual, which is a logical necessity of the system itself. The character of the Edward Norton a man, who is bored with his white-collar job and his mail orders, was the typical example of the event. The emphasis on the world ?one time, single? at the scenes during the travel, about foods and about passengers, shows the lost in the importance of the individual, apart from the context determined by the society itself. When Jack was talking about his job during the flight he acknowledged that the humans are nothing but numbers, showed in the statistics.

“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile… Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.” With the speech Tyler screams the bare reality of the alienated 20-century man.

The unimportant atomized individual, who works for the existence and improvement of the system, is alienated from society, from every aspects of the society; the public sphere is collapsed by the consumerism of our era. Jack was one of such persons, he was suffering from the insomnia since he was not able to recharge himself by the common human methods, and he even did not have a friend to cry on the shoulder. The only heroine he was able to use was the support groups, especial the one, testicular cancer support group, only after participating in these support groups he was able to fall in sleep. In fact these groups was the only place, he feels himself as apart of the organic whole, part of