Fight Club had a few overlapping points to make, most of which had to do with corporate America, disenchantment and the reaction to hopelessness and inactivity. The problems I had with the film didn't have to do with gratuitious violence as a means of reaction to the numbness that comes from conformity, per se. But my problems may stem from the fact that I am a female and violence has not done much to boost my deflated soul. I need to be more creative than that. Not that violence has not reached a creative level, but I'm sure you can finish my argument in your own words.
The focus of the violence seemed to be directed at faceless corporations, funneled so precisely that the people acting out the violence were no longer important enough to warrant names. I question the validity of the concept that the only way to fight a system is to create a system identical to it in structure, order, and execution. How is the system that Tyler constructed any different than the one they were rebelling against, and is the only reason it was thus because Tyler's thought processes were the result of a split personality? We are certain that Ed Norton's character would never be capable of escape from complacency without splitting his personality, that Tyler was as close to absolution as he could get.
If anything, the movie is an oversimplified view of the mutation of the human condition in America. There is a shift from privatization in a family sense to one in more and us-against-them sense, one where the motivation to fight the system is due to a respect for community is not the focus anymore but instead is replaced with a feigned sense of togetherness through a loss of the indiviudal.
People once owned family businesses, which were integral to the family structure. As we evolve as a society, the concept of togetherness is slowly lost, and we are detached from one another.
I wonder if this us-against-them attitude produces anything but more detachment.
The message we receive as young men, seeking our role in life, looking for leadership and guidance?
But what is the proper context for violence? Men know. Edward Norton knew in Fight Club, knows deep in his bones, so deep inside him that he can't keep it in--it splits him asunder. Fight Club attempts to regain the friendship and unity gained through violence by giving men with no outlet for it a chance to physically express it. Waiters, clerks, clergy, office drones, and bartenders no longer have the proper context for violence, and they need it. They miss their beatings and milkbones. Violence is not about reacting to conformity--violence is about connection to the society of men. Norton's character cannot sleep and goes mad without his connection to this society. He attempts to do so with his support groups, but they ultimately fail. In 2000 era America, the only way that men can connect is through violence. Fight Club is the connection.
I'll tell you a secret. I wish I could find a fight club. I crave the interaction and the unity that shared violence creates. Contrary to The inverse relationship between muscle mass and brainpower, I am not stupid. I played football in high school, and rugby in college. I made good friends, was a part of a team, and that, ladies and gentleman, is where I began to learn to be a man and to interact with men. Violence began it, and violence is the quick fix to regain it.
For he today that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother
King Henry V, Act 4 Scene 3
It was a tactical error--a definite mistake. I get more bruises from her small bony fists than I care to count (or admit.)
There is a fifth time that Tyler shows up that is not subliminal, when The Narrator is in his single serving hotel room, the television is on and an image is shown of a group of waiters all saying welcome. Tyler is the waiter in the first row on the far right hand side.
The first time we actually get to "see" Tyler is on the flat escalator travelling in the opposite director to The Narrator. This isn't a subliminal scene or a hidden reference as such, but rather the last real step before Tyler enters The Narrator's world.
Another interesting thing to note is that in the credits Edward Norton's character is only described as "The Narrator" and even though there is the running "I am Joe's..." joke, through-out the movie we are never told his actual name.
Finally in the last few seconds before the movie finishes a cock is flashed on the screen, the same cock that Tyler was using to splice into Disney films. This one is a little easier to pick and you know exactly what it is when you see it.
The barrel of the gun pressed against the back of my throat, Tyler says, "we really won't die." (...) "This isn't really death," Tyler says. "We'll be legend. We won't grow old."
Of course, when I pulled the trigger, I died. Liar. And Tyler died. ... We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. And God says, "No, that's not right." Yeah. Well. You can't teach God anything.
No, the greater underlying theme is that you have to break yourself apart in order to build something new. It is only when you forget the khakis and when you forget your debts, and ultimately the fears that you're not good enough that you can actually attain a new life, and one that you have indeed been sub consciously dreaming of. The film should have shocked the world into assessing who was really controlling our lives - us, or our own fears. However, most everybody saw the shallow side of the film which was the violence, the Brad Pittness, or the more "philosophical" meaning (the comment on consumerism).
"The idea of the fighting in this is not about the suggestion that violence directed outward toward other people is a solution to your frustrations," Norton says quite firmly. "It's very much a metaphor for self transforming radicalism for the idea of directing violence inward at your own presumptions. (My character) doesn't walk out of the bar and say "Can I hit you?" he says "Will you hit me?" It's this idea that you need to get shaken out of your own cocoon. The fighting is a metaphor for stripping yourself of received notions and value systems that have been applied to you that aren't your own. And freeing yourself to discover who you actually are."
"I still can't think of anything."
Fight Club was Chuck Palahniuk's debut novel, published in hardcover in August 1996. It was the first taste readers would get of his raw, brutal writing style, and set out many of the themes (hitting bottom, violence as catharsis, disenfrachisement with society, perceiving normal facts of life as atrocities) he would explore in his later novels: Survivor, Choke, and Lullaby.
While Fight Club was pubished before Invisible Monsters, it was actually written second, after Invisible Monsters had been rejected again and again for being "too dark." Palahniuk poured his frustration and depression into Fight Club, making it unquestionably darker and more violent than Invisible Monsters. Naturally, Fight Club was picked up relatively quickly, and went on to become a cult classic as both a novel and a film.
While the novel was a success, especially as dark, violent, and ultimately critical novels about modern society go, most people remember instead the movie adaptation, released to theatres in 1999, starring Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, and Helena Bonham Carter. This movie (which was surprisingly true to the novel) was at turns thoughtful and violent, sarcastic and bitingly true, and was both a box-office hit and an instant cult classic. Many people have tried to interpret the movie as anything from a Biblical allegory to a fevered hallucination on the part of the protagonist, and the movie is full of memorable quotes, like any classic American movie.
"Everything is just a copy, of a copy, of a copy..."
Fight Club is the internal narrative of the unnamed protagonist, starting out with his pithy, cynical descriptions of his day-to-day life as a yuppie "cubicle jockey." All of the pent-up frustration with his life, not relieved by his consumerist excesses, is coming out as insomnia and hallucination. Despite being a success by any other measure, the narrator isn't happy with his life.
Looking for a way to let loose all of his pent up tension over his pointless, little life, the narrator takes to going to support groups and lying about this malady or that malady, looking for cheap sympathy. This brings him relief, for a while, until a callous and intriguing woman and a anarchistic stranger enter his life, and destroy everything he ever believed, about himself or the world.
"And suddenly I realize that all of this: the gun, the bombs, the revolution...has got something to do with a girl named Marla Singer."
Marla Singer, a twisted and cynical bitch, has started going to the same support groups, relieving her own boredom. ("It's cheaper than a movie, and there's free coffee.") Her presence, her lie ruins the protagonist's catharsis, bringing back his crippling insomnia.
And then, on a business trip, he meets Tyler Durden. Tyler is attractive, determined, organized, charismatic, and, in the narrator's words, "free in all the ways [the narrator] is not." As the narrator's life comes down around his ears, strikingly symbolized by the unexplainable detonation of his apartment (apparently caused by a faulty stove or leaky gas line).
"I want you to hit me as hard as you can."
Left with only a fiery ruin for a home, he turned to the closest thing to a friendly ear he could find: Tyler Durden's business card. Tyler and the narrator become fast friends, as the narrator finds himself attracted to Tyler's nihilistic and antimaterialistic worldview. He even rises to Tyler's first challenge: a fight, in the parking lot.
From here, the narrator and Tyler's friendship and Tyler's curious lust/ignore relationship with Marla grow, alongside Tyler's odd vision of "Fight Clubs," anonymous gatherings of men of all classes, beating the crap out of each other for some form of catharsis, relieving their stress and their frustration and their social impotence.
"He's setting up fucking franchises."
The narrator, looking only for an escape from his dreary life, seems content with this, but Tyler, ever in charge, wants more and more. Slowly, he spreads Fight Clubs all over the country, and begins coordinating michievous terrorism. This Project Mayhem, set up without the narrator's knowledge, takes on a life of its own, even as Tyler disappears from the narrator's life. One night, he discovers Tyler's plans to demolish the headquarters of several major banks and credit card companies, to destroy the credit records.
This isn't the only revelation. The narrator finally discovers that he is Tyler Durden, that all of this is what he wanted, and that Tyler is the person he wants to be. Tyler and the narrator are just two halves of his own personality, warring for control of himself. In a final confrontation before the bombs are detonated, the narrator takes control, but too late to stop the demolition.
In the novel, the narrator is institutionalized, unsure of who he really is or what he really did. The movie isn't so grim, ending everything with a strangely sweet scene as the narrator and Marla hold hands, watching the destruction, to the voice of Black Francis wailing the lyrics of Where Is My Mind?, until the credits.
"You are not your hopes. You will not be saved. We are all going to die, someday."
The novel and movie are surprisingly close to each other, save for the endings. The novel has some additional material about the relationship between Marla and the narrator and Tyler, and Project Mayhem is considerably less benign in the novel's version. In particular, the final destruction of the bank offices is less harmless; the evacuation in the movie never happened in the novel.
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