Fight Club :: essays research papers

The movie Fight Club made a great achievement in the film industry, and significantly depicted the social system of the late 20th century. 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 dark parody about consumerist discontent. First of all Fight Club was one of the most direct depictions of modern society. We can visualize the clear criticisms of the movie from the words of Jamey Hughton, â€Å" ‘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 individuals and consequently urban alienation. Finally, the movie points out male-female roles and the place of violence in the male identity. Critic, Gary Crowdus, says it best by writing, â€Å"Fight Club members have become so physically impassive, so emotionally anesthetized, and so spiritually numb, that it takes a broken nose, a split lip, or a few cracked ribs to reawaken their deadened nervous systems and to provide them with a meaningful sense of male identity† (4 6). The biggest aspect of the movie was on modern society, which has recently turned out to be consumerism. During the movie this new trend is symbolized by the replica of Tyler Durden, â€Å"You are not your job.† This dialogue 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 one’s 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 consumerism, as displayed in the scene where Tyler asks, after seeing a Calvin Kline advertisement, â€Å"is this what a man is supposed to look like?† with simultaneous irony and sincerity, of the self-perceived emasculation of working-class white men, and how much money you do not have and how famous you aren't. It is about what happens when we are hit by the fact that our lives lack uniqueness; a uniqueness that we are constantly told we gained t hrough the enculturation process.