Analysis of “Fight Club”
For years David Fincher has directed some of the most stylish and creative thrillers in American movies. His works include: Aliens 3, Seven, The Game and Fight Club. Each of these films has been not only pleasing and fun to watch but each has commented on society, making the viewers think outside the normal and analyze their world. Fight Club is no exception, it is a multi-layered film with many subplots and themes, but primarily it is a surrealistic description of the status of the American male at the end of the 20th century. David Flincher’s movie, Fight Club, shows how consumerism has caused the emasculation of the modern male and tells a tale of liberation from a corporate controlled society.
In the movie Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) comments on the new way of life, “We are products of lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty do not concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with five hundred cannels and a designer name on my underwear.” The film, Fight Club shows the consumer culture in which the 20th century male lives in and how it is a deconstruction of individuality. The film gives many examples of this; the main character of the film (Ed Norton) asks while looking through an IKEA catalog, “What kind of plates define me as a person.” He’s not asking what personal characteristics and attributes define him but what possession most accurately does. Also, Ed Norton’s character has no name he is only referred to as the 90’s everyman, the IKEA man. The film shows the extensive emphases the consumer-based culture of the 20th century has on individualism and values associated with being a man. Corporations have replaced personal qualities with corporate logos. The modern male cannot be anything unless he has certain products in his possession. No longer does one own things, his things own him. The contemporary male is a slave of the IKEA nesting instinct. The main characters absence of a name only exemplifies this; the buying of furniture from IKEA gives the main character (Ed Norton) his identity, without being a consumer the main character would remain undefined and anonymous. In the movie, the two main characters, (Ed Norton) and Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), are staring at a Calvin Klein ad and ask each other is this what a man is supposed to look like. Fight Club shows the extent of consumerism contro...
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...od. By blowing up his IKEA catalog apartment and living in a dilapidated house without concern for owning products and designer names, Ed Norton’s character releases himself his consumer controlled life and begins a journey to regain his manhood. He does this by creating Fight Club, which is an underground boxing club for men. Fight Club lets men live by liberating them. They are allowed to express their primal nature, to be men and reclaim their independent strength, courage and power. It was said, “When a man first enters Fight Club he was a wad of cookie-dough, a couple weeks later he was carved of wood.”
The 20th century male’s struggle still continues today, the 21st century is a corporate controlled society, in a consumer culture that gives life value by what is bought and owned, not by the individual. The modern male is emasculated in this feminist culture. David Fincher does an excellent job of taking a contemporary subject and putting it on film. Fight Club takes these themes, consumerism, emasculation of the male and liberation and weaves them together to make a great narrative on the unfilled, castrated male who desperately seeks to be free from societies control.
Over time, the United States has experienced dramatic social and cultural changes. As the culture of the United States has transformed, so have the members of the American society. Film, as with all other forms of cultural expression, oftentimes reflects and provides commentary on the society in which it is produced. David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club examines the effects of postmodernity on masculinity. To examine and explicate these effects, the film presents an unnamed narrator, an everyman, whose alter-ego—in the dissociative sense—is Tyler Durden. Durden represents the narrators—thus every man’s—deep-seated desire to break free from the mind-numbing, emasculating world that is postmodern, post-industrial America.
James Madison, an American statesman and political theorist that was present at the constitutional convention. Many of the ideas proposed by Madison are part of the reason that the Constitution has withstood the test of time. Madison was ultimately prepared to deal with one of the biggest problems this new government would face in his eyes, factions. Factions, which as defined by Madison are “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community” (Madison 156). Madison addresses various ways that he sees factions can be cured of its mischiefs such as removing a faction’s causes and also controlling their effects. Madison points out that this is would potentially create an even bigger problem than the factions themselves by stating, “Liberty is to faction, what air is to fire, an ailment, without which it instantly expires” (Madison 156) Madison also stated that the way for a government to remove the cause of faction was either to destroy the liberty that causes factions to exist in the first place or to give every citizen the same beliefs and opinions. Madison deemed this impractical, because it is nearly impossible to give everyone in a given place the same opinions and destroying the liberty would take away the very thing that the colonies fought for 4 years earlier. The fact is Madison knew that the country wouldn’t be able to count on a well-educated statesman to be there any time a faction gets out of hand. Madison knew the only viable way to keep factions under control is not to get rid of factions entirely but to set a r...
...he other hand, Madison discusses the topic of liberty in that it is what fuels factions. He says that removing liberty is one of the only ways to destroy a faction. He proceeds to state that this is not probable, and that factions can not be destroyed, but we must control their consequences in order to have a stable government. Madison believes that the Constitution preserves man's liberty by fairly representing them in a central government.
“In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four” (Orwell 250). Winston lives in a time where a set of rules preventing him to be free are imposed on him – the Party defines what freedom is and is not. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows (Orwell 103)”. Winston expresses his views on The Party within his diary even though he knows it is not accepted by The Party or the Thought Police. The narrator in Fight Club uses fighting as a form of escapism from his anti-consumerist ideologies revealed by his alter-ego, Tyler Durden. “Fuck off with your sofa units and strine green stripe patterns. I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let’s evolve—let the chips fall where they may. (Fight Club)” Tyler urges the narrator to stop conforming to consumerist-imposed views of perfection and break barriers to evolve. Tyler and the narrator create a medium for people in similar positions to escape from societal bound norms; it is aptly named “Fight Club”. In comparison, both Tyler Durden and the narrator from Fight Club and Winston Smith from 1984 share
Factions are products of human nature, but the purpose of government and law are to control these often insatiable desires of self-interest. Detailed within James Madison’s address to the people of New York, “The Federalist No. 10”, are the destructive and counterintuitive ideas of factions to a democracy. Agreeing with that notion, factions are detrimental to the idea of a democracy due to the separation of people and ideas; and the subsequent establishment of tiers of power and status within both political and economic systems.
“I had to know what Tyler was doing while I was asleep. If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?” (Palahniuk 32). When Tyler is in action, narrator is not contemporaneous in a sense that he is Tyler now. Tyler is someone who doesn’t give any importance to money-oriented world but he indeed believes in the willpower of constructing a classless society. The narrator is insomniac, depressed, and stuck with unexciting job. Chuck’s prominent, pessimistic, radical work, Fight Club, investigates inner self deeper and deeper into personality, identity, and temperament as a chapter goes by. Through his writing, Chuck Palahniuk comments on the inner conflicts, the psychoanalysis of narrator and Tyler Durden, and the Marxist impression of classicism. By not giving any name to a narrator, author wants readers to engage in the novel and associate oneself with the storyline of narrator. The primary subject and focus of the novel, Fight Club, is to comment socially on the seizing of manhood in the simultaneous world. This novel is, collectively, a male representation where only a single woman, Marla Singer, is exemplified. “Tyler said, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can” (46). This phrase is a mere representation of how to start a manly fight club. However, in the novel this scene is written as if two people are physically fighting and splashing blood all over the parking lot, in reality it’s just an initiation of fight club which resides in narrator’s inner self. The concept of this club is that the more one fights, the more one gets sturdier and tougher. It is also a place where one gets to confront his weaknesses and inner deterioration.
One person might say that anarchy would be the only way to have complete and utter freedom, while others would go as far as to believe a controlled communist government is the best route to achieving liberation. Factions (a group of people who agree on certain topics) are inevitable, due to the nature of man. As long as men hold different opinions, have different amounts of wealth, and own different amount of property, they will continue to fraternize with people who are most similar to them. In Federalist #10, James Madison summed up factions eloquently stating that “Liberty is faction, what air is to fire, an ailment without which it instantly expires.” The government created by the Constitution controls the damage caused by such factions. The likelihood that public office will be held by qualified men is greater in large countries because there will be more representative chosen by a greater number of citizens. Power is distributed in a checks and balance format, making it difficult for factions to completely take over. Madison’s views on faction are still relevant and exercised frequently even after 200 years have passed.
Fight Club is a novel written by Chuck Palahniuk. This is a story about a protagonist who struggles with insomnia. An anonymous character suffering from recurring insomnia due to the stress brought about by his job is introduced to the reader. He visits a doctor who later sends him to visit a support group for testicular cancer victims, and this helps him in alleviating his insomnia. However, his insomnia returns after he meets Marla Singer. Later on, the narrator meets Tyler Durden, and they together establish a fight club. They continue fighting until they attract crowds of people interested in the fight club. Fight club is a story that shows the struggles between the upper class and lower class people. The upper class people here undermine the working class people by considering them as cockroaches. In addition, Palahniuk explores the theme of destruction throughout the book whereby the characters destroy their lives, body, building and the history of their town.
The Fight Club, directed by David Fincher, constructs an underground world of men fighting with one another to find the meaning to their lives. Ed Norton and Brad Pitt are the main characters who start the fight club. They make a set of rules that everyone must follow. The fight club exists because individuals get weighted down by possessions, causing them to miss the deep meaning of life. Most of the people in the fight club hold service jobs or lower level management jobs that are meaningless.
During the early formative years of the United States, James Madison contributed to the creation of many short essays describing what a functioning, well-established government should contain. In the 10th of his Federalist papers, Madison discusses the detrimental, yet necessary existence of factions in political life. Madison states that, “the latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man” (Madison), the effects of these factions has to be effectively controlled by implementing the republican principle. By evaluating four separate policy events it is remarkable to see the relevance of the ideas that James Madison presents
The Mayo Clinic defines a blood transfusion as “a routine medical procedure in which donated blood is provided to you through a narrow tube placed within a vein in your arm”. The first human blood transfusion on record was conducted by Dr. Jean-Baptiste Denys, a French physician during the late 1600’s. Although Denys’ transfusions weren’t sound proof and often written off as unorthodox, he unknowingly ushered in a new era of medicine and laid the foundation for modern advances in Hematology. I choose this topic because I volunteer to donate blood four times a year alongside thousands of other people. On average these donations help save 4.5 million Americans that would die in a years’ time without a blood transfusion. These generous people
Others often use masculinity, most often associated with strength, confidence and self-sufficiency to define a man’s identity. The narrator perceives Tyler Durden as a fearless young man who is independent and living life by his own rules. So is Tyler Durden masculine because of his no nonsense attitude or are his law breaking antics and unusual lifestyle seen as a failure because he is a man with neither family, money nor a well respected job? These typical aspirations are commonly defined as the male American dream, but does following life by the rulebook placed on males by society really make a male masculine? Fight Club specifically debunks the male American dream. It challenges’ the idea that the masculine identity is defined by material items and instead embraces the idea that masculine identity can be found in liberation from conformity and the ability to endure pain.
Fight Club “Its only after we’ve lost everything are we free to do anything”, Tyler Durden as (Brad Pitt) states, among many other lines of contemplation. In Fight Club, a nameless narrator, a typical “everyman,” played as (Edward Norton) is trapped in the world of large corporations, condominium living, and all the money he needs to spend on all the useless stuff he doesn’t need. As Tyler Durden says “The things you own end up owning you.” Fight Club is an edgy film that takes on such topics as consumerism, the feminization of society, manipulation, cultism, Marxist ideology, social norms, dominant culture, and the psychiatric approach of the human id, ego, and super ego. “It is a film that surrealistically describes the status of the American
The narrator is changed by his experience with fight club; his life becomes all about fight club. Fight club becomes the reason for the narrators existence. The narrator experiences a shift in consciousness; in that, he is able to understand more of who he is and what really matters in life through fight clubs trial by fire. Through battle and a mindset of counterculture and a complete expulsion of ...
It can be argued that most of David Fincher’s films share stylistic similarities in narrative and story more than any other way. This is a very interesting claim considering that Fincher does not write his own screenplays, yet most of his movies deal with similar overall themes and characters. This can be best illustrated by looking at films from different points in Fincher’s career. Fight Club is a film that heavily criticizes materialism, capitalism, and even religion at some points. In fact, mostly everything that Tyler Durden says is largely anti-western culture in general. Until the very end of the movie, society is in some ways the largest antagonist in the story. Se7en also shares a similar distaste for society. In Se7en both Detectiv...