Criticisms of Consumerism and Materialism in Fight Club (1999)

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“You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.” This is the underlying message in Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), which satirically analyzes and critiques consumerism. The films characters vividly depict society’s immersion in materialism and presents viewers with the harsh reality regarding the irrelevance of material possessions.

The opening scenes of the movie focus on the narrator, the epitome of a consumerist. He asserts, “Like everyone else, I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct…I would flip through catalogues and wonder ‘what kind of dining set defines me as a person?’” His IKEA fetish is the outcome of his unfound identity. He purchases these goods not because he needs them, but because it is represented as the optimum apartment for a single man in catalogues.

Arguably, it is due his lack of identity that suffers from insomnia. His insomnia intensifies his identity crisis, as he is unable to differentiate between dreams and reality. Ironically, the cure that the narrator finds merely proliferates his lack of identity. He attends support groups for the terminally ill under different aliases. Whereas his IKEA fetish was caused by a “consumer’s ability to choose from a vast range of identities through products and labels” (Davis, 2002), the support groups are an attempt at belonging somewhere. “His portrayal as an exhausted and numb narcoleptic insomniac is a vivid depiction of a man suffering from the failed promise of self-fulfillment in a brand name, corporate-driven consumer society” (Davis, 2002).

Though the groups gener...

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..., S. (2007, January 9) The goal: Wealth and fame. USA Today. Retrieved February 3, 2014, from http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-01-09-gen-y-cover_x.htm
Lizardo, O. (2007). Fight Club, or the Cultural Contradictions of Late Capitalism. Journal for Cultural Research, 11. Retrieved January 22, 2014, from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14797580701763830
Lockwood, R. D. (2011). Journal of Contemporary Religion. Cults, Consumerism, and the Construction of Self: Exploring the Religious within Fight Club, 23. Retrieved January 22, 2014, from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13537900802373320
Lyon, David. Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Post-modern Times. Malden, MA: Polity P, 2000.
Robinson, S. (2011). Fight Club and the Limits of Anti-Consumerist Critique. Genders Journal, 53 (Spring, 2011). Retrieved January 31, 2014, from http://www.genders.org/g53/g53_robinson.html

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