Term Paper on "Fight Club"

Term Paper 6 pages (1986 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Movie Analysis: Fight Club

The movie "Fight Club" is a sincere narration about the "lost generation" of 90's. This new "lost generation" does not belong to hippies, punks, pacifists or whatever they were before the 90's. Those young people were full of energy, hopes, illusions and ambitions which were broke and ruined by harsh realities of life. But in 90's it's visa versa. Standards of living, facilities, job and income are quite decent to satisfy the demands of an average working American especially if he is young, single and lives for his own pleasure. The only problem which arises from this question is that often happiness of life becomes substituted by material values: fancy car, expansive apartment, prestige and not hard job. The person begins to loose himself as he can not enjoy life when there are obviously no difficulties, when he doesn't need to fight in order to survive.

The victim of civilization and more over of his own prejudices and alienation is the narrator of the story Fight Club Chuck Palahniuk. He doesn't get any satisfaction from life, as it's usual and routine: he is an average manager in the car company, no one pays any attention to his existence, he is not respected either by his boss or by his co-workers. His personal life is not successful too. The narrator tries to spend all his money on luxury attempting to create an illusion of a happy and wealthy young man but he fails, as he can not achieve self-realization and happiness. Moreover he starts to suffer insomnia and finds out that he there is no medical support to overcome this disorder. In order to relief his suffering "IKEA boy" begins to attend support groups for survivors of different diseases and disorders. It helps him as he sees those who suffer more than he does and it makes him calm down.

Once the narrator meets a guy named Tyler Durden, soap salesman who set next to him in a plane. But when the narrator comes to his hometown he finds out that his apartment suffered from a great explosion and fire, that his car and all his bank savings are stolen. In fact he lost everything he had and finally decides to spend his last quarter on calling Tyler, a person whom he saw just once. Tyler lets the narrator to move into his house, which was situated in the "toxic waste part of the town' and was probably left for demolition. Tyler is a social rioter, he hates his job, he hates his boss and actually does whatever he wants: pees into soap while working at the restaurant, blackmails his bosses and does other crazy things. In fact Tyler is a total antipode to the narrator as he " wears loud print shirts and leather jackets and sunglasses indoors; Tyler sounds like a cross between a Bowery Boy and a Buddhist sage, and he's everything the poor sap apparently isn't" (Rainer)

Tyler is a free person, his inner freedom, his natural charisma and self-dependent character conquer the narrator and actually they become best friends. In fact, the narrator is one who needs this friendship most, as he starts to grow over himself and becomes a personality. They start a "fight club" organization where every man can relief his stress by the means of physical aggression: fight take place nearly every day. The club grows from day-to-day turning into a big centralized organization with the only leader: Tyler Durden.

They begin Fight Club, which is essentially modern man behaving like primal man, in effect freeing themselves from the superfluous things that people (consumers) value most. Stripped down with just muscle and instinct to help you, a millionaire and a homeless man are the same. With the new-found outlook Tyler has afforded him, Jack begins to feel life again, yet ironically he is perpetually scarred and bloody."(From Fight Club Movie Review, Epinions)

Men start preying on him, as he had given them what they lacked in routine life: confidence and manhood.

The narrator becomes jealous as Tyler acts egoistically and mean. Then the narrator starts his own investigation in order to find more information on Tyler: he attends places Tyler had been too, he talks to people Tyler talked to and actually he finds out that Tyler is an imaginary person and that Tyler doesn't exist in reality. Why? Because the narrator is Tyler Durden himself. Tyler became an embodiment of his fears, his hatred, and his unrealized ambitions due to his commonplace character and narrow-minded way of life. The narrator is Philistine, he lives by a schedule, but nevertheless there is something that lives inside him and feels disgust to his essence, to his life and his surrounding. He fails to overcome his fears and his diffidence due to taboos he had established. Tyler is his creation, Tyler is a forbidden fruit which is sweat and tasty. Tyler is an escape from his harsh realities where he is nothing but a miserable unit in a complicated social system.

Tyler's fearless individualism and rebel nature make him demonstrate protest against anything "In addition to a gig making designer soap (the focus of the film's cryptic marketing campaign), Tyler has a night job as a projectionist, where he amuses himself by splicing frames of hardcore porn into children's movies"(Adams)

He explains Jack (the narrator) that in order to change his life he has to sacrifice himself on the example of soap production. In fact he burns Jake's hand with alkali in order to perform "purification":

In ancient history...human sacrifices were made on a hill above a river...The sacrifices were made and the bodies were burned on a pyre...After hundreds of people were sacrificed and burned...a thick white discharge crept from the alter, downhill to the river...Rain fell on the burnt pyre year after year, and year after year people were burned, and the rain seeped through the wood ashes to become a solution of lye, and the lye combined with the fat of the sacrifices, and a thick white discharge of soap crept out from the base of the altar and crept downhill toward the river...Where the soap fell into the river...after a thousand years of killing people and rain, the ancient people found their clothes got cleaner if they washed them at that spot...It was right to kill those people...You have to see...how the first soap was made of heroes...think about animals in product testing. Think about the monkeys shot into space. Without their pain and sacrifice...we would have nothing."(Palahniuk p. 76-78)

Soap production is symbolic in the movie as they use fat stolen from the waste containers in liposuction clinics. So Tyler sells upper class women their own fat but they receive it in a different form. The sacrifice revealed in soap production from the past is a bright example of a moving power of progress and development of civilization.

Fight club had ultimately become a new religion for people who are unable to realize their initial potential given by nature as they wanted something new something primitive and driving. Actually it's a logical continuation of alienation caused by America's system, alienation which oppresses an individual even though it was created for individual.

A screenwriter Jim Uhls, adapting the cult novel by Chuck Palahniuk, want us to know that like Tyler, we men are all living in a toxic dump, and it's called America. Even though Tyler turns into a scourge by the end, his rantings are meant to resonate: We've all been deluded by advertising, he says; we've had no great wars or Depressions to preoccupy our testosterone. What's a poor primal guy to do?" (Rainer)

Such system doesn't make a person be either a social or individual (as most of people become alike), but instead it makes him alienated from others who have so much in common as we see in the movie.

Fight Club's most provocative move -- and its most solipsistic -- is merging Tyler's male-empowerment rhetoric with a classic Marxist analysis of alienation. Insulated from the means of production, a corporate drone like the narrator (or the others who flock to the growing network of Fight Clubs) is denied an understanding of his purpose in life and tries to fill that void with meaningless purchases. "It's only after we've lost everything," says Tyler, "that we're free to do anything."(Adams)

The atmosphere of vacuum which gave the birth to Fight club as to a phenomenon in the life of a city is very close to one which existed in fascist Germany in 1930's. German Tyler Durden was Adolph Hitler, a person who is guilty for the most tragic page in the history of humanity: WW2 and Holocaust. The favorable climate which assisted Hitler in his political promotion was created by the effects of economical depression and consequences of WW1 for German nation. In particular case of the movie, characters live in wealth or at least their living meets average standards, but the crisis they… READ MORE

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