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Thematic Analysis of the Film Fight Club

Uploaded by spootyhead on Apr 18, 2007

Thematic Analysis of the Film "Fight Club"

The film “Fight Club”, with its critique of 1990s American mass consumerism and its effect on the country's majority of movie-going audiences (mostly white males 16-34), should be considered a controversial film. A film of such immediacy and power would, in any other time or society, most likely have incited some form of public response. But it didn't. Not to my knowledge. Therefore, the most important question “Fight Club” is that in a society considerably tolerant of controversy, is it still possible to be controversial? When rebellion becomes mainstream, what is there left to rebel against? With these questions, the nihilistic virtues of “Fight Club” are revealed.

A possibility is that “Fight Club” is really not about revolution at all - but the impossibility of it. The film's criticism does not stop at corporations or media - but even goes so far to criticize any organizations seeking to react against them. In this case, the film's “Project Mayhem”, which seemingly begins as disorganized chaos, anarchy, descends into men wearing identical clothing and chanting in unison: the termination of individualism that is one of the key attributes of any revolution, be it fascism, communism, whatever. The argument of the film is that individualism as it is sold to us is not individualism at all, but a carefully crafted homogenization of the self, which serves only to benefit the powers that be. You can choose Apple Jacks or Lucky Charms. There's your freedom. So instead of reacting against this by seeking true individualism, the film accepts that any notion of true individualism is false. So what does that leave one to rebel against? Nihilism, “a doctrine holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated”, fits in nicely here. “Fight Club” aims at the idea that the values held by those in power and those wishing to rebel against them are worthless, and is hence nihilistic.

Tyler Durden’s initiation of the narrator gives us an example by which Tyler initiates the rest of his army. As a means of living, Tyler steals fat from liposuction to make soap to sell women “their fat asses back to them”, as the narrator puts it. Pouring lye, a chemical needed to make soap, on the narrator's hand, causing it to burn, provides the narrator with the appropriate pain and fear of death by which...

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Uploaded by:   spootyhead

Date:   04/18/2007

Category:   Film

Length:   4 pages (880 words)

Views:   11670

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