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Fight Club: Community in the Times of Violence There are a lot of movies made in the twentieth century which have good storylines and also contain a social message. In the regard, Fight Club is perhaps second only to A Clockwork Orange. The plot is an intricate web that links many issues facing contemporary society, and one of the most significant problems it looks at is violence. This paper is an analysis of the movie, which is based on a book by Chris Palahniuk, in terms of its approach to violence. Perhaps it would be prudent to begin with a brief examination of the charge of gratuitous violence that was leveled against the movie itself.
The title, as well as the central plot device of over a hundred people hitting each other to relieve their stress, suggests that this is a movie that is full of violence. Critics suggested that watching a cool star like Brad Pitt engage in acts of assault would only glamorize the issue for viewers, especially youth who idolize Hollywood stars. This is not the case. In actuality, the movie takes the genre of violent action films into a different dimension altogether. While Bruce Willis in the Die Hard series or Tom Cruise in the Mission: Impossible series are shown engaging in acts of brutal violence, these movies are oriented towards heroes belonging to law enforcements agencies who battle with larger-than-life terrorists.
Fight Club, however, locates the violence in a more social context and hits the audience considerably harder with its message of the dangers of corporati zation. The viewer is hit by the theme of violence from the very first scene, which depicts Pitt sitting in Norton's lap with a gun forced into the latter's mouth. The plot revolves around Jack (Norton) and Tyler (Pitt). Norton has a nondescript job at an insurance company and is suffering from insomnia. In a tongue-in-cheek effort to get him to feel better, his therapist asks him to attend self-help groups for terminally ill patients to understand that other peoples problems are worse than his. Jack seriously decides to do this, and ends up being able to sleep after attending a series of meetings peopled by patients of testicular cancer.
He schedules a different meeting for himself every week, and hangs out with people who are worse off than him, and gets to feel better about himself as a result. Along the way he meets Marla (Bonham Carter), who is also following the same ruse that he is, albeit because she enjoys the voyeurism of being there and not because she is looking for vicarious self-fulfillment. Tyler is a soap salesman who offers accommodation to Jack when his apartment is wrecked. In many ways, it is the character of Tyler who bears the brunt of the movies message. He is responsible for two of the thematically strongest plot devices in the movie.
The first is the creation of the fight club, and the second is the idea of making soap out of human beings. Both these issues are connected very strongly to the movies social message, and deserve to be examined in detail. One night, Tyler and Jack get into a fight in a parking lot. They conclude that this act of fighting is so cleansing for them as men that they want to share the experience with others. Fight Club is thus created, and becomes an underground brotherhood that grows rapidly as more and more men hear about it. The club develops into a national underground movement.
The fight club is moved to the basement of a bar and Tyler outlines the rules: The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club. The second rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club. The creation of this club is a strong comment on the way self-help groups function. But ultimately, this is not a movie thats been made to spoof such groups which offer therapeutic sharing with the promise of anonymity. Instead, the amount of violence unleashed by the men on each other is a testimony to the amount of stress that people carry around with them with their everyday lives do not offer them the space, creativity and freedom to live healthy lives. This portrayal of repressed consumerist society is particularly significant in the times of terror that we live in.
However horrific the 9 / 11 attacks and the war in Iraq have been, there are at least conventional explanations for such ethnic violence. But how do we explain situations where nine-year-old boys gang-rape their classmates, or children arrive at schools with guns and turn into murderers overnight? The character of Bob (Meat Loaf) is unmistakably a reference to Tiresias, the blind seer who is a man with a womans breasts who appears in Greek mythology. While the Tiresias of Oedipus Rex can move outside his society and explain why terrible things are happening in it, Bob here is a victim of society.
A hulking man who develops secondary female genetic characteristics because of the treatment for his testicular cancer, Bob is a victim of the cancerous society he lives in, which eats away at his very being. The scene where he sobs while holding Jack to his breasts is grotesque and full of pathos. His death, too, succeeds in implanting in the audience a repulsion towards violence and acts of terror inflicted by human beings upon one another. In many ways, Jack is also one such victim of society. Although the credits identify his name as Jack, he remains nameless in the movie, a kind of stand-in for every man who is a victim of corporati zation and consumerism. He is the Everyman of the Nineties, whose only alternatives towards life are either indifference or blind anger.
Before he meets Tyler, he is walking dead, unable to respond with feeling to anything. He seeks solace everywhere but find it nowhere. Even the momentary solace he finds by masquerading as a victim of terminal disease is taken away from him by Marla, who disrupts the peace that he finds. This is a movie about fierce repression that sets in as a result of social alienation.
The only woman in the movie is a negative influence on the men, as Jack struggles to suppress his feelings for her in the light of her torrid relationship with Tyler. In a society where stereotypes of masculinity and femininity cause severe alienation between the sexes, only dys functionality can result. The crux of the movie is probably the revelation that Tyler is not a separate individual, but Jacks own alter-ego. Is that what a man looks like? Jack asks Tyler as they look at a Calvin Klein underwear ad full of male models. Just like the fictional Tyler, the stereotype of male beauty is a myth.
Tyler is revealed to be an anarchist as he seeks to blow up credit card companies so that people can start afresh. In actuality, what he seeks is absolute depersonalization, where everyones record is erased, where everyone loses his identity. The revelation that Tyler is not a real person is what brings the social message of this movie across most strongly. Tyler's predilection for violence is neither real nor advisable.
His solution to the decay of society's vibrancy is that men resort to violence. By revealing him to be a myth, the movie-makers also reveal the concept to be false. The message is clear: violence as a solution is a ludicrous and false idea. The movie is not a recommendation for violence as a solution to stress. Instead, like all great art, it seeks not to offer solutions but to provide an accurate picture of its contemporary society: the picture here being that relating masculinity and machismo to violence is a false and dangerous idea.
Works Cited Fincher, David. (Director). Fight Club. Cast Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham Carter, Meat Loaf. U. S.
A: Twentieth Century Fox, 1999.
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Research essay sample on Fight Club Community In The Times Of Violence
