Why the movie Fight Club is so popular within the Self help / PUAs / Red pill crowd ?
07-08-2017, 05:32 PMQuote: (05-22-2017 12:22 PM)Enigma Wrote:
Quote: (05-20-2017 12:21 PM)Quintus Curtius Wrote:
When it comes to "ideas," I'd say that I don't agree with every single thing the movie tells us. There is a nihilistic streak running through the film that doesn't match my own philosophy of life. I understand where it comes from (it springs from modern man's repressed rage at his marginalization in the face of feminism, egalitarianism, and modernity), but I don't think it's the answer. I have a different vision.
Think of the scene on the bus where Tyler and the unnamed Edward Norton character are looking at the ads on the walls of the bus. They see a picture of a well-muscled frame. Tyler says, "Is this what a man looks like? Self-improvement is masturbation...self-destruction, now that's an idea." Or something to that effect.
Consider also the scene where Edward Norton beats himself up in his boss's office. It's as if males are turning their collective rage inward on themselves, rather than outward against the weasels, parasites, and scum who sold them out. I don't believe in self-destruction as an antidote for our modern ills. I have a different prescription for our malaise.
But here again, even though I don't agree with everything the movie posits, I can still recognize that it is a supreme piece of cinematic art.
Tyler is not supposed to be the "hero".
The Narrator was too much of a pussy, and Tyler is his polar opposite, his shadow.
Neither is a fully healthy individual, which is why the Narrator becomes schizophrenic and later tries to kill himself. Rather than accepting both parts of his personality and psyche, he splits them in two.
That's why the movie is worse than the book.
For one, it glorifies Tyler, when he's too destructive. You're not supposed to take everything he says seriously. He's just the opposite of the main character.
Second of all, it turns the ending into some kind of love story, rather than the (attempted) suicide that it's supposed to be. The main character is supposed to be killed by his unwillingness to accept the dark side of his unconscious.
And third, it kills off Tyler. He's a part of the Narrator's personality; he wasn't supposed to be killed.
The healthy masculine character would have been the Narrator and Tyler integrated, with both the light and dark elements of his personality.
Instead he kills off the dark side of his masculinity to hold hands with some crazy drug addict.
Good interpretation, A+. I think you're right. Makes a lot of sense, a lot of sense, when you see the movie as the problem of integrating modern nice guy with classic masculinity. I actually remember this movie coming out and there was no big discussion over the deeper meaning at the time, mostly it led to a bunch of people taking up martial arts.
I think it's time for a rewatch of Fight Club. I watched another doomsday film - 12 Monkeys - recently and that one is also awesome. It's interesting that all these gloomy but prescient films got made just a few years after the collapse of the Sovjet Union and supposedly in the "end of history" with freedom and democracy for all.
The Waichowskis and Matrix, they probably had no idea what they would set in motion and judging by their newest "work" would probably object. Still, it seems many artists of that time were able to sense the zeitgest without intellectualizing it.