Movie Fight Club example essay topic

The movie Fight Club made a great realization in the film industry, and significantly depicted the social system of the late 20th century. According to most of the reviewers, the success of the film lies behind the fact that almost every American man over twenty-five years of age is going to inevitably see some of himself in the movie: the frustration, the confusion, the anger at living in a culture where the old rules have broken down and one makes his way with so many fewer cultural cues and guideposts. At heart Fight Club is really a dark parody about consumerist dissatisfaction. First of all Fight Club was one of the most direct representation of modern society. Secondly, Fight Club was a real evolution of the modern ideals, the emergence of modern atomized individuals and as a result urban isolation. Finally, the movie points out male-female roles and the place of violence in the male identity.

The biggest aspect of the movie was on present society, which has recently turned out to be consumerism. During the movie this new trend is symbolized by the replica of Tyler Durden, "You are not your job". This dialogue was completely dedicated to the shaping power of the consumer culture. The movie is about what happens when a world defines you by nothing but one's job, when advertising turns you into a slave bowing at a mountain of things that make you uneasy about your lack of physical perfection determined by consumerism, as displayed in the scene where Tyler asks, after seeing a Calvin Kline advertisement, "is this what a man is supposed to look like?" with simultaneous irony and sincerity, of the self-perceived emasculation of working-class white men, and how much money you do not have and how famous you aren't.

It is about what happens when we are hit by the fact that our lives lack uniqueness; a uniqueness that we are constantly told we gained through the enculturation process. At that part Fincher was underlying the unseen patterns of society; we are not free because we are not free to choose. Sure there are choices in front of us but the results are determined by the supreme power of hegemony, gain more money to obtain acceptance from society. However, that was not the only interpretation. During the movie the director took us to the realm of the co-modification, especially in the scene where the narrator buys his new furniture that his cooperates make. The scene was very impressive because it made us feel the pace of consumption and the impacts of advertisement in the late 20th century, which are offering us the impossible: fame, beauty, wealth, immortality, life without pain, on consumption patterns.

The narrator looks at Ikea catalogs and wonders what dinner set defines him as a person. The narrator was consuming at the same speed with the advertisement and was not able to stop himself, even though he hardly needed the possessions he bought. Moreover, as the narrator says, "now I have everything that a middle class man can", he points out that the whole event was nothing more than conspicuous consumption. After the improvement of the new industrial era and consequently the invention of new transportation facilities, the modern society created its own atomized single individual, which is a logical necessity of the system itself. The character of the narrator, who is bored with his white-collar job and his mail orders, was the typical example of the event.

The emphasis on the world in the scenes during travel, about foods and about passengers, shows the loss in the importance of the individual, apart from the context determined by the society itself. When the narrator was talking about his job during the flight he acknowledged that humans are nothing but numbers, showed in the statistics. 'You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile... Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore.

We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing,' with this speech Tyler screams the bare reality of the alienated 20-century man. The unimportant atomized individual, who works for the existence and improvement of the system, is alienated from society, from every aspects of the society; the public sphere is collapsed by the consumerism of our era. The narrator was one such person; he was suffering from insomnia, since he was not able to recharge himself by the typical human methods, and did not have a friend to turn to. The only heroine he was able to use was random support groups. Only after participating in these support groups was he able to fall asleep.

In fact these groups were the only place that made him feel as a part of the organic whole, part of society. He was the individual left alone with his commodities and insomnia. Another depiction of the movie was the gender roles of modern society. Bob, an overly obese man with gigantic breasts, who is an ex champion bodybuilder. The struggle of Bob to be a member of Fight Club was the struggle of man living in a sterile, minimum wage existence dictated by long periods of peace, boring repetitive work, low wages, and an increasingly independent woman. Man is like a jungle-beast asked to do servant-like duties, in a more and more servant-like society.

'The goal (of violence) was to teach each man in the project that he had the power to control history. We, each of us, can take control of the world,' says Tyler and points out the importance of ritualized violence in the structure of male identity. We can conclude that the movie was criticizing the late 20th century society within the culture itself. Critic Ed Gonzalez said it best when he wrote, "Fight Club, in all its visceral beauty is a great moral comment on the way modern day psyches have been deconstructed by external forces like the media and corporate greed".

Moreover, since the so-called anti-hero of the film made his mind at the end and tried to stop his own creation, we can deduce that the film was a conformist product, using the attractive mask of anti-conformism. I believe Fight Club was overlooked and did not receive as much attention as it should have. Fight Club served as an immense scream for revolution, which many of us did not hear.