Fight Club, A Destruction Of Contemporaneity
The 20th century has been a century of change. It started with wars and ended with frantic technological advancements. Progress that has led to the consumer society we know today. Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) brought this century to a close and marked the beginning of the 21st century in a savage, brutal and less than optimistic way. Every sentence, every scene, every shot, everything he presents generates a reaction from the viewer.
Fight Club is a scathing criticism of society, a blow to many of us who sometimes feel identified with the unnamed character played by a magnificent Edward Norton. Many have criticized the film. Some felt uncomfortable and others saw it as a masterpiece that brought the 20th century to a perfect end.
No, this is not a movie to watch while eating popcorn. Nor is it a film that awakens the most forced sentimentalism in cinema. It is a film that awakens the viewer, in the strictest sense of the term. The warnings at the start of the film are already warning us that we are going to be hit. A blow to the ego, a blow to the stomach.
The main character, whose name is not mentioned, is the faithful reflection of a victim of his time: a slave to his work, he suffers from insomnia and wastes his time buying things from IKEA. His only breath of fresh air he finds in group therapy. A therapy attended by people suffering from diseases such as cancer, in order to make their situation “easier”.
All of this changes when he meets Marla, a key figure and, a little later, Tyler Durden (or rather himself). We advise that you do not read on if you haven’t seen the movie as this article contains spoilers.
Gray, dark, awkward and smelly. Here are words that could describe Fight Club, this sadistic burst of laughter in the face of what surrounds us, the world we know, this consumer society to which we are slaves. It plunges us into the diseases of our time, a time when we are what we have.
David Fincher and his trio of incredible actors (Helena Bonham Carter, Edward Norton and Brad Pitt) managed to capture the essence of the late 90s, anticipating the future by plunging us into an obscure club full of blood and d ‘self-destruction.
Contemporary disease
“We live in a sick world and we are sick”, this is the feeling that Fight Club leaves us . The film is presented as an introspective tale narrated by its main character. However, this introspection has a certain universality.
Even if it is told in the first person, the protagonist does not tell us his name and presents himself as an ordinary man: he lives alone in an apartment in a big city, works as an expert for a major automobile company, suffers from insomnia and spends his money on purchases.
This characterization is fairly universal. Since we don’t know his name, we transpose his story from “I” to “we”, retrospecting our own life. The character lives in a world we know. There is no fantasy or artifice, it is our daily reality. His “evils” are ours or those of many people we know.
The main problem of this protagonist is insomnia. His doctor refuses to continue prescribing sleeping medication for him, so he chooses to attend group therapy for people with cancer.
It was during one of these meetings that he met Bob, a man who had testicular cancer and lost his masculinity. He had his testicles amputated and, as a result of the treatment, began to have breasts that were growing. The protagonist feels relieved alongside these people and finally manages to fall asleep.
He does not know the cause of his insomnia. It ignores the root of the problem. In fact, he just knows that during these therapies he feels at peace and can cry without holding back. Something that previously seemed forbidden for men because crying was synonymous with femininity.
We live in a hectic world, we consume to feel good, we have everything and, despite this, we hear more and more words like “anxiety”, “stress”, “insomnia”, “depression”… This are the diseases of our time.
Just when he seems to be in control of the situation and his insomnia problem, Marla appears. This woman will reduce this peace to ashes, destabilize our protagonists and make him plunge back into his sleep disorder. Marla is like him; she is a woman for whom life has no meaning. She is only waiting for death and her greatest pain is to see that she does not arrive. She also attends these therapies. He’s just another tourist.
Why is Marla a threat? Because it constitutes its reflection. It represents his lie. If this is discovered, its whole center of stability and peace will disappear. The rejection that Marla produces is a rejection of himself. This woman even attends testicular cancer therapy. Who can believe that a woman has suffered from such cancer?
This insolence, this way of taking advantage of the pain of others to deal with his own is what drives our protagonist crazy. Marla is simply the female version of himself.
Fight Club, the destruction of capitalism
After Marla, it’s Tyler Durden’s turn to appear. Tyler is a strong, handsome man who lives outside the system and the norms. He makes soap, lives in a house we could call a ruin, and constantly does what he wants.
Tyler is the antithesis of our era. It represents the absolute rejection of capitalism, of modern man who is a slave to his work in order to be able to buy material things that are supposed to fill his inner void.
Together they will begin the fight club, the main character’s new therapy group. These are meetings where different men come together to unleash their wildest, most bestial side by fighting. Tyler is the guru of this group, the spirit guide tasked with exploding all the rage and anger that all these men are feeling.
These fights allow men to free themselves from social pressures, to extricate themselves from the slavery in which they live, to stop thinking and to let themselves be carried by their most violent side.
As Tyler explains, the cinema has made us believe that we can be rock stars, famous actors… The media have set goals too high for us and, meanwhile, we are content to lock ourselves in desks and to earn enough money to buy, to be someone.
These insomnia problems, this contemporary illness of the protagonist, led him to suffer from a split personality, to create a new “me”, to invent Tyler. A dissociative disorder that makes us think of a kind of updated Hyde, more beautiful, stronger, who represents all the hidden desires of the character, all this anger accumulated over years, towards society and the world around him.
Beyond the fighting, a conspiracy appears. A series of attacks with a deep feeling of freedom, of anarchy. Attacks which do not go against people but which aim to destroy large companies, buildings and symbols of contemporary slavery.
Fight Club is a punch, a nihilistic speech, an attack from the turn of the century and the beginning of the next; a blow to Hollywood, to capitalism and to ourselves. We all wanted, at some point in our lives, to be Tyler.
Our thoughts American Beauty, is an American film which criticizes, with a certain satirical air, the society of the time. It ended up becoming a classic.
