I’m picturing some hunter-gatherer from 10,000 BC thinking to himself “WTF is this shit? I spend all day, every day, hunting gophers for the stew-pot; I get home, and the tribal elders don’t even know I exist … could life be any more boring or meaningless?!” 
I don’t think I’d agree - it’s pretty strong in the movie too. Think of the scene where Narrator is making Tyler breakfast, or narrator’s jealousy of Tyler’s attention to Jared Leto’s character. David Fincher made the comment at the time it came out that it was “The gayest movie ever”.
One thing the book handled a lot better IMO, was the central twist, although that effect would be gone now. I read the book before I saw the movie and still remember hitting the reveal, then flipping back through the previous 20 pages trying to figure out if I’d read something wrong.
I really didn’t see it in the movie (not to say it wasn’t there). I think it was more obvious in the book.
I think that people who saw the movie first will think that the movie handled the reveal better. People who read the book first will think that the book handled the reveal better.
American Psycho is a little different. The main characters in American Beauty, Office Space and Fight Club are all similar in that they are regular guys in nondescript low-level corporate jobs they have no passion for. In fact, lack of passion seems to be their defining quality. They are essentially just floating through life just doing what they are told to do because that’s what they are supposed to do. Lacking any sort of passion or direction, they default to a sort of “drone” status.
The difference between Bateman from American Psycho and those other characters is that for those other characters, following societies rules has brought them nothing but mediocrity and lack of satisfaction. Bateman, as a result of family wealth and a pathological need to appear to be following the rules enjoys much greater financial and social success as a New York investment banker.
Of course, his life is just as empty and meaningless. He has nothing but contempt his friends, coworkers, fiance and his job. Like the Fight Club Narrator, he basically focuses all his energies into appearances, consumerism and has (most likely) invented a fantasy life to escape into.
I found it boring.
I haven’t read the book, but I did read where the author said that he liked the ending of the movie *better *than his ending in the book.
Actually, such cases are fairly common; it’s just that usually when the movie is better than the book, most people never even realized there was a book to begin with.
That makes sense, since it did come out before 300 :o
Cheers. I had a feeling there was something going on.
I now want to reread the book and rewatch the film. That’s got to be a good thing.
A hunter gatherer from 10,000 BC didn’t have to deal with the tribal elders bothering him every ten minutes about “reprioritizing his action items list”.
One of the themes of Fight Club and similar films is that while civilization has created a society that is relatively comfortible, it is also a society where people are often powerless to pursue their true desires or even assert themselves because they have become enslaved to that comfort and trapped by beurocracy.
What would happen if you tried to take a hunter-gatherer’s livlihood away from him? He would likely crush your skull with a rock. In modern society, we can arbitrarily take away someone’s livlihood by deleting a row on an org chart and that person is powerless to do anything but go collect their unemployment check.
But will Kyla ever realize it? Or will it only be those of us who go see the movie based on Kyla’s life that eventually find out that the Ellen Page “Kyla” charcter, and her klepto friend “Kyler” (Natalie Portman) are the same person?
I have a feeling I’m going to regret this, but what the hell…
The first half of the movie teaches us that modern safe, comfortable society has repressed out primal urges and prevented us from being everything we wanted to be.
The second half of the movie teaches us that this is a good thing.
See, here’s the thing: Tyler, the free-thinking, daring, unbounded rebel, is every bit as full of it as the mindset he decries, and vastly more destructive, to boot. There isn’t any goddam point to Fight Club or the stupid initiation test for Project Mayhem or the ridiculous crimes committed by same.
And that’s just it! If you create a mindlessly stupid, chaotic enterprise as a blow against tyrrany, that makes you every bit as tyrranical! The only way to be truly free is to think for yourself. Don’t do something because someone tells you to or because someone tells you not too. They’re just opposide sides of the same stupidity coin. Look. Listen. Do the research. Ask around. Dig a little deeper. Recall your past experiences. But above all else, trust your judgment and don’t be afraid to follow your own path*.
I have a feeling that the Narrator finally got it by the end. Too late to keep him out of Gitmo, but whaddya gonna do.
Oh, and the other big lesson is that people are going to talk no matter how many rules you make forbidding it, so freaking deal with it already.
- Yeah, I’m a big fan of Assassin’s Creed, what of it?
I think the movie was less a criticism of society than a warning - if we don’t do something to fix it, we’ll start seeing people like Tyler Durden offer their cures, whcih are much worse than the disease. It’s like criticizing the Weimar Republic because it opened the door to the Nazis.
Something I think we can all agree upon is that the movie and book were both phenominal. Regardless of whether you see it as having a deeper truth or you see it as proving itself wrong, any movie that can spark this type of debate is to me a great work of art.
In college I bought a paperback copy of Fight Club, highlighted all the aphorisms, and carried it in my backback every day. You could say I’m a fan. Not because I believe the dogma within, but because the book can convince you to either love it or hate it based on your own mental state before reading. You see parts of yourself in that book, but not everyone sees the same parts.
I read the book after I saw the movie a couple of times. The book, of course, gives more detail about some of the things that I thought were unclear in the movie, like what the space monkeys were up to. Two big themes about fight club itself that I got were:
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The group is some sort of rebellion against, well, something. Maybe modern conformity, it’s not clear. But in order to be part of the group, each person must unquestioningly submit to the authority of a single person so that their rebellion against the straightjacket of society becomes a parody of itself. All those space monkeys are working for Tyler, making soap for example, just like any other job. Even though they follow a complete maniac and do all kinds of organized destruction they are still just as trapped as before.
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You don’t talk about fight club. The biggest absurdity of all. Everybody talks about fight club, the narrator most of all, he’s even writing a book about it! Anybody else think it’s strange that a club nobody ever talks about could grow into every major city in the county in such a short time?
Anyway, what I got from the book was that the author was pocking fun at the absurdity of joining a group to escape a group.
This, of course, presumes that you don’t have a bigger rock at the ready. Otherwise, you can just cave in the other guy’s head first, and take his stuff, and there’s nothing he can do about it. Human society always functions as a power hierarchy, and for the vast majority of human beings, it’s always going to be somebody else who’s at the top of the pyramid. Which is the central irony of Fight Club. Nothing Tyler offers is going to make these people any better off. They aren’t freeing themselves from the machine, they’re just finding a different machine to be a cog in. The only person in the film who has any sort of real freedom or autonomy is Tyler, and he doesn’t exist.
I recall when the film came out, it received a negative review in the SF Chronicle. A week latter, a young man wrote in disputing the review. He described the film as life-changing, and a wake up call to fight for his individuality against the depersonalization of modern society. Towards this goal, he was shipping out to boot camp in three days.
I have never yet encountered anyone who so wholly and completely Missed the Point as that guy. Someday, he may realize that the dominate message of the movie upon which he had reordered his life is that he, personally, is a tool. I do not envy him this revelation. It’s probably going to sting something fierce.
Probably around the third day of boot camp.
I guess when you think about it, though, it’s really Ed Norton saying it. But he’s chosen for Tyler to look like a sexy male model type. So it’s also like he’s asking himself if that’s what a man is meant to look like but at the same time he probably does feel that way because he’s created an alter ego for himself who is a sexy male model type with rock hard abs…