Fight Club

Today I feel like writing something about the 1999 movie, Fight Club. The first time I watched this movie was on television with plenty of scenes cut. I didn't watch it from the start so I decided to watch it again. It is fortunate that I got the uncut version with all the blood and violence. It's definitely worth watching.

Fight Club tells an interesting story of a common white-collar slave working for an automobile company who suffers from insomnia. The way he sees it, his life was full of boring routines. That was before he met Tyler Durden which by far the most interesting single-serving friend he have ever met. A "tragedy" brought them together to start a ....

I'll stop here with the summary. Moving on with what I really had in mind about the movie. I'll start with some lines from the movie.

Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression.

Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

It's like being in a therapy session where the therapist broke the illusions from our life. The second paragraph really hits it, don't you think? Fight Club was actually not just about blood and violence, it ...

wasn't about winning or losing. It wasn't about words. The hysterical shouting was in tongues, like at a Pentecostal Church.

The fights in Fight Club showed the path to enlightenment. As I said before, it's like a therapy session. All the men of Fight Club was saved.

When the fight was over, nothing was solved, but nothing mattered. We all felt saved.

This movie actually reminds me of School for Scoundrels. The concept of being saved in both movies were similar. Only that Fight Club offers more blood.

Other than that, Fight Club also put up personality disorder in its plot. It was a result of the protagonist feeling neglected in life. When one felt his life was a failure, one would start dreaming to have a different life or to become a different person.

If you wake up at a different time in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?

In a world full of materialism, having everything does not necessarily mean you're satisfied with your life. The IKEA-boy (the protagonist) owned everything but it ended up owning him. He just didn't realize that having everything was not the answer he was looking for in his life.

It's just, when you buy furniture, you tell yourself, that's it. That's the last sofa I'm gonna need. Whatever else happens, I've got that sofa problem handled.

The above was a quote of how devastated the protagonist when he found out that his condo blew up everything he had; A sign of the importance of material possessions. This is one source, which I can identify, that resulted in the protagonist's personality disorder.

That "tragedy" was the beginning of a new life for the protagonist. A life as a new man; a free man. Free from everything that defines himself before.

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.

Yes.

We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.

Define yourself as ...

You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.

In the end, we should ...

Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.

That's all I can write about Fight Club. The one thing that really interest me was the concept of what I quote above; rejecting the importance of material possessions. It goes along with my point of view as a Muslim excluding the brutality. As a Muslim, I should never be attached to anything in this world. We're all bound to die anyway.

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.