The point of Fight Club

To me, it was mostly about the alienization of the modern American male, and how our more traditional, identifiable roles as breadwinners and providers has been gradually replaced by consumerism and loss of identity. The fights simply put each man 'in the moment', and were not even about winning and losing per se, just about the act itself. "You are not your car, you are not your credit rating" is a mantra I think many of us can identify with, in an age where being a 'successful' human being is merely about personal wealth and status and has nothing to do with who a man really is.

But of course, I'm hopped up on goofballs.

Now, Innocent, if you would be so kind as to provide a cure for AIDS... otherwise, great job.

And one more thing: stop cutting the Prozac in half. Babies don't sleep that good.

I thought I was really going to get to flex muscle here-but InnocentX got me word for word.

Hat's off to you, X-you know and understand and no one could have possibly said it better.

And Jacob as well-great to hear from you guys on this. Yes.

It also struck me as having alot to do with the fact that men as a whole have been emasculated in society for the last 25 or 30 years.

Most of us have never fought in any war, we've never had put in a hard days work on the farm to support the family. TO me Fight CLub was, in addition to all of the things listed above, a way for guys that have lived all their lives sheltered and protected, to actually reclaim some of that simple cave-man, hunter gather joy.

Why do we judge a man by his status? By the clothes he wears? By what kind of car he drives? Is that even important?

Nope.

Fight Club was, to me, about the visceral thrill, of going man to man, throwing aside all status symbols, and being judged on no other level aside from what you do at the moment.

But that's just me.

All that after you just got up,chenzzo? Wow. You must have some really strong coffee.

Ok, next movie for analysis: Pink Floyd: The Wall.
Chenzzo vrs. IX:GO!
(By the way, I think they just gave Fight Club 2 brains up.)

Me agree,coyote.

For all of you newbies out there...the definitive Fight Club conversation:

http://www.chud.com/board/ubbhtml/Fo...ML/000054.html

see when iwas explaining why i didnt care for it, i tried to do it quickly . The "modern america " i refered to was EXACTLY what y'all have explained here.

My point is I felt the character was dumb for having to go through all the crap , THEN find out that it was "--all this returns in the form of the Fight Club, another
conformist machine merely reformed as a paramilitary operation. It's running from one thing to the other, but
individualism is still not apparent."

i just coulda told him it would end up that way at the beginnig! thats my point.

Yes, he learned a lesson, but its a lesson an intelligent person would have learnerd without going throught the rest.
But like i said, i see why you guys like it and thats cool. Just not my bag baby

Similar theme

THE LAST SUPPER

they start out wanting to fight "fascism , evil, and all things wrong" and end up being exactly what they were against in the first place.

Just like in Follow That Bird.

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The preceding was brought to you courtesy of The Quatermass Institute for the Preservation of Electric Mayhem and from the kind donations of people like you...

When I was a newbie...

SPOILERS

What i got out of the movie is about accepting responsibility...and it was really cool. It seemed to speak to me, that this petty shit you are doing like school doesn't matter, because there is a bigger world out there and crap...wow.

Anyway, what I thought the end of the book meant was "You can kill the man (i.e. Tyler) but you can't kill the idea (Project Mayhem)". It's like nazisim or communism, or hell, Catholicism. Once you have the idea to a devoted group of followers it's not gonna matter how many people you kill. The idea is still gonna survive.

"We're looking forward to having you back, Mr. Durden."-that's gonna be my sr. quote.

And Choke is one of the most disturbing pieces of literature I have ever read. I love it.

I lovelovelove you. Did you get the impression that Mrs Mancini was somewhat like a (slightly) less volatile female version of Tyler?

Hey, we're workin' on it...

Two years after the fact, if anybody still cares, there is one thing in Kirby's post I want to expand on.

He mentions that the support groups are not enough for Jack, so he founds Fight Club. Then Fight Club as a weekly meeting is no longer enough either, so the organization has to expand into larger and larger displays of mayhem.

I think the point here is that if you are looking to your surroundings for justification, if you are trying to derive happiness from your peer group, it will never be enough. If you want to be happy, you have to figure out for yourself what makes you happy. If you want satisfaction you have to supply it yourself. No societal group will do that for you. You may find that you have to blow up your own life and start over in order to do that, but blowing up the outside world will never work.

I think it's interesting that in the novel Tyler wants to topple the skyscraper onto an art gallery. In the movie, he's blowing up credit companies.

Quite a different aesthetic, methinks.

*Spoilers abound*

I thought the main theme of Fight Club was how people feel empty and lost... It satirized the way people are willing to do the stupidest things in order to fill that emptiness. The fight club made people feel they really were a part of some bigger cause - something to really make them feel alive. This turned out not to be such a good cause after all, but I guess that's the way things often are in real life too. Lost or vulnerable people are more prone to join all kinds of sects or facist groups just to belong or find some reason for existence, or simply just to get an outlet for anger and aggression. In the movie the fight club initially helped its members cope by letting them release feelings that society has made illegal. There are of course other ways to do this than to beat each other senseless, but they are not always that easy to find.

On a personal level, I think Jack was quite a nice guy who had a dark side that he couldn't cope with. His self-image didn't allow for the kind of feelings he was experiencing, so he subconsciously created another personality for himself. Only when he had realized and accepted that he himself was Tyler Durden could he cope with the whole thing. One way to look at what happens at the end, is that he kills Tyler Durden and loses the destructive side of his personality. Another, more chilling way to see the ending is that by killing Tyler, Jack's personalities merge into one. He is whole and can accept that he has a destructive, anarchic side as well as a "normal" one.

By the way: Did the building they were inside collapse? Some of my friends say it did, others say it didn't. I haven't seen the movie in a long time, so I can't remember myself.

At least in the film itself, the building they were inside does not collapse. It was just a nice view.

It just occurred to me (finally) that the ending would have so not been allowed in (all together now) this post-9-11 world.

Hey Frenchie, didn't you kill your brother?