Before I go in depth about the film ‘Fight Club’, I would like to point out that there is a book that came first by Chuck Palahniuk and, like the movie, it is also very good.
The film ‘Fight Club’, interpreted by David Fincher, opens with an unnamed insomniac who finds meaning in his life through material that he purchases to complete himself.
He expresses his distress by saying “when you have insomnia, you’re never really asleep… and you’re never really awake”. Through this we can see that the narrator lives his life as a blur, just living for the next day and nothing else. We can relate this to a lesser extent to many modern day individuals who find solace in repeating the same routine day in and day out.
The film uses fighting as a way of expressing that we as humans are flawed and that instead of trying to strive for perfection, we should embrace and accept our many weaknesses. Furthermore, the film states that rather than perfection being the definition of beauty, it is in fact imperfection that makes us truly beautiful. The idea behind this is that we shouldn’t try to hide our scars because it’s part of who we are. Our scars are our reminders of where we’ve been, and each is a different story waiting to be told.
The film also shines a light on the idea of security and risk that takes place in our society. It says that today, society based around the same principle of staying your course and conforming so as to ensure your place in civilization. This is where the idea of risk comes into play, because we have been programmed by a young age to lock our minds and play it safe. Once again the film emphasizes this point in an extreme manner by having the narrator lose everything that “completes” him, and through this we see that because he has lost everything he has nothing more to risk and in turn he becomes free. Furthermore, we see a pattern in the narrators actions when he decides to join the support groups. He is slowly starting to realize that his entire life has been centered around what society has expected of him, and this eventually escalates to the creation of Fight Club to accentuate the fact that he is now aware of the constant demands and expectations that society imposes on us as individuals.
The reason this movie is my personal favorite is because it holds a mirror in front of us and shows us that we don’t have to be another cog in a machine, that beauty isn’t defined by perfection, but rather imperfection, and lastly material value does not define us as individuals. All of this is done in such an extreme way to show that these are some of the more important problems in our society, and we are the only ones who can fix it.
Films R Us 