London Calling…

I loved the movie. The first time I saw it I was deeply impressed with the storyline, and the characters and direction were fresh and fascinating. Brad Pitt as an antisocial weirdo’s hot alter ego in low cut jeans didn’t hurt either. Subsequently I also read the book, which delighted me because so much of the script was faithful to the books narrative, though the essential plot seems to be somewhat squished and twisted into movie form.

But sometimes I find it vastly irritating. Not in and of itself, but in people’s interpretations and the depth they see in the shallowest parts of the idea. Fight Club as I see it was a demonstration of how easily society could theoretically be subverted. That in elevating man so far above the level of an animal we have so thoroughly lost touch with instinct and real emotion, that the slightest contact with either sends us into a frenzy of desperation for more.

It tells us we go to soulless offices every day, and never challenge our own personal hierarchy. That we do not understand what we do, or its place in the world, and so we do not really care and cannot bring ourselves to. That the slight snub of a co-worker is a major event in our lives, that we seek to perfect ourselves through obtaining material things, and that in the end, none of these things truly matter. That we allow ourselves not to matter either, and be trampled by the world and all the other pointless soulless people in it. So when we are offered the chance to feel something real, or passionate, it becomes the centre of our lives, an addiction. If we face losing it we will kill, or die, or subjugate ourselves to keep it.

“You are not your fucking khakis�. I’ve heard it so often as a rebellion from materialism, an assertion that who you are is deep inside you, and could never be defined or contained within something you buy, or want, or go to work to do. Newsflash kids, you are most definitely your fucking khakis. Do you really think your underwear, suit, and Ikea couch don’t say anything about you? That they aren’t an expression of who and what you are? If you bought it, keep it, or do it, it’s you. Because you chose it, you chose how to behave and how to live. You chose to work in a multinational, you chose to live in the suburbs, you chose your bathroom tiles and your couch. You chose your life, and if you drifted into it without noticing, that’s your fault, not the fault of society.

Fight Club makes the excellent point that no matter how much you happen to like say, your kitchen table, you don’t need it to be happy. The part people seem to miss is that neither do you need to reject it to be happy. The only thing you really need is the knowledge of what is important, and what isn’t. Astonishingly, thats the part most people manage not to have.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.