Whats You Favourite Movies

[peas_and_corn]

Even though it has already been pointed out that we should not talk about Fight Club, I would like to have a brief discussion about Fight Club. IMO, this is one of the most misunderstood films of my generation. Quick question: who, in your ('you' being p&c and anyone else who cares to answer) opinion, is the most important character in this film?

Marla, because she is that catalyst for every action taken.

 

[bum]

So why do you say it is about nihilism? Nihilism has nothing to do with scoring with the babes.

Nor does it have anything to do with Fight Club.

 

[peas_and_corn]

Listen to the commentary then get back to me.

 

[manticle]

I find the film (and the book) to be about taking complete control over one's own fate and actions (and the subsequent responsibilities such control entails). The protagonist is still unable to do this without creating an alter ego to legitimise it.

Perhaps nihilism is the ultimate expression of said control. There is also an element of nihilism in the acceptance that one's place in the world means diddly squat.

 

[peas_and_corn]

OK, I'll expand somewhat.

In the DVD commentary, Edward Norton makes a point that the basic structure of the film revolves around a Buddhist parable: to become enlightened, first you kill your parents, then you kill your god, then you kill your teacher. In the Buddhist sense, it's not literal- 'kill' referring to destroying attachment. Taking the film from this angle, these three are all taken care of. The first is done through the 'bathtub' scene, where 'they' discuss their father going around and setting up franchises. They kill God in the scene with the lye ("you have to know that god doesn't like you, in all probability, he hates you"), and of course the killing of the teacher at the end.

This has to do with the journey that 'Jack' (yeah he has no name, but that's the convenient label he has) goes through in the course of the film. Fight club has at its core a struggle with consumerism and how it has found a way of defining people, through an absence of anything else.

"We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression."

Here is a quote by Fincher which very much sums it up-

The movie is not that violent. There are ideas in the movie that are scary, but the film isn't about violence, the glorification of violence or the embracing of violence. In the movie, violence is a metaphor for feeling. It's a film about the problems or requirements involved with being masculine in today's society. Ed Norton plays a guy in a rut, a guy who has grown up with ideas that were not his. His parents instilled all the typical beliefs in him: wear the right clothes, get a job, a nice house, start a family and make sure you fit in. At age 30, he's bought all the right stuff, but feels completely empty and out of touch with his anger. He's lived sort of an "Ikea existence" and he feels misled. Brad Pitt's character represents every idea--good, bad or indifferent--about what masculinity is. He tells Norton that "Pain is one of our great and memorable experiences of life," and that if we don't understand what it means to be hurt, then how do we understand when we've overcome our fears? They form Fight Club not to win, but to fight and to feel.

Going into the groups was a way for him to cover up the frustrations that Jack constantly felt. "And then she ruined everything." Jack saw in Marla what was in himself, she held up a mirror to himself and he didn't like it. In the aftermath of the explosion in his apartment, there was a point where he could have gone to her and the story would have been far different. However, instead he chose Tyler Durden, an invention, because Durden represented everything that he wanted to be "I look like you wanna look, I **** like you wanna ****..."

Nihilism is at its core a philosophy that rejects notions of values, arbitrarily arrived at or not. Tyler's philosophy rejects arbitrary consumerism, the life that Jack led at the beginning of the film. More from Fincher:

"There are so many things in this book that struck a chord with me. It deals with the riptide of being male in today's society. It explores a lot of subconscious stuff. It's not about fighting, it's about being alive - about not pretending to be somebody else. Getting hit in the face is one of the ways to be present in the here and now. When somebody hits you in the mouth and you get that first rinse of salty something under your tongue, and you spit into your hand to see what it is, you are truly alive in the moment. It's not an orgasm, but it's a very specific reality."

He says that emasculation issues are not fight-club issues - a fight club is not about winning - but also that a hundred years of male DNA are not to be satisfied by a website and a double cafe latte. It's not an answer phrased so as to satisfy the film's critics.

Of course, Jack turns against Tyler's philosophy when really nothing has actually been solved. As Roger Ebert explains-

Only gradually are the final outlines of his master plan revealed. Is Tyler Durden in fact a leader of men with a useful philosophy? "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he says, sounding like a man who tripped over the Nietzsche display on his way to the coffee bar in Borders. In my opinion, he has no useful truths. He's a bully--Werner Erhard plus S & M, a leather club operator without the decor. None of the Fight Club members grows stronger or freer because of their membership; they're reduced to pathetic cultists. Issue them black shirts and sign them up as skinheads. Whether Durden represents hidden aspects of the male psyche is a question the movie uses as a loophole--but is not able to escape through, because "Fight Club" is not about its ending but about its action.

Of course, "Fight Club" itself does not advocate Durden's philosophy. It is a warning against it, I guess; one critic I like says it makes "a telling point about the bestial nature of man and what can happen when the numbing effects of day-to-day drudgery cause people to go a little crazy." I think it's the numbing effects of movies like this that cause people go to a little crazy. Although sophisticates will be able to rationalize the movie as an argument against the behavior it shows, my guess is that audience will like the behavior but not the argument. Certainly they'll buy tickets because they can see Pitt and Norton pounding on each other; a lot more people will leave this movie and get in fights than will leave it discussing Tyler Durden's moral philosophy. The images in movies like this argue for themselves, and it takes a lot of narration (or Narration) to argue against them.

All of this leads to the 'battle' between Jack and Tyler, with Jack rejecting Tyler's philosophy and turning to Marla, which he should have done in the first place.

As I said before, Marla was the catalyst for every action. She was the one who ruined the groups for him and made hiim seek somehting different (Tyler?). She was the one who frightened him into Tyler's arms. She was the one who made him realise the dual life he was leading and she was the one to make him finally pull out of it and return to reality. He had challenged and cut off his attachments to various aspects of his life (back to the parable here, for the two people who are still reading by this point), but he went to the extreme point of trying to pull down everything, and in the meantime indoctrinated people into a type of cult that is just as brainwashed and slave driving ("you are all part of the same compost heap") as what he was railing against in the first place.

I hope I have made myself somewhat clear.

 

[bum]

I'm not trying to start a big thing about interpretation of the finer points of art, to paraphrase the Elvis Costello lyric, writing about film is like dancing about architecture. It is a great film and the fact that you like it makes you a better person in my book (not that that is something many aspire to). However, I do have a couple issues with your post, P&C, that I'll just put out there and feel free to ignore them should you wish.

The first is that Norton clearly has no understanding of Buddhism and the parallel is ridiculous and any interpretation he might put forward in that light is inherently flawed.

The second is that nothing you posted has even the slightest thing to do with Nihilism.

Furthermore, there is nothing to do with Nihilism in the film (regardless of how often the director and actors wish to misappropriate the word in the commentary (which I have seen already, thank-you)). Project Mayhem's actions were all targeted at elite systems/structures - its motives are blatantly related to class-system politics. This idea is pretty far removed from the tenets of Nihilism. Just because the film argues that the current system is flawed does not mean that the film suggests values are worthless. Durden's creation is not "Jack" tearing himself apart, he is a recreation of himself as a "perfect" image - extremely far removed from Nihilism, again. This film is in no way Nihilistic.

 

[DennisKing]

Life of Brian-"he`s a very naughty boy"

 

[tcraig20]

I dont really remember Fight Club, but it has somehow left an impression on me.

I last saw it in early 2000, at about four in the morning, and can remember very little beyond the superficial about it.

I really should get a copy and look at it again.

 

[manticle]

I'm not trying to start a big thing about interpretation of the finer points of art, to paraphrase the Elvis Costello lyric, writing about film is like dancing about architecture. It is a great film and the fact that you like it makes you a better person in my book (not that that is something many aspire to). However, I do have a couple issues with your post, P&C, that I'll just put out there and feel free to ignore them should you wish.

The first is that Norton clearly has no understanding of Buddhism and the parallel is ridiculous and any interpretation he might put forward in that light is inherently flawed.

The second is that nothing you posted has even the slightest thing to do with Nihilism.

Furthermore, there is nothing to do with Nihilism in the film (regardless of how often the director and actors wish to misappropriate the word in the commentary (which I have seen already, thank-you)). Project Mayhem's actions were all targeted at elite systems/structures - its motives are blatantly related to class-system politics. This idea is pretty far removed from the tenets of Nihilism. Just because the film argues that the current system is flawed does not mean that the film suggests values are worthless. Durden's creation is not "Jack" tearing himself apart, he is a recreation of himself as a "perfect" image - extremely far removed from Nihilism, again. This film is in no way Nihilistic.

Most good pieces of art can be interpreted on a number of levels and not all of them are reliant on author or participants.

I wouldn't suggest that any of project mayhem's aims or outcomes have anything to do with nihilism (anarchism perhaps) but that doesn't mean there is nothing in the film that could correlate with it.

If a work of art has only one possible meaning, I find I get bored by it quite quickly.

 

[Cocko]

Sleepers
A time to kill


2 movies where there is justifiable murder... makes ya think I reckon!

Heaps of other favourites but.....


Clockwork orange hasn't made an appearance has it?

Oh, and SAW series.... gold.

 

[bum]

Most good pieces of art can be interpreted on a number of levels and not all of them are reliant on author or participants.

I wouldn't suggest that any of project mayhem's aims or outcomes have anything to do with nihilism (anarchism perhaps) but that doesn't mean there is nothing in the film that could correlate with it.

If a work of art has only one possible meaning, I find I get bored by it quite quickly.

Fight Club is about many things and I am not the person saying it is about one.

 

[manticle]

Wanna fight?

 

[manticle]

Clockwork orange hasn't made an appearance has it?

Was on my list.

Donnie darko and American Beauty warrant a mention as two films about the American middle/upper middle class trying to take control back for themselves.

 

[bum]

Wanna fight?

I heard it was Nick JD's first night.

 

[bconnery]

Mallrats

Near us in between a few large Westfields is a once dodgy now upgraded shopping centre with a Woolies, Target and a few other stores.
We still refer to it as the Dirt Mall...