Talented David Fincher has directed some awesome films that force people to muse about our reality. One of them is the movie Fight club that was made in 1999. The film is based on the Chuck Palahniuk’s novel about an insomniac man who worked in the office and one day decided to open the club founded exceptionally for the men trying to find themselves in surrounding society. The Fight club was ambiguously received by critics, who couldn’t come up to the common opinion by this time.
However, it presents a list of the urgent problems of the modern world such as materialism, the men’s role in the society and freedom from the established social norm.
Undoubtedly, the major theme Fight club elucidates is the men’s role in the society. Establishing fight club, men were trying to find the meaning in their lives and distract themselves from the job they weren’t satisfied with. It was logical that fight club helps them to feel they are alive and gave them back the feel of masculinity.
Attending the club man recovered his natural instincts.
Fincher presents his main character as a typical man of his society; the truth is the men aren’t allowed to be men; they lost their power and braveness; they couldn’t have emotional strength and be independent. The director shows where lays the cause of this problem. Both narrator and Tyler were raised by mum, their fathers didn’t influence them and hadn’t any role in their upbringing. As a result, the men were grown in the female’s standards; the women established for them rules and norms, they were supposed to follow. This way wasn’t successful in creating the natural male; they haven’t anybody who could show them the example of masculinity, and they’ve grown up still hadn’t found themselves. Instinctively, they were looking for guidance, which hadn’t received during their childhood.
Being a part of Fight club gave everybody a chance to get lacking guidance from Tyler Durden and feel themselves under someone’s guardianship. His word is the rule for everyone; his opinion shouldn’t be discussed. The narrator and others club men finally have someone they can follow and they obedient him without a word.
The Fight club also illustrates the worthlessness of people completely sank in the materialism. Fincher places the narrator in the usual routine; he appears as an office worker who hasn’t any purpose in his life, any aim that could make his life full and interesting for him. He spends his money on buying the IKEA furniture; and here is the uncovered picture of our real life. We force to get the appropriate qualification blindly devoting our time only for studying; after having received the diploma, we force to get the well-paid job, to have money. We are ready to work overtime, spending the whole day at work. We are solicitous to achieve success in our career and all of this we are doing for one reason – to get more money. Then, we spend them on the stuff we even don’t need.
Fincher demonstrates us the slavery we all are caved in. It is natural when people own things; however, in this film, we can see something opposite. Narrator’s apartment, his furniture and all the stuff he buys, occupy him more than he occupies them. In fact, he didn’t like his job and wasn’t happy with his apartment. Fincher didn’t accentuate on the personal information, and the narrator hasn’t the real name, and it means that any of us could be him. The society dictates people that there is only one way to achieve success and it is hidden in having lots of possessions.
This leads to the next problem Fincher struggled to represent to our attention – the freedom from the society. If we take into the consideration social standards, we can say that the narrator lived the normal life. He did everything he was expected to do; he had a rewarding job and lots of things he didn’t realize they were useless. He acted according to the rules and still wasn’t happy. The narrator personifies every person living in modern society and proves that nobody can be happy until he becomes himself.
The society established a complicated system of rules and standards which fastens the person and gives no opportunities to breathe fluently. Only strong people that decided they don’t want to obedient somebody else’s rules can tear this net and become free. Those, who evince the courage not to follow other’s opinions, are truly happy as they find themselves.
One of the brightest themes Fight clubs also presented is the problem of loneliness. Living according to the society rules hadn’t given Jack the sense of being the part of this society. He was lonely. When the narrator met different people on his way before, and after he found out about fight club he suffered from being far from them.
No one could understand him completely; no one knew his thoughts and troubles. This is the real picture of modern life – every person has hundreds of others people in his or her life, but most of us can never rid of the sense of solitude.
As we can see, the problems stated in the Fight club largely remain their actuality in our modern life. All of us live in the society with its stated rules and norms, with its materialistic dependence and struggle to get freedom, to find ourselves. At once, all of us are surrounded by crowds of people, but not everybody feels like a part of their community. The loneliness still considered being one of the urgent problems of our society, and we are obliged to solve it.
References:
- Palahniuk, Chuck, et al. “Fight Club Essays.” GradeSaver: Getting You the Grade, .
- “Fight Club.” Fight Club :: Fight Club Analysis, .
- OH, Trevor M. Mason. “Fight Club.” Teen Ink, .