The Philosophy of Fight Club.
Chuck Palahniuk’s classic book was turned into a movie by David Fincher in 1999, and it is still relevant in today’s world. We still have a generation of people suffering doing stuff they hate, to buy things they don’t need, to impress people they don’t like. We have not learned to let go of society's assumptions, unlike the protagonist Tyler Durden.
I hope most of you have seen Fight Club, but the basic plot is that Edward Norton plays a depressed white-collar man who suffers from insomnia, on a flight, he meets an interesting soap salesman by the name of Tyler Durden, he soon finds himself living in Tyler Durden’s squalid house after his apartment is destroyed, the two of them then form an underground fight club but their partnership frays because of a woman called Marla Singer who catches Tyler’s attention.
Fight Club and Consumption.
Tyler Durden rejects the idea of consumerism while the narrator is obsessed with buying furniture for his “perfect” apartment. The film takes a critical look into the dark side of advertisements and media. One of my favourite scenes in the movie is when the narrator and Tyler are on the bus looking at an advertisement for Gucci underwear and the narrator asks “That’s what a man should look like?” Tyler replies saying “ Self-improvement is masturbation.”
