by Mike Shea on 8 April 2003
I was fixing up some articles on Liquidtheater.Com and read something I wrote about Fight Club almost three years ago. Sometimes I impress even myself:
"Why is it that when we try to hold a movie or a current day book we are assaulted with the literature of our past as if it is the end all be all of higher thinking?
Fight Club is a perfect example of a movie that gives a hard thick message on society as we know it. In many years to come, Fight Club can be looked at as a period piece that shows how futile our lives are in this day in age. It shows that 200 years of forced social values cannot stop 2 million years of instinct. That whatever car we drive, whatever we have in our bank account, we are animals. We have lost touch with what it means to have to fight to survive. In a world where we see beautiful actors dancing, drinking and procreating next to advertisements for sandwiches with 800 calories and 38 grams of fat, what kind of message are we supposed to be getting? How are we supposed to live? What are we as a people giving back to our society when we live in a world of buggy Microsoft products and four dollar coffees with five names?
Fight Club is a movie that was hammered for being violent, even when movies like Saving Private Ryan and Braveheart are given top honors with violence never seen on the screen before. Why? Braveheart and Ryan were movies with easily accepted messages. War is bad. Ooh, tough message! Fight Club has a much harder message that scares almost everyone who sees it, including myself. That doesn't mean we should label the movie as "violent" or "dangerous". We should think about the message. Accept it or toss it away, but do not try to hide it. While we shouldn't start burning smile faces into office buildings or castrate a mayor, we should think about what society is telling us when it shows a beautiful 103 pound blonde model holding a Big Mac and tells us to "eat"."