Film: Fight Club
May. 11th, 2016 02:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackAnother film I think I watched once, but then absorbed a lot more of from popular culture. I think it held up pretty well.
As with many films *about* violence, it walks an uneasy line between talking about it and exploring why some people are drawn to it, and exploring why it's bad.
Spoilers:
The big reveal, that Tyler actually is the narrator under a psychotic episode, is very well done. Watching it again, I see that almost every scene with Tyler works comprehensibly (with a few hints) when you assume they're separate people, but that it all makes *more* sense when you know they're the same person. Lots of things, like when he beats himself up and it reminds him of his fight with "Tyler", and when people talk about the founder of fight club never sleeping, and that applies to the narrator and Tyler as a unit, Tyler doing his thing at night when the narrator is suffering from "insomnia", all of that clicks.
Viewing it as a mystery, I couldn't have put it together without being told the reveal[1]. But you were given the first part of the film up to the reveal and told "which is more likely, Tyler is a separate person, or Tyler is an aspect of the narrator", you would find it completely compelling, no other explanation hold up to that.
[1] Well, ok, NOW I could because "they're actually the same person" is my go-to guess for anything weird, but if I didn't know that was a traditional twist, probably not.
Which in a way is odd, because I respect that craft, but the experience of watching the film for the first time would be the same if those hints were there or not, since they were subtle enough I didn't hold them in my mind as "things that needed explaining".
The first time I saw it, I was slightly confused, because the scene with him being accosted by the policemen Project Mayhem members was so surreal, I assumed that and other parts of the film were just his imagination. Which might be an interesting alternative hypothesis -- it would make sense if he imagined how pervasive Project Mayhem was. But now I think the most natural reading is that everything apart from Tyler really happened.
The ending seems actually quite sad. The narrator and Marla hold hands against a dramatic backdrop of buildings collapsing, supposedly without killing anyone. But almost certainly, project mayhem is going to lead to other people dying. And he's bound to be arrested/killed/kidnapped in short order. There doesn't seem to be a good "afterwards".
I'm also looking at the moral, if any, of the film. One moral seems to be a bit like Breaking Bad, "fund mental health services for people who need them, have decent sick pay, have a fallback for people who need support, and it will pay for itself in what you DON'T need to spend elsewhere".
Another is that, the enemy in the film seems to be faceless corporations and people being consumed by apparently pointless and soul-destroying work. Which I kind of agree is a big problem. But I'm pessimistic that randomly smashing stuff will make anything better. And also pessimistic that anything less will produce gradual change fast enough to make any difference :(
As with many films *about* violence, it walks an uneasy line between talking about it and exploring why some people are drawn to it, and exploring why it's bad.
Spoilers:
The big reveal, that Tyler actually is the narrator under a psychotic episode, is very well done. Watching it again, I see that almost every scene with Tyler works comprehensibly (with a few hints) when you assume they're separate people, but that it all makes *more* sense when you know they're the same person. Lots of things, like when he beats himself up and it reminds him of his fight with "Tyler", and when people talk about the founder of fight club never sleeping, and that applies to the narrator and Tyler as a unit, Tyler doing his thing at night when the narrator is suffering from "insomnia", all of that clicks.
Viewing it as a mystery, I couldn't have put it together without being told the reveal[1]. But you were given the first part of the film up to the reveal and told "which is more likely, Tyler is a separate person, or Tyler is an aspect of the narrator", you would find it completely compelling, no other explanation hold up to that.
[1] Well, ok, NOW I could because "they're actually the same person" is my go-to guess for anything weird, but if I didn't know that was a traditional twist, probably not.
Which in a way is odd, because I respect that craft, but the experience of watching the film for the first time would be the same if those hints were there or not, since they were subtle enough I didn't hold them in my mind as "things that needed explaining".
The first time I saw it, I was slightly confused, because the scene with him being accosted by the policemen Project Mayhem members was so surreal, I assumed that and other parts of the film were just his imagination. Which might be an interesting alternative hypothesis -- it would make sense if he imagined how pervasive Project Mayhem was. But now I think the most natural reading is that everything apart from Tyler really happened.
The ending seems actually quite sad. The narrator and Marla hold hands against a dramatic backdrop of buildings collapsing, supposedly without killing anyone. But almost certainly, project mayhem is going to lead to other people dying. And he's bound to be arrested/killed/kidnapped in short order. There doesn't seem to be a good "afterwards".
I'm also looking at the moral, if any, of the film. One moral seems to be a bit like Breaking Bad, "fund mental health services for people who need them, have decent sick pay, have a fallback for people who need support, and it will pay for itself in what you DON'T need to spend elsewhere".
Another is that, the enemy in the film seems to be faceless corporations and people being consumed by apparently pointless and soul-destroying work. Which I kind of agree is a big problem. But I'm pessimistic that randomly smashing stuff will make anything better. And also pessimistic that anything less will produce gradual change fast enough to make any difference :(