Fight crap

Back in high school, a fellow student told me to watch a couple of movies. One of his suggestions was "Fight Club", because it "changed [his] life". After carefully considering the source of this advice, I completely avoided Fight Club for the next five years.

Tonight, however, I watched most of it with my brother as I waited for a computing task to finish. As I suspected, it sucked. The worst part is that people consider it some sort of revelation. Wasn't anyone able to contemplate their own life of quiet desperation before the Fight Club movie came along?

The Fight Club movie takes Thoreau and kicks him up a notch using standard postmodernism. Thus, our capitalist consumer-based society has ruined everything, and people only find solace in purchasing things. The solution is Fight Club; much like Thoreau had to escape to Walden Pond, the men in today's society escape by beating the shit out of each other.

Gag me with a spork.

Unfortunately, the members of Fight Club eventually become a terrorist organization hellbent on destroying the capitalist society by bombing credit card companies and TRW. (This sounds like the wet dream of a screenwriter still paying off student loans from his MFA days.) How interesting that the slaves of capitalism turn into mindless slaves of Project Mayhem. Even more interesting are the real-life Fight Club-bers who become slaves to the ideas inside of the movie.

I find it ironic that so many people purchase the Fight Club DVD (which was manufactured and sold by large multi-national corporations), and then feel their life has been "changed" and decide to start a Fight Club or buy Chuck Palahniuk's books. This is exactly the type of braindead consumerism the movie was complaining about, morons!