Last night I watched Fight Club once again. It was more poignant this time around because I am also reading a book, The Truth about the Truth, about postmodernism for my class. The view of the self and consciousness in postmodernism, the authors say, is a malleable one. It is not an essence, but rather a description, a linguistic construction, of who we are and want to be. This to me resonates well with Fight Club who also seems to view the self this way. It also connected with a U2 Lyric from the song "A Man and A Woman" in which Bono sings, "The only pain is to feel nothing at all." Fight Club does a good job of showing how this may be believed in the extreme. This film asks the great questions about what is the self, how do others perceive us and how do we perceive ourselves? And also how do we fight off the numbness of everyday life, and how is this related to the U2 lyric, that we need to feel something, but what?
November 29, 2004
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Greg,
It appears as if you have found a conflict in your recent movie-going. Fight Club seems to contrast greatly with Hero on very foundational levels. If stories can, as Hero contends, teach, as well as decieve, then one is left to believe that life is more than a social construction, which is what Fight Club apparently stands for when you write "a description of who we are and want to be." Foundationally, it seems reasonable that our identities be set in something (i.e. God for Judeo-Christians, social status for Marxists, gender for feminists and queer theorists, etc...), so I won't contest the "who we are," which, while unexplained, certainly leaves room for a universal identity. However, the "...and want to be" could prove problematic. Are we to really believe that we can set our own identity? What are the ethics, if any, to such an action? Where did we recieve such power (for one does not see the constructing of identity as a "natural" act, insofar as the birds and the bees and the bears do it)?
I like Hero, for deep down, Hero has already made a few assumptions about the self and is moving forward. Fight Club, a fine film for engaging conversation (case and point? here and now!), does not want to assume anything and then move forward. It really fights a foundational battle, but it does so already with some assumptions and biases of its own (for instance, why use film to get that message across? Is there a reason the film is indebted to language? What, then, does language mean to humanity? etc...). Fight Club doesn't explicitly answer these questions, but could not have been made without an implicit answer. Hero, on the other hand, assumes a morality and, we must also assume, a universal morality, as it then goes on to show how stories teach and confuse, love and hate. Interestingly enough, I've just finished a project on Kurt Vonnegut, a self-proclaimed Humanist and leading post-modern writer, which explores the morality in his stories, as well as how and why he uses stories to get his message across to his audience. Thus, Vonnegut might be the bridge between Fight Club and Hero.
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