922: Fight Club

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Fight Club

Title text: I'm not saying it's all bad, but that movie has not aged as well as my teenage self in 2000 was confident it would.

Explanation

Fight Club is a movie starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton that was released in 1999, based on the novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk. It included this oft-quoted and parodied line: "The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club." Randall twists this iconic line by asking that if you ever meet him in real life, "Do not talk about the movie Fight Club."

The movie has been fiercely debated by critics, primarily regarding whether it makes a sophisticated philosophical statement about society and consumerism or whether it is just a movie with lots of fighting and mischief. It has a large and devoted fanbase who are convinced that the film is brilliant and transformative, and who have a reputation for wanting to discuss it at every opportunity.

In the title text, Randall explains is position further. He evidently saw it as a teenager and was implied to be a big fan initially, but now doesn't feel that it's aged well. As an adult, he doesn't claim the film is all bad, but has lost his enthusiasm for it, and appears to have no interest to discuss it with people who are still fans.

"This conversation is over" is also a line from the movie, used to bluntly cut off any further discussion. Cueball ironically uses a quote from the movie to make it clear he has no interest in discussing the movie.

Transcript

Friend: But Fight Club isn't really about fighting. It's about the way society—

Cueball: Nope, don't wanna hear it.

Friend: But it says consumers are—

Cueball: This conversation is over.

The first rule of talking to me about movies is do NOT talk about Fight Club.

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Discussion

I never really liked the movie either so... Davidy²²[talk] 09:25, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

Really? Is something like that really common? I was a teen when I saw that movie and I did understand what it was about. And I'm not trying to show off; honestly, I don't think there is any merit on that. Wasn't the movie pretty obvious about it's anti-consumerism ideas? :/ 189.179.25.191 23:05, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

No; it's about a dialectical opposition between the Narrator's two attempted paths to happiness: Conforming to what society says he should do to be happy, and smashing them all. (Norton and Pitt, respectively) It's the Slave and Master mentality from Nietzsche. A naive viewing of the movie (i.e. what almost every teenager sees, hence the mouseover text) is that, because the Conformist model is so clearly unhappy, the movie is glorifying Pitt's smashy-smashy ethos. Except that's completely self-destructive and unsatisfying, as well: an all-consuming hatred of consumerism is its own cosumerism-pathology. It's at the end of the movie that the dialectic resolves. Norton destroys both the confirmist and smashy-smashy selves, and starts on a path to true happiness. You see this as he leaves with Marla--he is leaving with her because he wants to be in a relationship with her because he and she will enjoy it. He is NOT doing it to ape how he's supposed to act, and he's not doing it as some sort of BDSM humiliation thing. He has become the Ubermensch--he is able to chart his own path to happiness, enjoying the fruits of material society if he would enjoy them, without being enslaved to them or enslaved by hatred of them. 173.245.63.192 15:32, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

tldr 108.162.219.223 06:53, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Don't conform to non-conformism.162.158.78.4 13:46, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

He has become the Ubermensch--he is able to walk out the door with a bullet in the head, fired at close range by a raving lunatic that gets the girl? I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait (talk) 17:27, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

The book is so much better. -- The Cat Lady (talk) 13:36, 22 August 2021 (UTC)