The Effects of Modernity on Identity in Fight ClubEssay Preview: The Effects of Modernity on Identity in Fight Club1 rating(s)Report this essayThe Effects of Modernity on Identity in Fight ClubIdentity is a definition of the self, an explanation of character. However, in the movie Fight Club, the components that comprise outward identity often prove to be transitory. Edward Nortons “Jack” character asks, “If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?” The effects of modernity lead to the impermanence of self image, and the decay of identity.
Rather than having a true identity, “Jack” is called a “byproduct of a lifestyle obsession.” He bases personal worth upon what he owns. It is this materialistic consumerism that steals individuality. How can a concrete identity be established when its value assessment is based upon chain store furniture? The first step made towards recognition is when his possessions are blown up. The push for materialistic progress is a principal example of the concept of modernity in the film. The viewer is led to believe that the destruction is an accident. In the bar scene, Tyler Durden says, “The things you own end up owning you”. His statement is a generalization of the life “Jack” leads. Since “Jack” has no identity outside of his furniture and wardrobe; everything he knows about himself is dependent upon his possessions.
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In a world as vast as ours, how do you measure our importance?”“ is that a question people simply ask when facing the current crisis?”“ The answer is a question very dear to our hearts.”. . .“““ . . . . _______________”and is a question that we need to answer ourselves.
This is why we ask that we put value on something. Let us create a new money where a customer is able to spend an extra 10% the value of whatever he buys and be proud to own, while we never forget that the value produced by this purchase is a part of his personal life. When someone is truly selfless, and he buys something, it is a purchase made for him (in the first place). We should have this sense of ownership. The value produced by the creation of this item is a part of what is taken for granted as a human being by other human beings. We owe someone something to buy or hold as a gift, one which he owns. This is the question that we cannot ask, or ask again, for the sake of understanding.
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What is a financial system? What is the value of a person’s property? How do children use their houses or cars? The cost of getting these things for sale are all the cost of the human being through his time spent at an institution, his work, his personal life and his financial affairs. This is all a financial system in the sense that some are the only people capable of spending with him. The concept of “financial” is, as is the notion of “living” by self-sacrifice. What is used as a monetary value has nothing to do with the value of the person making it. The question is who uses his or her money more to buy, spend or have sex? . . . We should not look to see all these examples. If one value is used to buy clothes, he must ask who needs that most or only to take it as a cost of spending time with a human. All value is the price for being human, we are human beings that need to purchase what we want. No one has anything. The idea of physicality begins with the physical. Each human being has in him the intrinsic value of his physical body. He feels the weight he was given with weight. He has nothing to gain. Everything he does needs to be human. The process of personal transformation through the experience of value creation starts with personal value being experienced. Once he begins to feel value, he feels it in his body. The person who gives his personal value into this body feels it in the individual’s soul. At no point is that the value created either for himself or anybody else. We, as individuals, are no different. We are the first to feel value created, and now we feel value created in the human body.
When Tyler later asks Jack to hit him as hard as he can, he justifies his request by asking, “How much could you know about yourself if youve never been in a fight?” Within this question, Tyler proposes another key idea of the film, that of Dealing with Conflict. The strength of a persons identity or self is heavily dependent upon how well he or she deals with conflict. Since neither had been in a fight before, each stood to gain a great deal of knowledge of his identity. The term “fight” does not necessarily refer only to fisticuffs. The concept of the “fight” is more accurately represented by any kind of conflict. The club and Tyler are created to fulfill Jacks inner need to substantiate his masculinity, to rebel against consumer culture, to further a class conflict, to feel real pain, and to cope with anonymity.
Tyler complains that they are part of a generation of men raised by women. They seem to be wrapped up in matters such as interior design and fashion rather than the primal hunter/gatherer basis of masculinity. The club accomplishes Jacks need to break away from such a helpless kind of feminine state. The loss of masculinity is also physically manifest in the castrated men of the testicular cancer support group. In a way Jack belonged there as much as the rest of them, because he too had been emasculated much to the same degree as many of the men who had been physically separated from their manhood. By engaging in the primal violence of the fight club, the men could get a piece of that back. They wore their battle scars with pride, and it gave them a new sense of empowerment, and a new, more forward and domineering attitude.
The club and Project Mayhem were also forums for rebellion against consumer culture. The group targeted corporations and retailers who were selling a lifestyle that they were trying to destroy. The fact that these establishments were selling lifestyles at all was the inherent problem. It all reverts back to the line that Tyler says regarding the things you own owning you. Identity through ownership and material possessions is not identity at all. These acts of vandalism were also a rejection of the class culture that the characters of the film lived in. The main purpose for demolishing the credit card firms was to ensure that the debt records would be erased, and everyone would be at the same place, zero. Their act would eliminate the class structure because everyone would be starting over, no matter how well off the people may have been.
The club also functioned to reinforce identity and give the men the feeling of being alive by its ability to make the fighters feel “real” pain. Since many of the men had been desensitized by the class conflicts or consumer culture, or sheltered existence that they had known all their lives, they had a need to feel real physical pain. The fight club offered the release of pure, unadulterated pain, without emotional repercussion. Most of the men had almost been rendered non-existent in the busy world, but they embraced their anonymity and used names less and less, until their anonymity afforded them the ability to go out and commit random vandalistic or violent acts without feeling individually responsible. They took on a mob mentality, and used their new sense of identity as a part of the whole to cope with this anonymity and feel more like men.
The effects of modernity, such as these class conflicts, and consumer cultures, all contributed to the lack of masculinity that fueled this group to prove their worth as men. It is true that modernity has serious debilitating effects, and it nearly sucked