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The movie Fight Club made a great realization in the film industry, and significantly depicted the social system of the late 20th century. According to most of the reviewers, the success of the film lies behind the fact that almost every American man over twenty-five years of age is going to inevitably see some of himself in the movie: the frustration, the confusion, the anger at living in a culture where the old rules have broken down and one makes his way with so many fewer cultural cues and guideposts.
At heart Fight Club is really a dark parody about consumerist dissatisfaction. First of all Fight Club was one of the most direct representation of modern society. Secondly, Fight Club was a real evolution of the modern ideals, the emergence of modern atomized individuals and as a result urban isolation. Finally, the movie points out male-female roles and the place of violence in the male identity.
The biggest aspect of the movie was on present society, which has recently turned out to be consumerism. During the movie this new trend is symbolized by the replica of Tyler Durden, “You are not your job.” This dialogue was completely dedicated to the shaping power of the consumer culture. The movie is about what happens when a world defines you by nothing but ones job, when advertising turns you into a slave bowing at a mountain of things that make you uneasy about your lack of physical perfection determined by consumerism, as displayed in the scene where Tyler asks, after seeing a Calvin Kline advertisement, “is this what a man is supposed to look like?” with simultaneous irony and sincerity, of the self-perceived emasculation of working-class white men, and how much money you do not have and how famous you arent. It is about what happens when we are hit by the fact that our lives lack uniqueness; a uniqueness that we are constantly told we gained through the enculturation process. At that part Fincher was underlying the unseen patterns of society; we are not free because we are not free to choose. Sure there are choices in front of us but the results are determined by the supreme power of hegemony, gain more money to obtain acceptance from society. However, that was not the only interpretation.
During the movie the director took us to the realm of the co-modification, especially in the scene where the narrator buys his new furniture that his cooperates make. The scene was very impressive because it made us feel the pace of consumption and the impacts of advertisement in the late 20th century, which are offering us the impossible: fame, beauty, wealth, immortality, life without pain, on consumption patterns. The narrator looks at Ikea catalogs and wonders what dinner set defines him as a person. The narrator was consuming at the same speed with the advertisement and was not able to stop himself, even though he hardly needed the possessions he bought. Moreover, as the narrator says, “now I have everything that a middle class man can,” he points out that the whole event was nothing more than conspicuous consumption.
After the improvement of the new industrial era and consequently the invention of new transportation facilities, the modern society created its own atomized single individual, which is a logical necessity of the system itself. The character of the narrator, who is bored with his white-collar job and his mail orders, was the typical example of the event. The emphasis on the world in the scenes during travel, about foods and about passengers, shows the loss in the importance of the individual, apart from the context determined by the society itself. When the narrator was talking about his job during the flight he acknowledged that humans are nothing but numbers, showed in the statistics. “You are not a beautiful