Fight Club

Hi Aki,

We saw Fight Club tonight.

The first time I saw it I didn’t like it at all and didn’t even watch all the way.

Then I saw something that gave away the ending. I watched it again and really liked it.

My dad ordered it so I saw it for the third time – second time all the way. I liked it a lot still.

But you know, it’s funny – the film is really dated now. it’s basically a rejection of a world that is now passed. Such stories and ideas can’t survive the things they reject.

But positive stories and ideas that are a celebration of some ideal can live on long after the world they sprang out of has died. Even though these ideals are formed as the opposite of the world they are born in.

Fight Club is nihilistic in that all it can manage to offer malcontents is the pleasure of destroying the world that oppresses them. It doesn’t offer them any answers or any way forward past the destruction. As such maybe it actually helps the world continue: we destroy the world through the movie, through the book, so we feel better about our oppression, and we don’t move to actually destroy the world. We just watch a movie and rent the dvd and watch it again.

Now that world is destroyed, and we all have bigger and better things to think about than childish temper tantrums.

(written around 12 February 2009)