To honor one of the most "magical" films to ever come out.
Heres to you Fight Club.
For those that dont know much about it.
Fight Club was a love it or hate it enterprise. It went straight to the heart of the schizophrenic nature of society, not only exposing it but positively wallowing in it. It tool delight in trashing consumer culture and western values and spitting in the face of the collective zeitgeist.
It was only natural that it invoked the most intense reactions of both admiration and loathing in audiences.
Fight club was not a movie that ingratiated itself easily. Probably the most virtuoso and passionate nihilist work ever made, it went beyond nihilism,beyond a mere denunciation of values, into an orgiastic celebration of their absence. Though it was smug and self-satisfied in its contempt for society,and even for humanity itself,it never stopped to moralizing about it. It was a reactionary work(in that it posited only negative responses to a negative situation). Even at a pinch a fascist one(it appeared to advocate blind force as solution).
But those were superficial(political) readings of a film that was at heart purely anarchic,hence beyond political readings. Fight Club advocated chaos as the only response to a irredeemable (dis)order, and entropy as the inevitable answer to an evolutionary plan that had an all-too-plainly come off the rails.
Fight club was deep,but it brought its depths to the surface and put them out in the open; at times it seemed simple-minded,facile, even asinine. As a sociological study of a culture on the brink of collapse, it hardly offered much by way of revelatory insights. It was far too extremist to qualify as a serious inquiry into societys ills. It was a fantasy work,and as such, closer to a nihilists "its a wonderful life" than to a "battle of algiers".
As much as "the matrix" though in a totally different manner,Fight Club took audiences through the looking glass and striped them of the luxury of objectivity or distance, of discerning between right and wrong or, for that matter, real and unreal. It provided audiences with the schizophrenic experience from the inside out, adeptly-with low cunning and artistry- turning the act of moviegoing int a simulation of schizophrenia.
The ideas of Fight Club were so fresh, vital, and unique-so alive- that it was as if the ideas themselves created and directed at the means of their expression, as if the ideas had made the movie, as a vehicle to travel into the public psyche. Idea is KING in any artform,and even, at times, in the world of business too. An individual artist inspired by an idea-an idea which, out of laziness or conceit,he considers his own- is inspired above all to communicate the essence of that idea, and to this end sets out to create a vehicle for it. That essence-if the artist is successful- is what the audience leaves with.
Not only the movie(book,painting,etc) but the artist himself,then, is the means by which ideas-the alpha and omega of art, there in the beginning and there in the end-cross over into the world of form.Fight club embodied just this,just as 'the matrix' embodied it; they were works that transcended the means of production and attained unprecedented artistic ends.
Heres to you Fight Club.
For those that dont know much about it.
Fight Club was a love it or hate it enterprise. It went straight to the heart of the schizophrenic nature of society, not only exposing it but positively wallowing in it. It tool delight in trashing consumer culture and western values and spitting in the face of the collective zeitgeist.
It was only natural that it invoked the most intense reactions of both admiration and loathing in audiences.
Fight club was not a movie that ingratiated itself easily. Probably the most virtuoso and passionate nihilist work ever made, it went beyond nihilism,beyond a mere denunciation of values, into an orgiastic celebration of their absence. Though it was smug and self-satisfied in its contempt for society,and even for humanity itself,it never stopped to moralizing about it. It was a reactionary work(in that it posited only negative responses to a negative situation). Even at a pinch a fascist one(it appeared to advocate blind force as solution).
But those were superficial(political) readings of a film that was at heart purely anarchic,hence beyond political readings. Fight Club advocated chaos as the only response to a irredeemable (dis)order, and entropy as the inevitable answer to an evolutionary plan that had an all-too-plainly come off the rails.
Fight club was deep,but it brought its depths to the surface and put them out in the open; at times it seemed simple-minded,facile, even asinine. As a sociological study of a culture on the brink of collapse, it hardly offered much by way of revelatory insights. It was far too extremist to qualify as a serious inquiry into societys ills. It was a fantasy work,and as such, closer to a nihilists "its a wonderful life" than to a "battle of algiers".
As much as "the matrix" though in a totally different manner,Fight Club took audiences through the looking glass and striped them of the luxury of objectivity or distance, of discerning between right and wrong or, for that matter, real and unreal. It provided audiences with the schizophrenic experience from the inside out, adeptly-with low cunning and artistry- turning the act of moviegoing int a simulation of schizophrenia.
The ideas of Fight Club were so fresh, vital, and unique-so alive- that it was as if the ideas themselves created and directed at the means of their expression, as if the ideas had made the movie, as a vehicle to travel into the public psyche. Idea is KING in any artform,and even, at times, in the world of business too. An individual artist inspired by an idea-an idea which, out of laziness or conceit,he considers his own- is inspired above all to communicate the essence of that idea, and to this end sets out to create a vehicle for it. That essence-if the artist is successful- is what the audience leaves with.
Not only the movie(book,painting,etc) but the artist himself,then, is the means by which ideas-the alpha and omega of art, there in the beginning and there in the end-cross over into the world of form.Fight club embodied just this,just as 'the matrix' embodied it; they were works that transcended the means of production and attained unprecedented artistic ends.
