Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Fight Club: a never-ending, downward spiral.

"This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom."

Fight Club, at this point, almost seems like existentialism in reverse. From an existentialist viewpoint, you are supposed to create meaning in your life. You are a product to what you have created for yourself. This quote is interesting because hope is something we generally associate as a positive thing. Something to work towards. A personality you work towards becoming better at. And in a way, creating meaning in your life is generally looked at as a positive thing. So to say losing hope gives you freedom puts a twist on creating meaning. Many of the other quotes (the one about Marla and her life philosophy about death) is similarly twisted. And maybe, existentialism give you the limitless boundary to push in either direction. But I think that creating meaning a positive journey and not a consistent spiral downward.

"It's Project Mayhem that's going to save the world"
It's not so much this initial quote that I highlighted but more so the entire idea of Project Mayhem itself. As it works, he who loses his fight in fight club, is the one who will have to carry out the project that week. The goal being "the complete right away destruction of civilization." As inately competitive creatures, we have the desire to win. Winning a fight in fight club will alleviate the having to participate in project mayhem, but then why fight in the first place? Im going to make the assumption that the fighters involved in the project believe in its capacity to do harm. So do they weaken themselves to participate?

This probably didn't make much sense.....my apologies.

1 comment:

  1. "Existentialism in reverse"--I like that Celine (and actually, this post makes a good deal of sense. I hope you can remember to bring up some of these insights in class).

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