Fight Club vs Lord of the Flies and Nature vs Nurture

[OubliO]

and i do have a woman in my life and i do have many hobbies!

so there

im in random mode

[Phaedrus]

@OubliO

and i do have a woman in my life and i do have many hobbies!

so there

im in random mode

Does she run screaming from the house now when you pop F/C into the DVD player for the billionth time?

[Rounder]

@OubliO

and i do have a woman in my life and i do have many hobbies!

so there

im in random mode

Is her name Marla ?? and do your hobbies include making soap ?

[curious_rina]

OMG, I feel normal now. I found a few websites where the authors have compared Fight Club with Lord Of the Flies. I thought I was the only one who saw the comparison…

What they don’t understand is that when society treats all manliness as immature or sexist, it gets more immaturity and sexism. The film Fight Club made that exact point.
Manliness is rooted in human nature. If you ignore it, it will grow like a weed — in the form of professional wrestling, hip-hop culture, or my first apartment in Washington. Gentlemen are the product of regulated and refined manliness. The Lord of the Flies was about a society with unregulated manliness.

(http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg082500.shtml)

But, to describe this film with so few words doesn’t give it justice. Indeed, even the trailer doesn’t show you its profound nature. It’s a sort of twisted amalgamation of Lord of the Flies and Taxi Driver and other stories whose mere mention would give away too much

(http://filmhead.com/reviews/fightclub.html)

Like a left hook breaking your nose with a crunch, making snot, blood and tears fly. Like a bastard cross of a Lord of the Flies for grown-ups, Office Space taken to its natural conclusion, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on acid, Iron John with real balls and Kafka with humour, this is what Pushing Tin couldn’t do. A demented, funny and brutal exploration of manhood, Fight Club posits that irony, clever postmodern references and style for the sake of style suck – all the while employing those very devices liberally and to great effect

(http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_10.14.99/film/onscreen.html)

Peace

[Floater]

Some comic relief here:
http://www.plif.andkon.com/archive/wc273.gif

[ReignOfUtopia]

Fellas, IU have to say that while fight club and lord of the flies are good movies, they are nothing more… if you really wanna see a good movie, go watch napolean dynamite.

[thirst4metal]

Phaedrus, I respect your opinion about Fight Club… however, I wonder what you do consider a good movie: what was Fight Club missing? Personally, I think Fight Club’s great social commentary alone made the film “purchase worthy.”

You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.

I guess the movie speaks to me as a godless/fearless heathen. We, humans, are as Tyler put it, “not special” nor are we “a beautiful and unique snowflake.”

For the agnostic and/or for the atheist in many it reminds us that we are all “the same decaying organic matter as everything else.”

For those that feel that the world is hopeless and is against you: “I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every Panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species. I wanted to open the dump valves on oil tankers and smother all the French beaches I’d never see. I wanted to breathe smoke.”

The day I go schizo I hope to do it like the fictional narrator of this movie.

[thirst4metal]

FUCKING HILARIOUS!!

Winter… you have out analyzed us all! You are a friggin genius!

@WinterOfDiscontent

You idiot!

Rule#1: You do not talk about fight club.

Rule#2: You do not talk about fight club.

[thirst4metal]

To a large degree I have to agree with the post below:

@OubliO

FIGHT CLUB IS THE NEO-BIBLE OF OUR GENERATION

I am one of those guys that got suckered into every bit that society’s bullshit sells (not saying that society is bullshit). Get an education, start your career, have mild success, get married, have more success, get greedy, have children, get divorced, have mid-life crisis,…get a wake-up call!

I think that I’m in that generation gap where I’m too old to be a part of Gen X and too young (and have too much self-respect) to be a hippy. I reject so much of the hippie bullshit (get haircuts!) yet am drawn to the idea of rebelling against the establishment.

Just as it was put in Fight Club: “The things you own end up owning you.”

I see the movie every 3-4 months. PHAEDRUS, you should watch this movie at least a couple more times to catch a lot of the cool stuff that you never notice the first time.

One more quote:

Well, I gotta tell you: I’d be very, very careful who you talk to about that, because the person who wrote that… is dangerous.
And this button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho might just snap, and then stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers. This might be someone you’ve known for years. Someone very, very close to you.

[Crooked_Mouth]

I don’t think that humans are inherently evil by nature. What I toook out of Fight Club is that they were protesting. Tyler durden says at one point, “we’re a generation of men raised by women… I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we’re looking for.”

The point he was trying to make is that masculinity is now deemed evil by society. The whole idea of metro-sexual has taken hold and honestly, Gen X and Y did grow up without fathers. The men in this movie had to overcompensate to reclaim the masculinity that was deprived of them.

Women cannot ever be a replacement for men and vice versa. The bottom line is simply this: If mother and father get divorced, the person who should retain custody is the one of the same gender. Men to men, women to women. Otherwise you end up with a bunch of men who let women walk all over them or a bunch of butch women who look more out of place in a dress than Oprah Winfrey in a Jenny Craig.

Of course there are inherent tendencies of the sexes within, but we must be taught to embrace them, else we become something we were never intended to be.

[TheAdlerian]

I see Fight Club and LOTF as being about two opposite ideas. LOTF sold the idea that humans aren’t worth much unless they are controlled by a society. The stupid and brutal will take over if not managed. If I recall correctly, it’s a Hobbesian kind of idea.

Fight Club had a more Nietzsche kind of feel too it. Man is a wild beast that when tamed starts to decay. The fighting was a metaphor for freedom of action and the support groups represented how inaction causes one to stew in one’s own juices. So, current society, which the main characters dismantled in the end, is the force that keeps men from being human.

Meanwhile, in the book the main character just kills himself, which is a totally different message. The book had a “you might as well just give up” kind of feel for me.

I also read Chuck P’s book Choke and that had a similar defeatist message.

In fact, everything that I have read by the author has this kind of theme. The funny thing about an author sending this message is that HE’S AN AUTHOR! That means that he spends a lot of time working and doing something that is totally ingrained into society and big business. Clearly, he wants people to like him and his work and yet what I have read is very nihilistic. I wonder what he is getting at.

As a side note, I don’t see the violence in the film as realistic. One punch in the nose can totally blind you and I don’t think that most people could last for even a few seconds in a bare knuckle fight and they certainly wouldn’t go back for more. So, the violence really didn’t impact me very much as I saw it as a device to get a message across.