My husband popped in the old Fight Club DVD last night. In these post-9/11, economically tanked times, I’ve begun to miss when America’s biggest problem was our disillusionment with our excessive consumerism.
“Boohoohoo! I drink my coffee at Starbucks! I must be a cog in the machine!”
All of that angst—it just seems so absurd now.
Rima Chaddha Mycynek is a writer, reporter, editor, photographer, videographer, former talk show host, and all-around journalism nerd. She currently teaches multimedia journalism at Boston University. [
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This shouldn’t make me crack up as much as it does but… what are you going to do? Even so… amazing what a little economic down swing does to a society. Worse yet, in this age we can expect more downturns than we used to. Things just get out so fast now.
Blog it to the masses, honey!
“His name was Robert Paulson.”
Well said!
The narrator had a yin-yang table, labeled shirts, and nice stuff all around, and yet this made his life intolerable?? We should all be so lucky!
Great observation!
I think you’re right. Fight Club would not have the same impact today that it had back in the 1990s. However I think the themes are still important.
The narrator is a man who seeks chaos. His life is too generic. He wants to destroy something beautiful. Every generation’s disaffected youth feels this way.
Thanks for the input, everyone.
C.S.,
His struggle is very real, and it’s one that plenty of young people can relate to.
Indeed, I don’t mean to discount narrator’s disgust with this “existence in a box” lifestyle, so to speak.
It seems that every generation hits a point where they want to slash and burn everything that came before. It’s a rite of passage–we come into our own by rejecting that which came before.
These are the anxieties of privileged youth.
When the privilege ends and the struggle becomes a matter of survival, we cease to concern ourselves with all of the horrible things we (or the narrator) could do to the Mona Lisa.
Just as video killed the radio star, 9/11 killed the metrosexuals.
But is that in fact a bad thing (that metrosexuality is over)?
“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything. ”
Tyler Durden
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