This past weekend I watched "Fight Club" for the first time since it came out. When I first saw it, it bothered the shit out of me--almost as much as "Attack of the Clones." If I had a blog at the time, I would have written pages about those movies. Stupid to get so worked up but that’s what I do. I doubt if I’ll go see "Revenge of the Sith."
Part of the reason I got so annoyed with "Fight Club" was jealousy. I had just finished writing a novel about a revolutionary cult--it’s the reason I read a lot about Scientology (see last post) as well as other cults. Cults in our Midst is an interesting read. It’s an expose on cults which also reads like a manual on how to run a cult and brainwash people. Part of the problem with that novel is that it was too much a reflection of the non-fiction I had been reading. So…when I saw the revolutionary cult in "Fight Club" I got jealous and mad.
This was partly because the movie seemed like a Hitler Youth propaganda film, cloaked in productive ideas like anti-materialism. That seemed kind of dangerous to me--the hyper masculinity. I still don’t know what people mean when they say they "love" the movie. Brad Pitt’s character, the blonde alternative Uber-Mensch, is a nightmare. Free spirited, maybe, but nothing to aspire to. Maybe people aspire to that kind of anarchy, the ability to do whatever you want to do. It’s Nihilism without the philosophy: dangerous. I get the sense that people want to be in the fascistic militant group. I’ve never read the novel but I imagine it’s saying that this is what we’ve been driven to, not this is where we should go. The movie seems to celebrate violence.
The movie didn’t bother me nearly as much as it once did. Actually, I kind of liked it. It was nice to see a big Hollywood movie which had some relation to human conflict. I love science fiction movies, but CGI movies like "Lord of the Rings," "Harry Potter," "Gladiator" and whatever else are kind of dead and impersonal. It’s weird that "Fight Club," a movie that I hated, could make 90s movies seem like a renaissance.
Also, "Fight Club" has a surprise ending way before "The Sixth Sense" but "The Sixth Sense" gets all the credit for it. If you’ve seen the movie, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, this post isn’t very interesting.
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2 comments:
I know that "Fight Club" has CGI stuff but it's not the heart of the movie. Most of the movie takes place in that house or in the basement where they fight. I don't hate CGI movies across the board.
Brad Pitt was really good in that movie along with a lot of other movies back then. Seems like when he married Jennifer Aniston, he became a celebrity instead of an actor.
You might be right about "Fight Club." I like David Fincher too. I really liked "Seven." "The Game" was amusing.
See, I’m full of shit. I’m a pop culture hound like anyone. I have a mixture of fascination and revulsion with Hollywood. I say I don’t like CGI movies but I’ve seen the Matrix movies, the Harry Potter movies, both Spiderman movies, 2 LOTR movies, the Jurassic Park movies, I could go on…Part of this is because my mom’s a member of the Academy--she votes on the Oscars--so at the end of the year she receives VHS and DVDs of all the movies that have come out that year. Pretty amazing, and I see a lot of movies that I never would have seen otherwise. There’s an irony in there but I won’t bother.
I’ve been entertained by most of those movies. It’s hard to not be entertained by dinosaurs. Still, I think there’s something wrong with them. It’s not all right for grown men and women to be reading comic books, but it’s all right to go see Spiderman or the Hulk. It’s the same thing. I’m a snob, even though I sometimes drown myself in bad movies and bad TV.
I should have made a post out of this comment.
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