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We seem to have been thrust into our own nightmarish version of a Fight Club:
- The opponent - the much-reviled CAP score
- The training regime - readings, essays, essays, readings...
- The nutritional supplement to raise our strength - caffeine
In the spirit of our personal fight for strength to pull us through this arduous period, we at Hooked re-introduce an old favorite - Fight Club.
In the words of Tyler Durden, "Our generation has had no Great Depression, no Great War. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives."
Fight Club is a depressing film about men reclaiming their masculinity through underground fight clubs. The unnamed narrator, Edward Norton, tired of his homogenized job attempts to seek refuge in support groups for terminal diseases he does not have. He deals with the pain of life in a capitalist society, and struggles to come to terms with his identity as a man as he is brought up in a "generation raised by women."
 As his world blazes past him, the insomniac meets Tyler (Brad Pitt): assertive, confident, charming, everything Norton wishes he is.
In an exhilarating rush of events, the two men set up an underground Fight Club for other men, run from one liposuction clinic to the other making soap out of fat, and soon have a horde of men worshipping them.
While their worship is unquestioningly staunch, we are presented with a bunch of gullible men whose naivety pushes them into a hole of mundane, senseless tasks with a scary robot-like overtone.
Through violence, these men buy into Tyler's anti-individuation philosophy where everyone originates from the same source and there is simply no such thing as a "beautiful or unique snowflake." Norton tries to convince the dupable men to remove themselves from their abiding selves.
The twist in the movie arrives when Norton springs out of his self-pitying trance, and the audience, together with him, realizes that Tyler is but a figment of his imagination. Tyler, dashing and cool, is stalking through his life, as Norton lives his life as an insomniac.
Death, unflinching violence, blood and gore give sanity and existence a new meaning as the audience witness the men struggling to come to terms with their identities in extreme ways. In fact, extreme is an understatement.
More than just about loss and self-denial, Fight Club deconstructs commonly-thrown around concepts like masculinity, and also questions our existence and our own individualized space on Earth.
Impactful and yet unsettling, the film is aptly named. HOOKED
"Warning: If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every
word you read of this useless fine print is another second off your
life. Don't you have other things to do? Is your life so empty that you
honestly can't think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you
so impressed with authority that you give respect and credence to all
that claim it? Do you read everything you're supposed to read? Do you
think every thing you're supposed to think? Buy what you're told to
want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex.
Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a
fight. Prove you're alive. If you don't claim your humanity you will
become a statistic. You have been warned." - Tyler Durden
Pictures courtesy of Google Images
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