Fight Club

The movie Fight Club tested every cultural boundary between conformity and non-conformity and everything in between. It blurred the lines of social norms and drew us in with enticing non-conformist ways. I believe that Fight Club helped us believe that we need to break free from the social constraints that control our lives. Tyler Durden believed that in order to find yourself, you had to learn how to lose everything.

Project Mayhem was created for as its name implies, mayhem. The members of Project Mayhem set out to do the very things that society told them they could not do, or could not be. The people involved in the fight club and Project Mayhem were your normal, average, everyday men. They worked everywhere and controlled a little bit of everything. To try to stop them would shut down society as they knew it. The theme that was drilled into my head throughout this movie was that you have to stop letting others and material things control you. They wanted the government, “the man” to stop telling them what to wear, what to buy and really what they were and were not allowed to do. I believe that this is why Fight Club was started in the first place. They were told they can’t, so they did.

Although I think that this movie was based on extreme measures, I have to say that it made some very solid and valid points. I think that in society today, anyone that is seen as a non-conformist is ultimately tried to be “shut-down.” People don’t like non-conformists. People are not comfortable with things they don’t know or understand. Although I don’t agree with or condone a lot of their actions, the movie helped me understand the theories behind them.

The discussion board almost made me sympathize with the characters in the movie even more. Just talking with my classmates I almost felt like an outsider or non-conformist myself. I felt the pressure of conformity among my peers when expressing my own opinions. The whole point of the movie was to get out from under that societal control and pressure, obviously in an extremely unconventional way, but to break free none the less.

The Fight Club was a place for people that felt trapped in some aspect of their lives, to be open and free and do whatever they wanted. Tyler said that, “after fighting, everything else in your life got the volume turned down. You could deal with anything.” Fighting was their escape; their support group. Who is to say what is ok and not ok “therapy”? That was their point. When Tyler got beat up by the bar owner Lou, the age old phrase ran through my head: “Stand up for something, or you will fall for anything.” Tyler told the narrator that he was everything the narrator wanted to be, “but most importantly, he was free in all the ways the narrator was not”. I feel like the physical fighting in the movie was a symbol of fighting for some of your personal freedoms. Was it extreme and over the top? Of course! But ultimately did he make some great points about what it means to cross those cultural boundaries of conformity? Definitely!