Movies That Changed My Life 1: Fight Club (The Post-Modern Void)

Look at me. (Slap!) Look at me. You are not special. The universe does not know your name. God does not care about you. God will not save you. In time you will die and everyone you ever knew or rather who ever knew you will die. Nothing you do will be remembered. The footprints you leave won't fade in the sand because eventually there will be no sand. This is not an opinion. This is not some grim cynical outlook on life. This is the only truth that is objective.

You will die.

Eventually your consciousness will cease to exist

This little rock will go cold.

And you will be forgotten.

Stop fucking lying to yourself that you matter, that anything you do or think matters, that anything at all period matters because in the vastness of the universe it doesn't.

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I was a pretty angry teenager.  To this day you don't want to meet my id stripped of all my inhibitions because I am a pretty destructive human being.  Which is a fancy way of saying when I first watched Fight Club I fully bought into what Tyler Durden was selling and took the movie a little too literally. Durden is nothing more than a spirit animal guide to the world of absolute nihilism.

As insane as Tyler Durden is there he speaks some truth. And what makes Fight Club significant to me is the question of so what?

Tyler Durden is a anarchistic nihilist, the real deal. And the movie is about exploring what, ironically enough, the lack of meaning means.

The movie, the book, are about exposing how much of what we attach meaning to is artifice. And then the third act of the movie is about turning itself on its head, exposing the artifice of itself. Tyler himself is nothing more than the narrator's coping mechanism literally another one of the lies he tells himself he so he can sleep better.

And I think that's kind of a clue as to what the movie is trying to do. Take the audience to their existentialist bottom. Destroy all of the mental tools they have to construct the world around them to leave them with a new all encompassing question that it can't and shouldn't answer, ending with a bang.

Now what?