Fight Club: A generation of men raised by women

I’m going to have to rewatch this movie. I saw it a long time ago, and was a little bewildered by it, to be honest.

No disrespect intended, BetaC. You could substitute “young woman” and “raised by men” in the stated comment, i guess. But not being of your gender, i don’t know if that would make any sense. The statement was a little tounge in cheek and was meant to convey an absence of any role model that may present, at a critical period of development, an “explicit” or (nowadays) “subtle” right of passage that functions to provide direction and a sense of purpose to the budding young male mind.
Returning to my comment and now that you force me to think a little deeper, I would imagine that males raised by (healthy) females may be better off than the obverse, since the female is hardwired for nurturing (excuse the generalization).

So then, you think that what you “believe” in this immediate generation somehow defeats millions of years of evolutionary biology? I had hoped to avoid that branch of reasoning with the caveat “excuse the generalization”. Of course, there are nurturing men. I like to think that i am one. I also realize that i am the exception rather than the rule. And there are times when nurturing isn’t effective and i must be firm as my familial role dictates. My home-schooled child may say “i don’t want to do my homework”. His mother responds “if you want, you don’t have to do it now, but it has to be done because this is the path of education that we have chosen for you”. This nine year old is not quite capable of choosing his own curricula or if he could he would choose a multitude of inappropriate activities that would do little to insure his survival in this world. Let us say that this time the homework doesn’t get done. The mother says, “you know if you don’t do it there will be consequences!” There may be a timeout, which has worked in the past but no longer works because sitting alone in his room is now preferred to doing the work. Well, how about positive reinforcement. Do your homework and you can go swimming with your friends. To which the retort is “i don’t want to go swimming anyway!” You get the idea. Two days and the homework is not done. At this point, i get serious, and say…”unless you can give me a reason why you shouldn’t do it, get in your room right now and finish your homework!” He thinks and thinks, sometimes coming up with various rationales. If none of those are satisfactory, he reluctantly goes to his room and in twenty minutes has completed his work. I guess my point is that there is something in my demeanor (i am not a violent or even angry person) that motivates him to respect my wishes and the homework gets done.
Bottom line the (generic) mother says, “no matter what you have done, or not done in this case, i still love you.” I say “get in there and do it or i’ll kick your butt (implied, of course). I love my children and would never and have never resorted to any physical discipline.
Now Beta, you seem like an intelligent person and i know you’ll respond to this honestly. Did you write your own curricula, or did you have loving parents and grandparents that traditionally guided your development? If the former, please enlighten me on how this was accomplished. If the latter, then you were brought to this point by traditional methods. If you were raised by TV and disinterested parent(s) then maybe i should renew my cable subscription.

This womans interpretation of fight club slowly takes my mind from “powermongers” to how women do not get the social equality rights they were promised by a society that’s just not cutting it. And giving credit where credit is due, she did address many of the ovious intentions of perception of Chuck Palahnuik in her review.

A community of men living like slaves in a “free” country. All dies some time or another, what does it matter when? Does anyone else ever get the feeling like they would be better off in the times of the first human existince? Hunting and gathering, what we were made to do.

I watched Fight Club for the third time last night after a 3 year hiatus. In the time since my last viewing of FC i have studied Philosophy and Martial Arts so i was able to gain a clearer insight into the matter at hand.

From my perspective it seems that FC is a comment on how Materialism is damaging to our Spiritual well being. In the first section of the movie we see how Society trys to bandage over its problems through the avoidance of pain. The “false gods” of IKEA and Starbucks attempt to subvert the individual by offering a lifestyle, which if one invests in is detrimental to true inner happiness.

Inner happiness can only be found within ourselves (no…i’m not a Buddhist) through confronting the problems we face as opposed to avoiding them through Group Therapy and excessive, unnecessary retail purchases. Tyler Durden’s purpose is to force Jack to learn to deal with the pain and pressures of modern day society (Middle History / Generation X) by looking inside himself. In my opinion the actual fights which take place are a metaphor to help us understand the conflict in our own souls: that is what we need and what we “think” we need.

Obviously advertising has played a part in hypnotising society into feeling that their lives are incomplete without the inclusion of material goods. This point is made apparent throughout FC and the lack of Spirituality in today’s society is reflected in the mis en scene and bleak lighting which the Director has employed.

Fight Club utterly condemns Materialism and it is rare for this to opinion to be portrayed in American Cinema succesfully (American Beauty), a genre of Cinema which is typically used to glorify the ideals and values of the American Dream.

Tx

Phantasy

Without the pressure of having to be special, you have more *room* to be special, as long as your culture gives you room to be and makes space for thinking and improvements.

Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying. When you realize it really doesn’t matter what you do, that can be depressing at first. But if you continue it and realize this means you’re free to do anything, that’s when life gets interesting without the pressure of imagining you have specialness to achieve or live up to.

Power is only granted from those who already have it.

“We’ve all been raised by television to believe that we’d be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars – but we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed-off.”

There is no power to take for ourselves. I’m only given power if someone else decides that I should get it.

What i want to know is, how do we take our own power? Obviously, begging for it like we have been hasn’t worked so well for us. We do the formula, because that’s what we’re told will grant us power. But it doesn’t. We’re still slaves asking the master when we get to have a whip too.

Force is the only logical solution. You can’t ask the master to hand you the whip. You can’t negotiate with the master to hand you the whip. You must overtake the master by force and pry it from his hands.

While your words sound inspiring, I am still left wondering exactly what you are trying to say. you seem to laud over the point that fight club, through courage and machismo, reinvents the role of the average cog in society’s great machine. This I understand, but then what about feminism? your evidence is based on Freudian psychoanalysis and therefore weak (the regular occurrence of phallic imagery is deemed significant, as is the lack of such imagery), evident in your “cornflower blue” segment (a color chosen at random to represent the maddening minutiae of consumer society). This is echoed in his apartment scene, relentlessly listing the names and details of his ikea furniture. Furthermore, you contradict yourself blatantly in the 7th paragraph, where you deny standard gender roles, then use them in your argument.

Certainly a very stirring “speech”, but not very coherent.

I read it perfectly. You just contradicted yourself, twice. If you don’t believe in a dichotomy, you cannot argue that someone is using it, because, according to you, it doesn’t exist. Your position, I think, is that you do believe in traditional gender roles, as per the basis of your argument, but it seems more trendy and progressive to deny them.
And you misunderstood my point about Freud, that he was discredited is not the issue; the problem with using psychoanalysis on a film (or any artifact, for that matter), is that, akin to the observer effect, it tends to reveal more about the reviewer than about the text itself. While there might be some merit to your conclusions(though this is debatable), it is more likely that you found them because you were looking for them.