Fight Club - The Changeover
by Justin Thurston
“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile. Our culture has made us all the same… We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing” (thurstjm, 2009)
"Tyler says the things you own, end up owning you. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Fight Club represents that kind of freedom." Fight Club Analisys (Freeonlineresearchpapers, 2012)The resurrection story of Fight Club indicates that the identity is something which can be changed as many times as something happens in ones life. It suggests that there is no such as individuality.
Is it possible to give up one`s identity, acting similar with someone else, preferably with a leader of a community, then the community identifies that person with the leader? Can someone`s identity be determined by an other person? e.g. worshipping Tyler Duran?
Fight Club is a small group of people who try to achieve to be the same with their master, I think. Nowdays every community leader is coming with strong personal features and ideas which are unwanted by most of the people. But we have got a leader without personality and this is the media, which dictates the trends in everything. A new culture for humanity. A new leader who is not personalized, as fluid as our identity. Step by step manipulating people in term of "education", to which Kellner (1995) mentions that media is already teaching us how to be a man, a woman, what to wear, how to consume etc.
People threw out their cultural tradition, we often hear people saying, that their original language is a useless language. This was a process to get in this stage where we are now. The national identity is not regarded as a value. People think this old tradition gives us a limited mode of thinking (Gauntlett, 2011) which is somehow true if we don`t look deep enough in our history. If we just look back to the tradition and beliefs of our grandparents, that might not be enough to appreciate one`s traditional values. But if we look back in the history we can find out a complete guidance how to live, what to wear, how to dance, what to read and the most important, how to live in harmony with Nature, what kind of house to build, how to grow your own vegetables etc.
Why di we exchange all this with the media, allowing such an invention to flood us with all sorts of well selected and global interest-oriented environment-polluting rubbish?
On the other hand we have a big freedom, we don`t want to be told what kind of persons we are but with this fluid identity we can feel vulnerable and defenseless to follow the mass of people who has no idea what to do.
Identity must be something original, unique, which is not a copy, which is just me. If we look at drawing, everyone has their own style, as many lines we see they are all differently drawn. Also we have all different faces. All human faces but having different feature. Handwriting, signature are all different. Our voice is different as well. Through these qualities we can get closer to answer a question: who am I?
Identity is uniqueness.
Thurstim, (2009) Fight Club and the Illusion of the Self Available at: http://thurstjm.hubpages.com/hub/Fight-Club-and-the-Illusion-of-the-Self
(Accessed: 21 April 2012)
Freeonlineresearchpapers, 2012 Fight Club Analisys Available at: http://www.freeonlineresearchpapers.com/analysis-of-fight-club (accessed at: 21 April 2012)
GauntleY, D. (2011) Media, Gender, Iden6ty extract. [Online] Available at
http://www.theoryhead.com/gender/extract.htm (accessed 21 April 2012)
Kellner, D. (1995) ‘Cultural Studies, Mul=culturalism and Media Culture’
in Gender, race and class in media. Thousand Oaks; London; New Delhi:
Sage.
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/SAGEcs.htm (accessed: 21 April 2012)
