Thursday, October 15, 2009
Ten Years of Project Mayhem
It's been ten years...am I still not supposed to talk about it?
Fight Club was released in US theaters on October 15th, 1999. I probably saw it two or three weeks later at the discount second-run Silver Cinemas near Poughkeepsie. I had no interest in the picture based on the advertising which seemed to focus on dudes fighting in a basement. Why would I want to watch a movie about that? Why would anyone?
Thankfully, my friend Joe called me at some point and told me I needed to see this movie. He assured me it wasn't about dudes fighting in a basement but wisely wouldn't tell me what it was actually about. Indeed, in that sense the advertising was actually brilliant in that in gave audiences no clue that Fight Club was actually a radical tale of anti-commercial ism and self-destruction. I've never managed to think of a way to successfully sell this story to people other than the way Joe did it: he told me I should see it and he was right.
I covered some of this in my now-five-year-old essay about meeting Chuck Palahniuk, but the impact Fight Club has had on my life is hard to underestimate. Superficially speaking, it became my favorite movie of all time (a title I think it still retains) and the book managed to draw me into reading as a hobby, something I was never really keen on. Not just Chuck Palahniuk's work either, but books in general and, surprisingly, non-fiction in particular. I still read novels but the ideas put forth in the movie motivated me to read more non-fiction because such books invariably force me to look at the world in a different light, questioning things I assumed were just or normal and making me consider alternative viewpoints.
Then again, I can't say I found myself espousing much of the same philosophy raised in Fight Club even if the movie seemed aimed directly at me. At the time it spoke to me because it was a movie about men who felt purposeless. The line that still sticks with me to this day more than any other is "I'm a thirty year old boy." I remember when I really was just a kid and I looked up at adults and I wondered when I would be a grown-up and know what to say and have a job and a family. When I saw Fight Club I was legally an adult at 22 but I was as lost as I ever had been as a kid. I lived alone in a crappy basement apartment, I had a dead-end job at the post office and my friends and I spent most of our weekends just drinking the time away. Some of them were in college at the time but I was years removed from my resounding academic failure and I had no plans to go back. I was single with absolutely no prospects, no confidence and no clue on how to even approach a woman. I was probably clinically depressed but too stubborn to get help. In every sense of the word, I was a loser.
I'm not going to say Fight Club turned things around for me (I credit my interest in Japan for that) but it definitely reminded me that I wasn't alone. It reminded me that my job, my apartment, my obesity and my loneliness did not define me as a person. I didn't need to feel lost because most people my age (or any age) were no more "complete" than I was. I was beating myself up for not having a girlfriend or a good job that people respected, but people who had those things weren't living problem-free lives, they just had different problems.
In Fight Club men get together and start doing horrible things to each other and society in general, but that wasn't the message I took away from the story. Rather than going out and get into fights, I just started going out for going out's sake. I began spending a lot more time visiting my college friends and meeting new people. I don't think it's a coincidence that less than a year after seeing Fight Club I enrolled in evening classes at The Japan Society in New York. The characters in the movie embraced self-destruction (and destruction in general, frankly) while I began a move towards self-improvement. They found purpose in fighting and retaking control of their lives, I just went for the latter without all the scarring the former would entail. The main character has an unfulfilling job and an unremarkable condo so he throws it all away in a quest to hit bottom - all so he can rebuild himself. I had much less to work with than he did but rather than destroy what I had, I skipped that part and just started fixing what little things I could. Maybe that's why it took me five years to finally quit that terrible job and get back to school.
I suppose there's no straight line to draw between Fight Club and anything it inspired me to do, see or read. All I can really say about it is that it's an excellent movie that I'll never forget. That doesn't make it sound very special but maybe it can't be special to everyone. At the very least, I promise you it's not about dudes fighting in a basement - although that totally happens.
Fight Club was released in US theaters on October 15th, 1999. I probably saw it two or three weeks later at the discount second-run Silver Cinemas near Poughkeepsie. I had no interest in the picture based on the advertising which seemed to focus on dudes fighting in a basement. Why would I want to watch a movie about that? Why would anyone?
Thankfully, my friend Joe called me at some point and told me I needed to see this movie. He assured me it wasn't about dudes fighting in a basement but wisely wouldn't tell me what it was actually about. Indeed, in that sense the advertising was actually brilliant in that in gave audiences no clue that Fight Club was actually a radical tale of anti-commercial ism and self-destruction. I've never managed to think of a way to successfully sell this story to people other than the way Joe did it: he told me I should see it and he was right.
I covered some of this in my now-five-year-old essay about meeting Chuck Palahniuk, but the impact Fight Club has had on my life is hard to underestimate. Superficially speaking, it became my favorite movie of all time (a title I think it still retains) and the book managed to draw me into reading as a hobby, something I was never really keen on. Not just Chuck Palahniuk's work either, but books in general and, surprisingly, non-fiction in particular. I still read novels but the ideas put forth in the movie motivated me to read more non-fiction because such books invariably force me to look at the world in a different light, questioning things I assumed were just or normal and making me consider alternative viewpoints.
Then again, I can't say I found myself espousing much of the same philosophy raised in Fight Club even if the movie seemed aimed directly at me. At the time it spoke to me because it was a movie about men who felt purposeless. The line that still sticks with me to this day more than any other is "I'm a thirty year old boy." I remember when I really was just a kid and I looked up at adults and I wondered when I would be a grown-up and know what to say and have a job and a family. When I saw Fight Club I was legally an adult at 22 but I was as lost as I ever had been as a kid. I lived alone in a crappy basement apartment, I had a dead-end job at the post office and my friends and I spent most of our weekends just drinking the time away. Some of them were in college at the time but I was years removed from my resounding academic failure and I had no plans to go back. I was single with absolutely no prospects, no confidence and no clue on how to even approach a woman. I was probably clinically depressed but too stubborn to get help. In every sense of the word, I was a loser.
I'm not going to say Fight Club turned things around for me (I credit my interest in Japan for that) but it definitely reminded me that I wasn't alone. It reminded me that my job, my apartment, my obesity and my loneliness did not define me as a person. I didn't need to feel lost because most people my age (or any age) were no more "complete" than I was. I was beating myself up for not having a girlfriend or a good job that people respected, but people who had those things weren't living problem-free lives, they just had different problems.
In Fight Club men get together and start doing horrible things to each other and society in general, but that wasn't the message I took away from the story. Rather than going out and get into fights, I just started going out for going out's sake. I began spending a lot more time visiting my college friends and meeting new people. I don't think it's a coincidence that less than a year after seeing Fight Club I enrolled in evening classes at The Japan Society in New York. The characters in the movie embraced self-destruction (and destruction in general, frankly) while I began a move towards self-improvement. They found purpose in fighting and retaking control of their lives, I just went for the latter without all the scarring the former would entail. The main character has an unfulfilling job and an unremarkable condo so he throws it all away in a quest to hit bottom - all so he can rebuild himself. I had much less to work with than he did but rather than destroy what I had, I skipped that part and just started fixing what little things I could. Maybe that's why it took me five years to finally quit that terrible job and get back to school.
I suppose there's no straight line to draw between Fight Club and anything it inspired me to do, see or read. All I can really say about it is that it's an excellent movie that I'll never forget. That doesn't make it sound very special but maybe it can't be special to everyone. At the very least, I promise you it's not about dudes fighting in a basement - although that totally happens.
Labels: anniversary, Fight Club, movies
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