The thing about Fight Club...

Here's a pretty random post.  Now, I enjoy the movie Fight Club.  It's stylish, got a great soundtrack, good acting, good plot twists.  It is filled to the brim with Gen-X angst about the meaning of life, the meaning of being a man, and the meaning of IKEA furniture.

Tyler's arch enemy.

The movie posits two options; one where you are consumerist cog in a machine that is designed to just perpetuate more consumption, the other where you totally reject consumerism and become part of something larger.

And here comes my problem with the movie.

Actually, my problem isn't with the movie itself (well, I could go into how it is sort of odd that only men are allowed/need to fight and in the end are portrayed as easily led by the nose, but).  It's with how many people interpret the movie.  I know many friends who think Tyler Durden is right on.  That everything he says is right.  Now, I get what they're saying to some extent - consumerism and the mindless purchase of "stuff" is a serious problem, and people need to get value out of their lives beyond "stuff."

But what I don't hear from these friends is the fact that Tyler is setting up just another system by which people are doing what someone else says they should do - where they are just (really) mindless cogs in a machine.  He's just replacing one type of servitude for another - and the men who follow him are blind and more than a little gullible.  It seems to me that the movie (and its more evident in the book) is saying that Tyler is no better than the forces of consumerism that he's trying to replace.

So when people tell me how much they love the movie and how great the ideas that are presented in it are, I want to shake them and say - if you don't want to just be a consumer, then... don't!  Do your shopping at Goodwill! Ask your friends if you can borrow something you need!  You want blue glass plates with little bubbles proving they are handmade?  GO FRIGGIN LEARN HOW TO BLOW GLASS.  Make something with your hands.  Build something.  Learn to fix your car.  I never saw someone who knew how to fix their own car wondering if they were enough of a man (or woman).  Want to fight?  Go ahead.  But if you want to feel like you're doing something worthwhile... even if you know you're going to die someday, that you're not a special snowflake, that you're still the same decaying matter as everything else... make something. Figure things out for yourself.

Just don't stop doing what society tells you to to start doing what some jackass tells you to.