A Movie About Not Being A Mannequin Man As Told By A Mannequin

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Seriously. Fight Club is a movie about not being the kind of man who looks like a Calvin Klein model (among many other tropes spliced together in a fast, jarring, violent, philosophical clusterbomb of Nietzsche-esque cool). It’s a great point, especially because the advocate for this point is Brad Pitt.

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(this guy)

The movie centers around a guy who is bored with his life because he’s got too many IKEA furniture pieces and an office job, so he blows it up and starts making soap bombs with an imaginary best friend that he’s created (that he becomes when he’s asleep- the logistics of this are never fully explained). Starting out by fighting in the basement of a dirty bar, Fight Club eventually evolves into something much grander: a plot to sow discord and mayhem in the streets of New York (?) culminating into a master plan to “set the world to 0” by destroying five buildings that credit card companies own (because computers/external hard drives didn’t exist in 1999/there aren’t other buildings in the world with credit information).

He eventually decides its all too much and destroys his imaginary friend by shooting himself in the mouth (literally) and then watches the five skyscrapers collapse onto the city below (BUT Brad Pitt assured us there would be no casualties because the buildings were vacated prior to detonation) (??!!??) and spends the rest of his life with Helena Bonham Carter.

I worshiped this move as a 15/16 year old. In fact, I loved it so much that my friends and I took to our basements to beat each other senseless in this spirit of (genuinely felt at the time) “letting go of everything”, so that we too could be free.

This was my first time watching this movie in many years, and although I concede to the fact that there are some great, thoughtful scenes (particularly when Brad Pitt rips the clerk out of the gas station), philosophically its not as deep as I once thought it was. I realize the political relevance to Fight Club was Berkely, and I think I have the same sentiment about them both: Brad Pitt/AKA Edward Norton via exploding buildings and the Yiannopoulos riots via exploding buildings ultimately accomplished very, very little.

3 thoughts on “A Movie About Not Being A Mannequin Man As Told By A Mannequin”

  1. When I saw the film earlier in the semester, I also thought that it was relevant to rioting going on (especially at Berkeley). What made you think this, or was the connection more obvious than I thought?

  2. In my history of cunsumption class, we discussed this movie and it was interesting to see the connections made. With the credit card buildings crumbling, this represented the erasing of one’s debt record in the hopes of starting over. Overall a great movie.