The following only represents personal views, does not express any position, does not state right or wrong, only objective analysis. Do not politicize academic views.
(In order to better understand the core of "Fight Club", before formally analyzing the film, I will first use some theories and film screenshots to explain the film's superficial values)
"Only a true gentleman can be brave to be himself-Erich Fromm"
who am I? What is the human self? Does the human self exist? What is the meaning of my existence? What am I worshipping? Does what I believe makes sense? What do I exist for? What am I thinking? What do I live for? This is not only one of the most common propositions since "self" was introduced into psychology in 1890, it is also the biggest existence of young people in this fast-developing information age soaked in consumerism, utilitarianism, and hedonism. One of the ethical dilemmas.
Everyone is flaunting themselves, everyone is pursuing freedom, but is there self-existence? Is freedom really as good as it sounds?
Many people may think that I was who I was born, and I am a different kind of firework.
But are you really that unique? Do you really don't care what other people think? Are you really a completely independent and free person? Are you really living yourself? Living the true self? Is this just a kind of self-deception by you?
Your ego may never exist.
1. From the perspective of materialism, there is material before consciousness in the world. Material determines consciousness. Consciousness is the reflection of material (material first, consciousness second). The true absolute and objective "self" does not exist theoretically. It is that we don't really have the so-called selves. (The self here refers to one’s own unique values, worldview, and outlook on life. According to Freud’s perspective, there is no true innate "self" or "superego", both of which are acquired products) the origin of the world It is matter, and spirit is the projection and reflection of matter. It is impossible for people to produce an idea out of thin air, nor can they produce a character out of thin air. All character and self are also projections and reflections of the outside world.
Ego
After the individual is born, it is produced by the differentiation and development of the id in the real environment. If the needs from the id cannot be met immediately in reality, he must adapt to the limitations of reality and learn how to be in reality. Get the satisfaction of your needs. From the perspective of the principles governing human nature, what governs oneself is the principle of reality. In addition, the ego is between the id and the superego, and has the function of buffering and regulating the impulse of the id and the control of the superego. (The focus of the painting, "differentiated from the self in the real environment", that is, if there is no real environment, there is no "self".)
Key points: "produced from the differentiation and development of the id in the real environment", that is, if there is no real environment as the basis, the ego does not exist, that is, all your "personality" belongs to others, and your "hobby" belongs to others Yes, your "favors" belong to others, your "three views" belong to others, and one of your "bright ideas" is inspired by others. "Original" is a relative term for self-deception. In theory, you cannot Really original an idea.
There was once a child who was abandoned by his parents to grow up in a wolf den. Without any human social value and rules added, he finally succeeded in becoming a "werewolf." )
I only have 10% of my content, and 90% of it belongs to others————Wu Zhihong
2. Behavioral psychology perspective
The founder of behaviorist psychology-John Watson
It took only ten years for Watson to upset the psychology world. He used a series of anti-humanity and controversial experiments, such as beating babies, to prove that human fear is a product of the environment and is non-hereditary. Human behavior patterns and preferences are also non-hereditary. The product of the environment is non-hereditary.
You are not like your dad because of inheritance, but because you were brought up by your dad.
Personality has been shaped since infancy, and the difference in time of birth does lead to different personalities. But this has nothing to do with the constellations. What is related to it is the climate at the time of birth. The difference in climate directly affects the way the mother raises the baby-the length of time it is in contact with the baby's skin.
Studies have shown that skin contact can cause the baby's brain to secrete growth-promoting chemicals. In some countries, premature babies are attached to their mothers or fathers. This is good for the development of premature babies’ body temperature, sleep, hearing, and taste. Moreover, through such close contact, parents are more sensitive and more sensitive to the needs of their babies. Patience is more conducive to the establishment of related attachments between parents and babies.
The psychologist Bobby, the founder of Attachment Theory, found that the orphans who lost their parents in World War II had less physical and psychological development than normal children, and even some orphans grew up emotionally indifferent and could not establish healthy intimacy with others. This is because the orphanage can only provide food, but cannot give caress and emotional support to the orphans, so these orphans cannot establish a secure attachment to their caregivers.
Example: For example, children born in winter are more embraced by their parents because of the cold weather, and are paid more attention to-largely because the parents who gave birth to the children are often "self-centered" out of instinct. Of course, it can also be understood as a tendency to "almighty narcissism", that is, when your soup is hot, you think that other people's soup is also hot. If you feel cold, you will feel even in a warm bedroom. The child also felt cold. So with this kind of psychology, you will give your child more warmth, of course, too much care is not necessarily better. The consequence of this is that it will give him more restrictions, "love" and control this. Sometimes two nouns can be equated with certainty. The space for activities is restricted and attempts are blocked, so such infants and young children will passively reduce many opportunities for self-exploration and self-determination when they first encounter this world. (The self here is closer to Freud’s "self"), so that the imperceptible personality becomes calmer, quieter, or tends to hesitate and make choices when making choices; and so on for children born in summer, They tend to be more adventurous, more active, and so on.
(Some of the arguments above are taken from time psychology.)
Of course, this is an ideal situation. In view of the differences in the personal values of parents, social environment, policy guarantees, and the impact of major social events in the year of birth, single parents, orphans, and disharmony of parents’ marriages will also affect the personality of infants and young children. Formation, of course, still, your character comes from the collection of your birth environment.
As Freud said, "Character is a metaphor for childhood."
The core value of modern society is fairness and justice, but parents’ intellectual wealth, vision, and emotional quotient have huge differences, leading to excellent parents raising excellent children, ordinary parents and ordinary children, stupid parents and stupid children. The difference in parental quality also determines The difference in quality of offspring.
Obviously, it can be seen that in recent years, fewer and fewer talents have come out of the so-called poor students to study in the rural areas.
Give me a dozen healthy babies, I can train them to be any kind of characters---doctor, lawyer, artist, big businessman, even beggar or robber--John Watson
The formation of a person’s character obviously has his objective regularity.
To put it pessimistically, external factors inevitably determine what you become. I think if there is such a formula that puts you and me in, and adds the trajectories of you and others, this is the so-called "me".
To be pessimistic, it is true that people can only live as expected in this era, that is, to spend their entire lives, living others, not themselves.
But what a person with strong self-esteem you are, omnipotent narcissism makes you unable to accept such an objective fact, so how angry you are!
Almighty narcissism is the psychology that everyone has in the early stages of infancy , that is, the baby thinks that I am omnipotent, and when I think about it, the world that is completely integrated with me (actually my mother or other nurturing person) will follow me the willingness to operate.
This is Fromm's famous thesis that "in a sick society, mental patients are healthier", and the so-called "normal people" are just those who have given up on themselves and surrendered under the strangulation of social forces and ideology. Fromm's words broke through the satisfaction of modern people's emptiness, the dying self and the struggling soul, and exposed the deep pain and misfortune hidden under the surface of optimism. We claim that we are free, but we have given up the right to think freely, but only listen to the words of authority. There are many such "authorities": patriotism, national interests, moral public opinion, mental health, science, common sense... So false thoughts replaced true thoughts, and false self replaced the true self. Maybe we have the right to express our thoughts, but "the right to express our thoughts is meaningful only when we can have our own thoughts!"
———Excerpts from the Book Review of "Escape from Freedom"
(The above are all theoretically discussing that there is no objective self in the absolute sense. I think this is an important core for understanding the pessimistic, angry, negative, and desperate worldview of "Fight Club".)
(Below I will briefly explain the world view and outlook on life of "Fight Club")
Sperm and egg are combined, after ten months of wandering in the original pond.
First of all, you are born. Since self-awareness has not yet been produced, your genes are expressing your basic factory settings (part of the behavioral patterns are directly inherited from your parents, and are often negative personalities, such as paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc.), and thereafter You must first accept the influence of your family, accept your parents' "unique" (actually similar) nurturing to you,
If there is no accident, you enter the school, learn the knowledge and rule awareness in the textbook, and the teacher corrects the sometimes crooked "thought" by the teacher. Then you enter the university and you study a major that you think you like, the major you learned It also determines and limits your way of thinking
If nothing else, you will enter society later, learn about the spirit and laws of society, blend into it, and follow your own ideas and you will find a job. Maybe you will like this job, but you rarely really ask yourself whether you really like this job, because even if you really think you don’t like him, after all, there are cognitive biases, and you really can’t distinguish between them. Like, like the new and dislike the old, inappropriate, burnout and other emotions, the self-interested deviation in your thinking will still make your brain self-deceive and fabricate the integrity and personality that most make you feel reasonable and reasonable at the time. Independence and self-esteem reasons to continue this job, of course, you may also use some bright slogans such as: "I am going to pursue my true love!" This slogan is likely to change jobs. Even if you choose the wrong one, you will unconsciously believe that he is really correct. After all, the brain must ensure that your happiness is maximized! Truth and truth are not so important!
Then, without accident, you will work hard to earn money, follow the rules and laws of society, and maybe you will continue to work hard and become another "996". You take the material wealth from work in exchange for certain goods, clothes, shoes, cars, houses, watches, and all the things attached to you to label yourself to gain a sense of self-identity, social identity, etc., So gradually accumulate wealth, and repeatedly improve one's living standards (consumerism)
If nothing else, after a few failed romances, you finally found (committed) (associated) a so-called real-name goddess (child) (1 note below), you may get married without any accident, and then you Will buy a car that others make you like, buy a house that others make you think you want to buy, repay the loan, have a baby for herding sheep, and herding sheep is for saving money to have a baby, you long for a sweet and colorful life, but you have been living Chasing and running, being dragged and trampled by your peers, you can't breathe under the pressure of responsibility, and then you bring this curse to your child, and he starts another cycle of reincarnation.
Of course, it is certainly not surprising that most of us are just ants-like insignificant members of society, just the floating grass in the social tide, not the waver, nor the back wave. In the process of self-deception, those who worked hard and obsessively ended a short life, leaving the mortgage to future generations to continue to repay, holding on to the lies of "benefiting future generations", you evade death and helplessness, and deal with the most important issues in life. I leave it to the next generation to answer, and think that I have lived my "self" alive for a lifetime, passively accepting a variety of values, and I don't even realize how similar traces and processes and individuals my individual lives have gone through. The limitations and insignificance of life in the face of the times, and even less realize the so-called freedom and self-emptiness of oneself. Of course, for today's human beings, being able to live such a happy life is already very extravagant.
In the end you die, and as your body decays, your consciousness gradually disappears into the endless darkness.
You have turned into a dust of history.
(1):
When faced with the contingency of the world, Friedman, the 1976 Nobel Prize winner in economics, made a metaphor like this: "If there are two people who are the only and only one of each other, and they hit If they are destined to belong only to each other, then the probability of them meeting is 0%"
(So all the destiny in love is just a kind of self-deception. It is just a kind of self-interested and biased thinking formed by the human brain in order to preserve the integrity of the personality. You can actually treat countless people in the world. People have that fateful illusion, and similarly, he is also a kind of thinking guided by the state in order to prevent the emergence of the population crisis in the "Universe 25" mouse experiment of social psychologists, so that people in society generally yearn for love. slogan.)
An individual is like a drop of water in front of the times. A drop of water flows with a drop of water. Whether it evaporates or smashes into pieces, it always flows continuously until it converges into a majestic torrent. At this time, bystanders will say, how much this is. Majestic. Does anyone care how every drop of water feels?
no!
Therefore, since following the laws of society, it must mean self-apoptosis! If life has never been meaningless, if social rules are a farce! Then stand up and fight him! Break all the rules! Break all the rules! Even if it is absolutely depraved!
With such emotions and opinions, it is probably the basis for understanding the world view of Fight Club.
In fact, in a strict sense, what really belongs to us is the "self", that is, animality, so when we follow our own subjective wishes to "be ourselves" and do what we want to do, we are often exposed. They are all animal in nature, so a large number of young people are gradually degenerating themselves by flaunting "being themselves". In fact, they are basically following the animal desires at the most basic level. They dance, club, drink, and have fun. , Smoking is indeed a little messy, but pessimistically speaking, it seems to be the only way to be yourself literally.
The id: the id is the earliest and most primitive part of the personality, it is the repository of biological impulses and desires. The id is active in accordance with the "principle of pleasure only". It desperately seeks satisfaction and pleasure. This kind of happiness refers especially to sexual, physical and emotional happiness. The id is composed of the energy of various biological instincts and is completely at the level of unconsciousness. It is all the psychological deposits that are fixed in the body when a person is born. It is the irrational and unconscious vitality, drive, instinct, impulse, desire and other psychological abilities of people who are repressed and rejected for a while. .
Speaking of the id, by the way, two digressions. In real life, everything that is done well is consciously or unconsciously following the principle of material first and spiritual second, and all mistakes, in the final analysis , Are due to invert the relationship between the two. In other words, everything that is done well in reality suppresses one’s most subjective and deepest desires, and let reason and objective dominate. Take love as an example. In the process of pursuing the opposite sex, the more you suppress emotions. Experience and subjective thoughts make it easier to pursue each other, so love is indeed an anti-human process on a certain level.
Of course, there are many examples, such as the Franklin effect, the Juliet and Romeo effect, the exposure effect, the white bear effect, the frustration attraction, the southerly effect, the barrel effect and so on. So why is PUA so rampant, based on solid psychology, haha, corruption goes to corruption, and it also reflects love ().
To convey such negative anti-social values, it is not difficult to infer that "Fight Club" was once blocked when it first came out.
But are such negative and pessimistic and metaphysical and nihilistic values really just what this movie wants to express? I think the answer is no. If so, I believe this movie will not go from being blocked to being promoted to the altar.
Then it turns around, knocking on the head, waking up, or pulling back to the original question, how do people be themselves? Can you really live yourself? What is freedom? What is the meaning of life? David Fincher answers these questions to us through Jack and Taylor in the movie Fight Club
The first is of course the role of Jack, a white-collar worker of a major automobile company, a severely insomnia patient living in the "Microsoft galaxy" and "Starbucks planet". The long-term lack of insomnia has made him gradually lose the concept of time. Only by observation The color of the tie on the boss's clothes can tell the day of the week. Every day, like a walking dead, he does repetitive, boring, formulaic work. Facing life, he is numb and tired. Like most office workers, the joy and self of life can only be satisfied in constant consumption, so Jack will reflect the lost self in the purchase of various IKEA home furnishings. Any furniture that can express his personality and style, whether he needs it or not, he will buy it all home, even a round wooden table printed with yin and yang patterns, which is typical of consumerism.
The concept of consumerism is described in the book "Consumerism in World History"
Life goals are closely related to the acquisition of commodities. Even if these commodities are not needed for survival, it is not for the need to show off in the traditional sense. In consumerism, people are obsessed with the process of obtaining goods and use this as the basis of their own identity, and the socio-economic system also serves consumerism, such as designers who are responsible for enhancing the attractiveness of products, and overwhelming and ubiquitous advertising, etc. And the biggest brainwashing of consumerism to people lies in this. The process of obtaining commodities has become the basis of people's identity.
Jack is just such a consumerist. He exchanges work for money and uses money to buy goods. Under the advertising, more advanced products are born, so he makes money and buys more advanced products, and iterates the cycle continuously. That's all of Jack's life. Is he being himself? Jack believes that when you buy personalized products, you are also personalized, but in fact this is a false self-identification, because when we get personalization from the purchase of goods, we are essentially buying personalized, because when personalized When it becomes a commodity that can be purchased, it also means that everyone can obtain personalization by purchasing the commodity, but this is not true personalization, because his starting point is external, not internal.
Just like many people, they use tattoos, perms, luxury goods, fancy clothing to label themselves, or buy a pair of brand-new sneakers, or buy a beautiful skirt, to show off their personality and expand their appearance. , Is often a constantly collapsing inner, constantly differentiating oneself outwardly, distinguishing oneself, in order to highlight the existence of "self", its essence is the manifestation of the lack of self-identity, the more open the personality, the more vulnerable .
As for changing the relationship between external and self-identity, a simple example can be used to illustrate, where is the favorite place for women who experience a broken relationship? It’s a barber shop, maybe cut your hair short, maybe change to a new look, put your head up, walk on the street with your chest straight, a pair of me has walked out of this haze, the most beautiful posture of the old lady in the whole street, looks glamorous Beautiful, in fact, it is only an externalized behavior. Through the changes obtained through "consumption" and the personalization obtained by "purchasing", it can fill up the extreme lack of self-identity after a broken relationship. This personalization is the same as Jack's personalization. , Is a false personalization, a false self-identification, but Jack, like most people, does not know himself. In the context of the prevailing consumerism, he was portrayed as a consumer, and like most people, he still lived as a thousand people. Like most people, he was trapped in the trap of consumerism, trapped in the cycle of work and consumption, and became a spiritual prisoner. He could not feel his existence or the vitality of life.
Erich Fromm said in "Escape from Freedom": "Anyone must be related to society in the form of "attachment" or "dominance" or "influence", otherwise he is a lunatic"
In "What Zarathustra says", Nietzsche divides the freedom of man to the spirit into three stages, namely "camel", "lion" and "baby" respectively representing tame confrontation and rebirth. There is a ruler in their world, that is a golden dragon. Each of his scales is written with a defined value. After the soul is born, due to the initial weakness of the period, he must follow the will of the golden dragon and join the golden dragon. In the constructed world, the soul absorbs learning, accepts the rules and systems, and accepts the values of the Golden Dragon. Therefore, the soul is domesticated into a camel in this process. A camel working diligently, looking for the value given to him by the dragon, and the camel serves the golden dragon.
In such a materialistic environment, people are encouraged to pursue commodities to reflect their own value. Jack is in a state of "depending on" society, that is, he is trapped in this stage of camels.
According to Nietzsche's three realms of life
The first realm camel, tamed and received, endured humiliation, and passively obeyed the arrangements of others or fate;
The second realm lion turns passive into active. When Jinlong tells him "you should", he always responds, "I want", which represents confrontation and destruction. I take the initiative to fight for everything and take the responsibility of life; pursue Freedom, against the golden dragon.
Babies in the third state, this is a state of "I am", live in the present and enjoy everything now.
But if you don’t know it, you can only be a camel (according to Fromm’s "Escape from Freedom", this is not necessarily bad). Some people have been a camel all their lives. Of course, they have changed from a camel to a lion like a fish leaping. It is as difficult as the dragon gate, it must be struggling, it is self-struggling, it means self-subversion, it means constantly trying to jump out of the comfort zone, it means disobedience, it means loneliness, it inevitably requires full courage and courage.
Nietzsche said that spirit is something that restores vitality. Spirit is a luxury in today's society. However, if you only take care of the necessities and forget this luxury, you are no longer you, but just a pile of materials, creating a kind of estrangement between yourself and yourself, until it leads to a spiritual crisis that you cannot escape.
In the cycle of consuming and working, Jack could still be at ease, but one day, there is no reason and no defense.
The apartment exploded and all the "personalization" was gone
This loop is broken.
Jack needs to transform from camel to lion.
He needs freedom, he needs to find himself.
So Jack Camel met Taylor the Lion.
Taylor, a soap seller, a ruffian hero full of rebellion, cruelty and violence, he is Jack’s opposite, Jack’s upside down, he opposes materialism, opposes consumerism, he lives in a dilapidated, stubborn house. In the deserted and deserted house, dim lights, yellowed walls, shabby furniture, leaky roofs (when it rains, the power must be cut off to prevent tripping, and the first floor must be submerged), covered with cobwebs, and falling. A handful of furnishings with all the dust, empty, narrow, and gloomy. Only brown water can flow from the tap. The walls are not sheltered from the wind and tiles are not protected from the rain. He sleeps during the day and works at night. He works as a waiter in a high-end restaurant. He was peeing in the guest’s soup. He was a film projectionist in his later years, but he cut into adult film clips in the family film. He made soap (and used it as dynamite). He was in the hospital where the rich woman had liposuction He steals their fat from the trash can and sells them as soap. He drives away other people’s cars at will. He throws trash at will. He speaks freely, doesn’t care about materials, and is not restricted by social morality. With incomparably free spirit, Taylor uses his methods to fight against and mock this material-dominated consumer society.
He believes that everything in society is a lie and a joke. Human civilization is absurd and ridiculous. He believes that all human values (above) are given by others. To work hard, to succeed, and to be positive is one. In a farce, he believes that order itself does not exist. It is nothing more than a rule made by the weak who fear that they will become weak. He believes that justice is nothing but a good idea that is conducive to collective development selected in the process of human evolution. He is contrary to self and he publicizes , He stretched, he indulged.
After Jack’s apartment was destroyed, Jack opened Taylor’s phone and the two talked together while drinking in the bar. Then at the door of the bar, Taylor asked Jack to punch him hard. Jack did so, and the two fell into a fight. But in this painful sensation, he perceives life. After the end, he feels vigorous and fierce. Jack tells Taylor: "We will do this often in the future."
Since then, the behavior of the two gradually attracted more and more people, and the fighting club gradually grew. With their system and rules, the two get along more and more harmoniously. According to Fromm's social theory, Jack and Taylor will gradually change from being attached to society, to dominating others, or linking through influence. But the two are not the same person? Why does Jack change from a camel to a lion by this kind of "fight"? Why did the two personalities turn from gradual harmony (combination) to contradiction? I think behind this lies the values that David Fincher really wants to convey through Fight Club.
PS: Someone may have read this article without watching the movie. Jack and Ted are two different personalities separated by the same person, so the essence is derived from the same person. Not to mention that the following content will be a little messy.
Analyzing these two roles according to Fromm’s psychoanalytic personality structure theory, it is not difficult to infer that Jack (Ted) is a life-and-death personality in a non-invasive personality.
Fromm said: "God died in the nineteenth century, and people died in the twentieth century." A sick society produces sick people. The world of the twentieth century is a dead, lifeless world without vitality. People who have a tendency to love death.
Death and life love type: Death and life love type includes the personality tendency to love death (nephew) and the personality tendency to love life. There are very few people who are pure love to death or love life. Generally, the two are mixed in the individual. However, one of them has the advantage. People with a tendency to love death love death more than life, and even stifle their love life tendency. They yearn for death, thinking that it is better to be alive than to die. They are more interested in the pleasure and comfort after death than all the enjoyment in the real world. Not only do they have more affection for the inorganic world than for life, but they also treat their own kind as inanimate things. They pay too much attention to the law and the use of force. They show the courage to die and often use death as a bet. ———— Cheng Liangdao "A Brief Comment on Fromm's Personality Theory", Journal of Hubei Normal University, 1991, No. 3
Key points: "There are very few people who are purely in love with death or love for life. Generally, the two are mixed in the individual, but one of them is dominant. " This sentence is not combined with some of the following video screenshots. It is hard to see that in the early days of the film, it was actually the same person who laid the groundwork for Jack and Ted. Combining this sentence to understand the integration of Jack and Ted from the region to the contradiction in the latter part of the film is easy to understand. " To the inorganic world is more sentimental than to life " " and often bet on death. " Combined with the following screenshots, it can be seen that Jack not only has a strong tendency to love death, but at the same time love life and death are contradictory.
In fact, the popular general, the tendency to love death is a person’s inner desire to destroy. It is a tendency to disrupt order and disorder. It is very common in everyone. Take children as an example. Children’s cognitive level is low, and they usually do. Do things according to your first feeling. For example, a bear kid will kick over the piled blocks and kick over the sand castle. When he sees other children running, he can’t help but stumble and trample on the ants for no reason. Feeling comfortable, throwing the goldfish in the fish tank on the table and watching him shake and struggle is novel, or some unprovoked rebellious and self-harm behavior extended to teenagers can actually be attributed to this (of course, it cannot be attributed to this aspect alone) For teenagers, the reason is relatively more complicated), you can recall for yourself, when you used to sit in a quiet classroom or in a regular office, did you ever flash in your mind and wanted to stand up and shout to break this This kind of impulse to order, and in fact, there is no specific reason, this is also one of the manifestations of the tendency to love death, a desire to break the order, then how is Jack's tendency to love death reflected in the film.
Jack has a strong tendency to destroy the rules and the beauty.
Tyler gambled with death, closed his eyes on the road and speeded up, allowing the car to crash into any place.
At this time, the love life personality in Jack's heart is trying to suppress this love death tendency.
Take chemicals to self-mutilate.
A view of life that downplays life and death
Think that pain is the proof of experiencing one's own survival, and enjoy pain.
Do not avoid any conflicts, have an obsession with chaos, and like the feeling of breaking the order.
In a sense, the key to Taylor and Jack's ability to win people's hearts with the "fight club" is actually that they inspire this kind of love for death (lower-level desire for destruction) in people's hearts.
Most of the inclination towards death in the film was originally set out by Ted, and then gradually led by Jack. When the latter two gradually merged, they began to contradict each other.
According to the analogy of Nietzsche’s three realms of freedom, Jack the Camel met a lion, and Jack gradually evolved from a camel to a lion. However, this lion gradually went to extremes. This lion even wanted to fight against the golden dragon (against the world) all.)
Then things will be reversed, and all excessive so-called self-assertions will inevitably lead to a self-contradictory closed loop, which will inevitably mean that he will confront a part of himself on a certain level.
There are two main aspects to this.
1. Everyone yearns for freedom, but deep down in their hearts they desire a safe zone. In the process of pursuing freedom, there will be a tendency to escape freedom. Therefore, Taylor's extreme pursuit of freedom will inevitably lead to a kind of inner self. contradiction.
We find that the ambiguity of freedom that we discussed before also exists in this period. Individuals are free from the shackles of economic and political ties. He played an active and independent role in the new system and gained freedom in a positive sense. But at the same time he got rid of the ties that had given him a sense of security and belonging. Life is no longer a closed world centered on people; the world has become endless and threatening at the same time. As a person loses his fixed position in a closed society, he cannot find the meaning of life. The result is that he has doubts about himself and his goals in life. He is threatened by powerful superhuman forces, capital and markets. Everyone has become a potential competitor, and his relationship with his compatriots has become hostile and alienated; he is free—that is, he is isolated and helpless, threatened by all sides. Without the wealth and power of the Renaissance capitalists, and losing his sense of oneness with man and the universe, he was overwhelmed by his personal sense of insignificance and helplessness. Heaven is lost forever, and the individual long stalks stand facing the world, as if a stranger is in a boundless and dangerous world. ————"Escape from Freedom"
This is one of the reasons why Taylor’s extreme pursuit of freedom can be self-contradictory. In fact, it includes Taylor's ability to form an army of fight clubs. It is precisely this tendency of people to pursue freedom but escape freedom.
Don’t the members of the fight club join the group to break the rules and pursue freedom? But why is everyone becoming so submissive again? The essence is still an ambivalence to escape freedom. When they escaped from one kind of spiritual slavery, they unknowingly entered into another kind of slavery. They broke away from the slavery of the consumerist society and became attached to another kind of slavery. In a group, they never changed from a camel to a lion from the bottom of their hearts.
2. As mentioned above, all our individual thoughts and thoughts cannot be original in an absolute sense, but are a collection of environments. That means that Taylor’s idea of “against society and pursue freedom” is also inspired by the society he lives in. That is, if Taylor wants to fight against the entire world order and society, it also means that he wants to fight against himself. It’s very difficult for Taylor to be a scale on the Golden Dragon, but he wants to fight the entire Golden Dragon. It also means that he has to deny a part of himself. Therefore, Taylor's gradual extremeness will inevitably lead to self-contradiction, and a certain part of his heart will also realize this contradiction and struggle with itself.
Let us take feminism as an example: any woman who is too extreme to oppose men and women, or even towards a kind of vulgar feminism-gender nihilism, is in the final analysis self-contradictory, and she is bound to fail. Take clothing and aesthetics as an example. Natural selection and gene expression make women themselves tend to grow into a sexually attractive appearance to men, solidify puberty girls, develop secondary sexual characteristics, develop breasts and buttocks, This kind of body change is inherently compatible with male aesthetics from a biological point of view. Males have more developed muscles and a lower voice, which is of course the same for women. It has evolved to cater to female aesthetics. Moreover, people are social animals. Wear clothes and laugh. The deepest starting point of these behaviors is to show to the other person. Non-social animals have no concept of expression. The starting point for you to have a smile is to convey from the perspective of biogenetics. You are very happy about this symbol, and the same aesthetic trend of women’s clothing is of course inevitably deeply influenced by men’s preferences, so if you want to oppose men and women, or the vulgar gender nihility, it is self-contradictory. Stupidly, when you deny the existence of men, you also deny most of your own aesthetics, preferences, and gender characteristics. Of course, this is the same for men.
Taking the example of feminism above and returning to Taylor, it is not difficult to understand that Taylor's pursuit of extreme pursuit of freedom and self is self-contradictory, so Jack and Taylor clashed head-on.
At the climax at the end of the film, Jack finally woke up and realized that Taylor was a personality he split up. Taylor installed explosives in several buildings to try to destroy the material society of the entire economic system to embrace primitive freedom. Jack immediately went to Mara and Mara. Okay, and to keep her safe, while he tried to break Tyler to end the series of farce.
In order to defeat Taylor, Jack came to the third stage of spiritual evolution. In order to evolve from a lion to a baby, Jack had to strangle the extreme lion of Taylor. Jack shot his own throat and killed Jack’s personality. A lion evolved into a baby. He was free and reborn. Jack held Mara in his arms and looked at a strange and beautiful explosion with Mara through the tall buildings. The romantic ending of the movie.
If the infancy of a person’s birth is also added to Nietzsche’s three realms of freedom, the coherent view is that baby-camel-lion-baby we will find that our spiritual freedom is a journey from baby to baby The journey. The baby in the last of these three stages. Infant represents new birth and forgetting, and represents the shackles of forgetting the past and hurting and starting again. Reassessing all values, Jack strangled Taylor's personality, completed the unity of personality, and evolved into a baby. The babies here are not physical babies, nor are they the mentally unsound adult giant babies in Wu Zhihong’s mouth, but our perception of the world is in a new stage of babies. When we were babies, we came here for the first time. The world, everything in this world is new to us, we will be excited about a pool of water, we will be happy all day because of the fragrance of flowers and plants, we learn to absorb the knowledge of this world, and join this world, and experience What Nietzsche said is a baby of spiritual evolution, from camel to lion to baby. We were tamed as a camel along the way. We were told what value is and what should be done until we began to question, reflect, and become confrontation and destruction. The lion, finally we got rid of the original values and rules and returned to the baby. We re-perceive the world, with the original curiosity and freshness in the eyes of children, and we can find different beauty and brilliance in our lives every day, but unlike the initial babyhood, we are no longer as weak and small, and can only be passive Accepting values and rules, and the baby Nietzsche said has the ability to be independent and active, he no longer blindly pursues the value defined by the outside world, he observes the world with his own eyes and thinking, he lives in the present , Enjoy every moment of the moment, even the explosive building.
In order to evolve into a baby, Jack in the movie has accomplished two things.
1. Kill Jack
2. And embrace Mara and accept Mara's love.
In fact, it is not difficult to see that Jack's view of love has undergone changes and transformations before and after.
Jack began to treat love with avoidance, eagerness and avoidance, which stems from his fear of complete and stable relationships and his impulse to impulse to destroy order and rules.
But in the end he overcame this difficulty, he hugged Mara and killed Jack.
Finally, when we return to reality from the movie, how exactly do we evolve into the babies in Nietzsche's mouth?
David Fincher passed the end at the end, which actually tells us how to pursue true freedom and self in a positive sense.
1. Jack realized that Taylor was a personality split from him, and killed Taylor, and killed Taylor by shooting himself instead of outside.
This behavior itself is actually a kind of self-knowledge.
That is, the first way out to freedom in a positive sense-self-awareness and recognition of one's own limitations.
The rules and order of society give us restraint, but in fact, he also gives us shelter at the same time. Maybe many people are like Jack, indulging in choppy hands. In the social tide, they can't feel the value and meaning of themselves. Maybe many people are troubled by the problems of the original family. In fact, there is no need to be pessimistic. Although Jack has lost his ambition and lost his life, he has also improved his living conditions. Although social convergence has brought a thousand people, it is precisely because of the thousand people that the value of individual consciousness awakening can be highlighted. The baby in Nietzsche’s mouth, understanding, forgetting, and creation, when we understand our formation, when we begin to face ourselves, begin to examine ourselves, begin to know ourselves, begin to understand the composition of our personality, when we explain ourselves, when we begin Listen to the inner voice, all pessimism and tragedy can be reversed.
We must clearly accept our own limitations. People can't really live themselves objectively and absolutely, only subjectively. However, people's subjective feelings are sometimes more precious than objective facts. Some people are camels all their lives. But it does not mean that they live unhappy and happy all their lives.
You can accept sobriety, you can also accept reason, and freedom, but you also clearly recognize your own limitations. Human thinking itself is cognitively biased.
Cognitive bias is a phenomenon in which people often distort their perception results due to their own or situational reasons when they perceive themselves, others or the external environment .
Thinking has a subjective tendency, so unless you abandon animality, you can't be objective in the true sense. For example, self-interested bias, the performance of many levels of consciousness can be completely opposite to the subconscious, and even if you are aware of the bias itself, when facing yourself, use the bias to analyze the bias. For knowing yourself, people are always in a closed loop. , This is human finiteness.
In the preface of "The Genealogy of Morality", Nietzsche also made a big fuss about "knowing yourself". He said: "We inevitably remain unfamiliar with ourselves. We don’t understand ourselves. We don’t know ourselves. Our eternal judgment is:'The furthest away from everyone is himself.' ──For ourselves, we Not a "knower"..."
Accepting this finiteness and limitation, but not being able to reach it, and yearning for it is the first thing that leads to the spiritual freedom of infants.
Man does not have his true self, but he can be himself, avoid the dark side of himself, and move towards the glorious side of human nature. This is to be himself.
————Luo Xiang
It's also like Hu Ge's famous saying: "I'm afraid that the truth is infinite, and there is almost an inch of joy near an inch."
2. In the film, Jack recognizes his fault and takes the initiative to restore Mara again to find love.
It is also the second way to the spiritual freedom of the infant stage that David Fincher wants to convey. ----love
Fromm said: "Man is the only animal that has not yet been completed"
But at the same time he gave a way to perfect his personality.
Love is the only way to achieve unity between people, and it is also the inevitable way for human beings to get rid of interpersonal loneliness. Everyone as an independent individual seeks another independent individual in the vast sea of people to achieve unity and get rid of loneliness. This is love.
————Erich Fromm "The Art of Love"
Since human beings are contradictory creatures who yearn for freedom and want to escape freedom, how to restrain this kind of restraint on freedom and get rid of? I want to quote Hegel to explain the way out.
The so-called love is to realize the unity between me and another person. The first link of love is that I do not want to be an independent, lonely individual.
————Hegel
Know your own limitations, accept yourself, know yourself, reconcile with yourself, understand, you forget, to bravely pursue love, to take the hand of your loved one, to live in the present, I think this is the great The values that Wei Finch really wants to express in "Fight Club" under the cynical values.
As for whether love is really the antidote to nothingness and doubt, I may not know. In the nineteen years of life experience, the fruit of love has not been tasted yet, maybe time can give the answer.
The above is my Fight Club film review. Part of the copy about Nietzsche’s Three Realms of Freedom is extracted from the main “White Continuous Flow” of station b. I have obtained my consent. If there are academic errors, please correct me. Thank you for reading.
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