Palahniuk probably belongs to the kind of "intellectual person" who is energetic, curious, and knowledgeable but not deep. He is good at getting inspiration from the information and knowledge he has and using it to serve his own story. The inspiration for "Fight Club" should come from "The One-Dimensional Man" by Herbert Marcuse, a leftist scholar of the Frankfurt School. The general point of view is that capitalism is another form of totalitarianism, which enslaves people through consumerism. Society continuously produces materials far beyond what people need to live, and then stimulates consumption through commodity advertising and other means, while society provides There are enough ways for people to satisfy their desires, so everyone is overworked, and then buys goods they don't actually need, falling into an infinite loop of "material desire - satisfaction - material desire", and finally in the material society It completely loses its original personality and pursuit, and assimilates into consumer animals. They use consumption power to measure their personal value. Capitalism also achieves the same goal as totalitarianism: enslaving people's thoughts and canceling people's individuality. , and continue to consolidate the existing social structure.
"The One-Dimensional Man" is an influential sociological work in the United States. When we understand these backgrounds, we will suddenly be enlightened when we face "Fight Club": for example, why is Jack in the title of the film apathetic and confused, Why he says he got his orgasm from reading mall catalogs; like why he hates his job, he's a traffic accident investigator, if he told the truth every time in his investigative report, it would hit the auto industry , to create resistance to the consumption behavior of the society (of course the institution he works for does not allow him to do this); for example, the "fight club" he initiated from various "sympathetic meetings for terminally ill patients", why did he use physical pain to Wake up members, where did those slogans come from, what was the value logic of their anti-social actions, and what was the last revolution aimed at...
Perhaps a few years from now, the film will become a cultural icon, just as the mask from V for Vendetta is now a staple of protests around the world. "V for Vendetta" and "Fight Club" appear to be anti-communist and anti-capitalist on the surface, one right and one left, tit-for-tat, but in essence the connotations are the same, both are romanticized interpretations of resistance to totalitarianism. And we were born in this country at this time, unfortunately, to experience both kinds of oppression.
"Fight Club" is now ranked in the TOP10 on IMDB. This is a very impressive result. IMDB's scoring system is based on mass voting. In other words, "Fight Club" is the top ten films of all time in the minds of audiences (mainly American audiences). Although I liked this movie before, it must not deserve such a high evaluation. I think the reason for this is that Marcuse's point of view hits the real experience of quite a few people in developed countries in Europe and America. Even for those people whose living standards have not yet reached "excess consumption", they will substitute the experience of social repression in other aspects of their personality into the repressed form of personality enslaved by consumerism in "Fight Club", and then pass Psychological empathy obtains the catharsis and release of repressed emotions from the highly contagious violent revolutionary plot in the film.
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