preview

David Fincher 's Cult Classic Fight Club

Better Essays

David Fincher’s 1999 cult classic Fight Club often gets picked apart for it’s supposed depiction of toxic masculinity and contemporary manhood but what I want to focus on is the anti-consumer, anti-capital, and pro-elimination of social classes that is also displayed throughout the film. Not to say that the film does not represent white bourgeoisie hyper-masculinity but to look at the parts of the film that doesn’t feed into this train of thought. I want to expand the lens past Norton’s character, which I will call Jack for simplicity, and to Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden’s Project Mayhem and the underlining values that Durden preaches. I argue that Project Mayhem manages to unite the proletariat and form the beginnings of what appears to be a Marxian revolution. This conclusion may seem an odd one due to the white-collar, bourgeois job that Jack holds in the beginning of the movie. The bourgeoisie are the owners of capital by definition1 and considered to be the middle class workers of our society. However, Jack’s job allows for a depiction of how capitalism turns humans into commodities. Jack is a recall coordinator for a major car company. His job is to “apply the formula”2, as he tells one of his single serving friends on an airline flight. His formula determines whether or not the company should recall a vehicle due to a malfunction. The formula goes; “you take the number of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B),

Get Access