Foolsgo1d said:
Why would a black guy from the streets have any recognition for a white mans struggles and vice versa? Segregation has worked for decades and will continue to do so for decades to come.
The rich cannot have empathy with the poor or middle class and they them. You could do the same argument for tax bands. Do the lower classes want more or less taxes on those above them?
Does a black man from some hood in the US have anything in common with a white man from suburbia or a low income area? They don't and never will because the machine has put them in two camps separated by high walls.
A quote from the ever-increasingly-predictive-and-relevant film
Bulworth has application: "Black people and white people have more in common than they do with rich people."
That aside, onward, and continuing to break Tyler's rule...
Coincidentally, there was another movie which addressed the same subject as
Fight Club. Same year, in fact. It even beat out
Fight Club for an Academy Award (in sound editing, the award given to all films that rich liberals would prefer buried). Can you guess what it was?
The only difference between these two movies is that one of them was marketed as an action movie and therefore in the fantasy genre, and one of them was not.
The Neo of both films has two lives. In one life they are both white guys doing essentially meaningless jobs and pretending to live in the real world, and in the other life they are subversives, devoted to bringing down system/s from within. Neither film allows for two identities. Remember what is the ultimate fate of Tyler Durden in
Fight Club. As Agent Smith says, commenting really on both films: "One of these lives has a future; the other does not."
I say it's basically the same movie in each because both are addressing the ennui of middle class Western men. They both are touching on the fact there is a system all around you that does not require your input in any meaningful way. They also (or rather
as a result) touch, in a fundamental way, on the narcissism that is endemic to the West and which comes about because of the lack of healthy coming-of-age rituals. Those of you who read a lot of Last Psychiatrist will probably know where I am going with this, so rather than bore you all with another restatement of the topic, I'll leave one crumb at the trailhead for you to contemplate. How far you go down the road from there is up to you.
When you glance over the Shittypedia entry for
Fight Club you're given reasons a voiceover was used:
Uhls started working on an early draft of the adapted screenplay, which excluded a voice-over because the industry perceived at the time that the technique was "hackneyed and trite". When Fincher joined the film, he thought that the film should have a voice-over, believing that the film's humor came from the Narrator's voice.[29] The director described the film without a voice-over as seemingly "sad and pathetic".
The Last Psychiatrist expands on this aspect of filmmaking:
Voice overs are supposed to be an example of bad or lazy writing, but I have a theory: when a movie has a voice over, it means the character is being dishonest. Not "it wasn't me who stole the cookies" dishonest, but "it's not as simple as it looks, you don't know the whole story, let me explain" dishonest. In other words: BS. This can be consciously manipulative (The Usual Suspects) or unconsciously rationalizing (Sex And The City). The voice over pulls you into the mind of the character and so you are less able to make an objective assessment about what you see. What's important about it is that the story would be impossible to tell without the VO because no one would buy it.
Narcissism is defined by making the world relate only to you. It is about convincing the rest of the world of the story that you tell them as your identity.
