Am I the only person who found it
weird that we could go to a Hollywood movie to be lectured about the evils of
consumer capitalism?
Or have
Brad Pitt disparaging
Calvin Klein style masculine body imagery 'Is this what a man looks like?' before
stripping off to display the work of endless sessions with a
personal trainer?
Back in the
fifties a French intellectual movement known as the
Situationists posited the idea of the
Society of the Spectacle, where we cease to be actors and become
passive spectators.
One of the worst aspects of the
spectacle was its ability to
recoup - that is
absorb and
defuse - challenges to this passivity.
Thus
punk begins as a
radical rejection of the
tyranny of
teen culture, and ends up as a
lifestyle you can buy off the peg.
And
Fight Club reinforces all the passivity it preaches against because as
Marshal McLuhan said '
The medium is the message. We think that watching a
movie is an act of
rebellion. In fact it just
disarms what little
resistance we have left.
Disclaimer: This argument may have been overstated for rhetorical effect.