Fight Club: Masculinity and Violence

This is awesome: "Fight Club and the American Mythology of Violence in the Postmodern Moment". If you make it past the academic title, there lies a truly remarkable psychological, mythological and philosophical essay on David Fincher's 1999 masterpiece film -- and respectively Chuck Palahniuk's novel.

The website belongs to an MA thesis by some Robin Freed. It features a ton of good thoughts and at least a quarter-ton of cool clips from the movie to illustrate its points. I highly recommend any Fight Club fan to read this -- if words like "furthermore" don't scare you!

In its entirety the essay addresses such topics as The Mythology Of Violence, The Fracturing Of The Self, Masculinity and Violence, FIGHT CLUB's cultural contexts and reactions to the film.

Don't want to rant too much.
Just this quote to get you curious:

If the schizoid reality of postmodern society produces fractured individuals, then violence becomes a means by which the alienated and fractured individual can experience feeling and inscribe a history on his body. Inflicting pain on the body becomes a means of exhibiting endurance through visual signifiers like blood, cuts, and bruises. Wounding the self is a way to experience the certainty of existence known only through pain.

The use of self-inflicted violence fits nicely within the postmodern paradigm because its relationship to the body is paradoxical. While it is the postmodern remedy to ahistoricity and fragmentation, violence simultaneously perpetuates this fragmentation because the wounding of the body results in a disruption of the totality of the coherent bodily narrative. Fighting and wounding is the only means by which the men in fight club feel truly "alive."

Thanks, Robin.
Here's the full story:

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma02/freed/fightclub/

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