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April 28, 2005
bleah
listening to the fight club soundtrack. excellent soundtrack.
i really hated that movie : it disappointed so deeply -- or perhaps i just missed the point.
"it's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything"
"this is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time"
tyler is saying these things in my ear right now.
"you are not your bowel cancer. you are not your grande latte."
"you have to give up. you have to realize that someday you will die."
the first parts of the movie were... resonant. i'm sure i haven't much to say about this movie that hasn't been said by the critics. re-masculinization, buddhist philosophy, nihilism, all rolled into a post-ikea philosophy that brad pitt fans could grasp.
but then it just got silly. blow up the credit unions? please. ever heard of off-site backups? no? okay, how about cowardice? the cowardice of making Tyler turn from bodhisattva to megalomaniacal paramilitary dictator and then to split personality illusion? that seemed like the easy way out until...
... until I got a bit older, wiser, and better read. even as i type this i'm more impressed with the plot.
the credit scheme is a red herring. project mayhem is a partial red herring. the point is not what Fuhrer-Tyler is doing, the point is that Fuhrer-Tyler exists. The transformative kundalini, left to its own devices, run amock. the Narrator has received partial illumination and now the illuminating force -- still active -- is undirected. Unfocused. A King of Edom. Unbalanced force. The transformative power directs outward and becomes a brainwasher of weaker minds.
Once the Narrator realizes this, he knows it's his job to but the genie back in the bottle. Shiva has destroyed the world but he must not continue destroying -- Brahma needs a turn.
Whether this was all there in the movie is irrelevant, that's the fun part about mysticism and symbolism, especially the esoteric kind. the mind makes connections on its own, illuminating symbology from one system with symbology from another, thus illuminating itself.
Okay, the Katamari soundtrack just came on, there goes my mystical bullshit.
For a moment I thought you were about to completely diss my favorite movie.
yes, but instead i just descended into incoherent gibberish.
the problem with the movie, as i see it, is that i can see all this fantastic stuff in it that i am not positive was intended by the author/director.
the philosophy and action of the pre-project-mayhem part of the film is blunt and explicit. you can't miss it. in the rest of the film (the meaning of the suicide-attempt, what tyler does, the meaning of the survival of the suicide attempt, project mayhem, etc..) i can see a lot of subtle meaning, but I fear that i'm just projecting and the meanings i find were not intended by the author/director.
it's fine to watch a movie and enjoy it for the pretty pecs and special effects (ooh, i rhyme, all de time) but it's another thing entirely to watch a film, be drawn in by its "message" and then watch in dismay as the message is either 1 - abandoned in favor of comedic violence or 2 - forcefully devolved into a muddled mess.
then again, i'm still not sure that's what happened. and sooner or later i'll stop thinking about it again for a couple years. har!