Fight Club

Fight Club was very interesting for me to watch because I’d watched it long ago and I’d never once considered it to be a work of dystopian fiction. It’s not necessarily that I was against the idea, but the thought had just never crossed my mind. I still wasn’t sure I was going to be watching the right film when I popped the disk into the DVD player, but having finally watched it again, I totally understood why it was included on the syllabus.

I’m pretty sure that all the works of fiction set in dystopias that I’ve read, watched, or played were all works of science fiction (or speculative fiction, if you want to go there). So to me, dystopian fiction has also always been science fiction. You have stuff like cyberpunk, a science fiction genre that’s literally always set in a dystopia where advanced technology exists, but it’s only available to the wealthy. Bladerunner is probably the most prominent example of cyberpunk in film. Or you have most of the other films we’ve watched so far, where it’s the near-future, but some aspect of our lives or society has changed for the worse. It’s always speculative, though: “This is what will happen if governments are given too much power,” or, “This is what will happen if corporations are given too much power,” or, “This is what will happen if babies can’t be born anymore,” or, “This is what will happen if we legalize euthanasia.” (As in the case of the film, GATTACA.)

Fight Club posits that we are living in a dystopia today. Some of the examples of dystopias I gave above were settings where the government or corporations were given too much power. Fight Club isn’t worried that the government or corporations will become too powerful like Nineteen Eighty-Four or Bladerunner are, it’s worried (“worried”) that they already have too much power, with anti-consumerism in particular being set up as the “antagonist” of the film.

At the very beginning the narrator, who refers to himself as “Jack”, tells us how he’s overly-attached to his furniture; a pretty clear message about our over-reliance on corporate products. Tyler Durden then tells Jack to ditch it all, to sever his attachment to the furniture; a rejection of our corporate overlords.

And then comes the Fight Club. It seems innocuous enough at first, just a bunch of like-minded people getting together to vent some steam. But as the movie progresses, the Fight Club grows into something bigger (read: it becomes a full-fledged resistance movement). Fight Clubs start to spring up all over the states (resistance cells), Jack and Tyler literally begin to train an army, and then we have Project Mayhem. An actual plan to bring down the corporate system, the oppressor.

I've always heard a dystopia as being synonymous with a utopia, because one man's utopia is another man's dystopia or something like that. It kind of makes sense, but at the same time, it also always sounded a little bit like nonsense. Minority Report, for me, was the first work of fiction that really sold me on this idea. And having just watched that film, I also saw it here at the reveal that Jack and Tyler were one and the same, and it's the one thing that really got me on board with the whole "Fight Club is dystopian fiction" thing.