"Fight Club" and Paradoxes

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how the movie, "Fight Club", is bound up in one great paradox and how this sense of paradox is bound up in the very narrative. It looks at how the first two rules of Fight Club are that you must not talk about Fight Club, but the club's very existence and growth depends on the fact that everyone breaks that rule. It examines how nothing is quite as it seems in this movie, and much of the intensity and power of its message is bound up in those uncertainties. It also analyzes how three central paradoxes guide this film: the paradox of production, the paradox of power, and the paradox of patriarchy.

From the Paper:

"One of the most basic questions posed by Fight Club is as to why men have allowed corporate culture to symbolically castrate them, to rob them of their free will and their internal experiences, and the fullness of their personhood. In essence, why hasn't there been a revolution? Tyler's answer is fear -- he suggests that only by overcoming fear of the pain and destruction (through facing that fear in the fighting ring), and in fact embracing that aspect of live, one is free to start that revolution. It's an extreme answer, of course, from an extreme individual. However, the question has been asked by many others who are far more academic and calm than Tyler. Early Marxist theory claimed that class oppression should result in widespread class-based revolution."

More papers on "Fight Club" and Paradoxes:

• Analytical Essay # 111245 : "'Fight Club' and Violence"
• Analytical Essay # 130987 : "Sound Application in 'Fight Club'"
• Book Review # 94821 : "Fight Club"--A Review"

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