Free Will and Individuality in Film

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how for both the Wachowski Brothers in their 1999 sci-fi thriller, "The Matrix" and for David Fincher in the 1999 post-modern deconstructionist film "Fight Club," the commercial industrialization of modern life is portrayed as a hulking monolithic force that has created a generation and class of other-directed individuals. The paper specifically looks at how the films portray a complex picture of the human experience in a modern and materialist society.

From the Paper:

"At its core, the film is a clear-cut remark upon the distracting impulses of our buying power, which we may see as the force by which so many are other-directed. The Narrator of the film is a figure who, at the chronological start of the novel, is very much a victim of the conditioning of the consumer society. Encouraged to pursue the static markers of social progress such as the completion of subsequent levels of his education, the acquisition of a job and the maintenance of a materially suitable apartment, the character is driven by impulses that do not come from within but are instead imposed upon him by the standards and expectations of the culture. He is very much the classically other-directed modern urban dweller warned of by Riesman. So much so do these become his only motives that the character can no longer seem to recognize any other reality than that created by his maintenance of a soul-crushing job and his buying habits."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Bordwell, D. & Thomp, L. son. (1996). Film Art: An Introduction. McGraw-Hill Companies; 5th edition (August 5, 1996).
• Gramsci, A. (2000). Cultural Themes: Ideological Material. Media and Culture Studies: Key Works: Blackwell Publishers.
• Leary, Charles. (2004). What is the Matrix? Cinema, Totality and Topophilia. Senses of Cinema.
• Marx, K. & Engels, F. (2000). The Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas. Media and Culture Studies: Key Works: Blackwell Publishers.
• Riesman, D. (1950). The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. Yale University Press.

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