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Fight club psychology analysis
How social norms and values guide our behaviour
Fight club psychology analysis
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Fight Club: The Pressures of Social Expectations Social norms are the unwritten rules that provide humanity with an expected idea of how to behave in a particular environment or situation. These social norms are the accepted standards of conduct which produce order in society. Therefore, it is difficult to imagine how humankind could operate without these expectations. People rely on these social norms to guide and direct their behavior and to bestow order and predictability in social situations. However, certain individuals find themselves exasperated trying to live up to these standards. The nameless main character in the 1999 American film Fight Club, directed by David Fincher; essentially goes crazy by living this life of conformism. …show more content…
Like The Narrator, most people struggle to meet the anticipations of others. The creation of Tyler Durden’s persona allowed The Narrator to become the person he had always wanted to be. He was able to escape his routine existence and adopt a new perspective through Tyler’s support. Most individuals can identify with the men in fight club because they were not criminals or crooks. They were regular people leading ordinary lives and working average jobs. Despite their materialistic lifestyles, these men felt unsatisfied and inadequate. Fight Club allowed them to strip social roles and expectations to truly let go. Although Tyler helped the main character dissolve habit and escape his mundane routine, his personality had a destructive undertaking on The Narrator. Fortunately, He gained mindfulness through the damaging effects of Project Mayhem and came to realize how absurd it was. As a result, The Narrator was able to find an area of compromise within himself. He had certainly evolved from the man at the start of the film, yet was no longer the extreme of Tyler Durden. Fight Club encourages the idea to live freely, to be completely oneself and remain unconsumed by the expectations of
Over time, the United States has experienced dramatic social and cultural changes. As the culture of the United States has transformed, so have the members of the American society. Film, as with all other forms of cultural expression, oftentimes reflects and provides commentary on the society in which it is produced. David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club examines the effects of postmodernity on masculinity. To examine and explicate these effects, the film presents an unnamed narrator, an everyman, whose alter-ego—in the dissociative sense—is Tyler Durden.
Society often pressures individuals within it to conform to different ideals and norms. This stems from the fact that individuals in a society are expected to act in a certain way. If a person or group of people do not satisfy society’s expectations, they are looked down upon by others. This can lead to individuals isolating themselves from others, or being isolated from others, because they are considered as outcasts. The emotional turmoil that can result from this, as well as the internal conflict of whether or not to conform, can transform an individual into a completely different person. This transformation can either be beneficial or harmful to the individual as well as those around them. The individual can become an improved version of himself or herself but conversely, they can become violent, rebellious and destructive. The novels Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess both explore the negative effects experienced by individuals living within the confines of society’s narrow-mindedness. In A Clockwork Orange, protagonist Alex was the leader of a small group of teenage criminals. He did not have a healthy relationship with either one of his parents or with others around him. Instead he spent most of his time alone during the day and at night roamed the streets in search of victims he could mug or rape. In Fight Club the unnamed protagonist was an outcast in his community. He chose to distance and isolate himself from others and as a result had no friends, with the exception of Tyler Durden and Marla Singer. Due to his isolation, he often participated in nightly fights that took place in Fight Club so that he could relieve his anxiety and stress. In this way, Alex and the unnamed protagoni...
In Palahniuk’s Fight Club, Tyler Durden is a conformist to society that experienced a personal tragedy which led him to disengage from the societal normality and found an organization known as Fight Club, an underground street fighting competition. Tyler was once an aspiring businessperson. His failure was the cause of his conformity. Tyler then began to work as a security guard, primarily conducting after hour duties. This led him to begin stealing left over human fat to create the ingredients for the manufacture of explosives with the aim of supplementing his income (Schuessler). Here a personal tragedy, specifically failure, led to a behavioural condition known as disengagement. Tyler retracted himself from the typical American societal expectations and rebelled through forms of crime and backlash.
“In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four” (Orwell 250). Winston lives in a time where a set of rules preventing him to be free are imposed on him – the Party defines what freedom is and is not. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows (Orwell 103)”. Winston expresses his views on The Party within his diary even though he knows it is not accepted by The Party or the Thought Police. The narrator in Fight Club uses fighting as a form of escapism from his anti-consumerist ideologies revealed by his alter-ego, Tyler Durden. “Fuck off with your sofa units and strine green stripe patterns. I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let’s evolve—let the chips fall where they may. (Fight Club)” Tyler urges the narrator to stop conforming to consumerist-imposed views of perfection and break barriers to evolve. Tyler and the narrator create a medium for people in similar positions to escape from societal bound norms; it is aptly named “Fight Club”. In comparison, both Tyler Durden and the narrator from Fight Club and Winston Smith from 1984 share
“I had to know what Tyler was doing while I was asleep. If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?” (Palahniuk 32). When Tyler is in action, narrator is not contemporaneous in a sense that he is Tyler now. Tyler is someone who doesn’t give any importance to money-oriented world but he indeed believes in the willpower of constructing a classless society. The narrator is insomniac, depressed, and stuck with unexciting job. Chuck’s prominent, pessimistic, radical work, Fight Club, investigates inner self deeper and deeper into personality, identity, and temperament as a chapter goes by. Through his writing, Chuck Palahniuk comments on the inner conflicts, the psychoanalysis of narrator and Tyler Durden, and the Marxist impression of classicism. By not giving any name to a narrator, author wants readers to engage in the novel and associate oneself with the storyline of narrator. The primary subject and focus of the novel, Fight Club, is to comment socially on the seizing of manhood in the simultaneous world. This novel is, collectively, a male representation where only a single woman, Marla Singer, is exemplified. “Tyler said, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can” (46). This phrase is a mere representation of how to start a manly fight club. However, in the novel this scene is written as if two people are physically fighting and splashing blood all over the parking lot, in reality it’s just an initiation of fight club which resides in narrator’s inner self. The concept of this club is that the more one fights, the more one gets sturdier and tougher. It is also a place where one gets to confront his weaknesses and inner deterioration.
Fight Club is a story about the never-ending struggles between classes. The Project Mayhem is formed in an attempt to overthrow the upper class who undermines the lower class. There are a number of scenes in the story, which highlights the struggle between classes. For instance, when Tyler pees in the soup of an upper class person, when he splices pornography into films and the scene when a mechanic takes the unnamed narrator to steal body fat. The characters here do all they can to fight against the upper class people and to get revenge.
The main theme that is demonstrated in Fight Club is collective consciousness. Collective consciousness is a term coined by Emile Durkheim and it refers to a set of shared attitudes and beliefs that operate within a society as a unified force. They are a way of understanding and acting in the world in a specific way among society members. It was concluded by Durkheim that earlier societies were banded primarily by nonmaterial social facts or a strongly held morality that was common among members of the society. According to Durkheim, social interactions among members of a society lead to the development of a collective consciousness, particularly interactions between families and small communities, among people who have common interests, spend their recreational time together, or who share a common religion. All of these are present in the movie Fight club. The movie begins with a small group of people who are joined together in the act of fighting recreationally. At the beginning, only a small number of people take part in the fighting. Over time, however, more and more people gain an interest in it and eventually the group grows larger, while the members come to know one another within their group. The group is eventually “officially” organized as “fight club”, and with it, certain rules are established that are to be followed by its members. This sets up some of the values and norms that the members of the group follow. These rules become their shared way of understanding and acting in a specific way within the group. Collective consciousness is formed in the group when the individuals in Fight Club act and think in similar ways. More Fight Clubs are developed across the nation, and eventually the main character organizes the...
The Fight Club, directed by David Fincher, constructs an underground world of men fighting with one another to find the meaning to their lives. Ed Norton and Brad Pitt are the main characters who start the fight club. They make a set of rules that everyone must follow. The fight club exists because individuals get weighted down by possessions, causing them to miss the deep meaning of life. Most of the people in the fight club hold service jobs or lower level management jobs that are meaningless.
In the novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk we are introduced to our narrator, a nameless male who stands atop the Parker-Morris building with a gun pressed to his mouth waiting for the moment when the bombs go off and the building crumbles. Holding the gun to his mouth is Tyler Durden who represents everything the narrator is not. The narrator is a man presumably in his 30's, although it is never stated. He works as a recall campaign coordinator and lives in a condo furnished with the latest furniture. Tyler Durden is none of these things, Tyler Durden works various jobs and sells soap made of human fat. Tyler Durden lives in a dilapidated house with makeshift furnishings and questionable utilities. Tyler Durden is satisfied with his life, unlike our narrator who suffers from chronic insomnia and who often speaks bitterly about the corporate life.
Others often use masculinity, most often associated with strength, confidence and self-sufficiency to define a man’s identity. The narrator perceives Tyler Durden as a fearless young man who is independent and living life by his own rules. So is Tyler Durden masculine because of his no nonsense attitude or are his law breaking antics and unusual lifestyle seen as a failure because he is a man with neither family, money nor a well respected job? These typical aspirations are commonly defined as the male American dream, but does following life by the rulebook placed on males by society really make a male masculine? Fight Club specifically debunks the male American dream. It challenges’ the idea that the masculine identity is defined by material items and instead embraces the idea that masculine identity can be found in liberation from conformity and the ability to endure pain.
While breaking the three social norms there was one feeling that I felt was mutual throughout. Breaking those norms made me felt extremely out of place and rude. They made me feel that way because I knew what I was doing wasn 't socially right and people would get mad or be rude to me with their reactions. For the most part throughout my experiment, most people reacted the way I thought they would. You could tell that most people felt awkward or uncomfortable while I was breaking the norm. I faced a couple of difficulties through my assignment when it came to violating the social norms. While trying to break the movie theater norm, it was difficult for me to pick movies with different variety of people and movies that were a little older so less people would be attending them. I also had a little trouble when it came to answering the phone and waiting for the other person to talk first. The problem with this one was that I had to wait for people to actually call me which doesn 't happen that often in this day and age anymore. To conclude, these social norms forced people to be in uncomfortable situations and make a decision as to how they would react to
Social norms are the implicit or explicit rules a group has for the acceptable behaviors, values, and beliefs of its members. Implicit social norms are introduced to us at a very early age, and exert a powerful influence on our behavior into adulthood. Our culture is ruled by social norms. In many situations, people 's perception of these norms have a big influence on their behavior. Implicit social norms are not openly stated, but found out when disobeyed. Implicit rules are rules we conform to as a society, and generally these rules make living together more comfortable. Social norms are important because they define the nature of a group, clarify relationships among members, and express values. They are also important because they create cohesion within the society, and members of that society are very aware when such norms are violated. Social norms are often strictly enforced and offenders are often disliked for their conduct. Also, some norms are more strictly held to in certain situations than in
Social norms refer to the way that members of a society are expected to act and behave. These norms provide structure and conformity for individuals within a society. They also provide a sense of “normalcy” amongst individuals within a society. In a society, “we tend to follow our own cultural norms without questioning them, because we regard them as the ‘norm’.” (Henslin,2012). To intentionally break a cultural norm, takes some thought and effort to consciously go against our inbred “culture within us.” When pondering about social norms that I could break and the reactions of others, I began brainstorming various social norms. One in particular norm came to mind. In American society there is a social norm that if you use the drive thru window
Fight Club “Its only after we’ve lost everything are we free to do anything”, Tyler Durden as (Brad Pitt) states, among many other lines of contemplation. In Fight Club, a nameless narrator, a typical “everyman,” played as (Edward Norton) is trapped in the world of large corporations, condominium living, and all the money he needs to spend on all the useless stuff he doesn’t need. As Tyler Durden says “The things you own end up owning you.” Fight Club is an edgy film that takes on such topics as consumerism, the feminization of society, manipulation, cultism, Marxist ideology, social norms, dominant culture, and the psychiatric approach of the human id, ego, and super ego. “It is a film that surrealistically describes the status of the American
The narrator is changed by his experience with fight club; his life becomes all about fight club. Fight club becomes the reason for the narrators existence. The narrator experiences a shift in consciousness; in that, he is able to understand more of who he is and what really matters in life through fight clubs trial by fire. Through battle and a mindset of counterculture and a complete expulsion of ...