Criticisms of Consumerism and Materialism in Fight Club

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Recommended: Analysis of fight club novel

“Do you know what a duvet is? It's a blanket. Just a blanket. Is this essential to our survival? No. We're consumers. We're by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty...these things don't concern me. What concerns me is celebrity magazines, television with five hundred channels, some guy's name on my underwear”(29 min.) We are a generation comprised of invidious and conspicuous consumers, desperately trying to meet society’s consumerist criteria; seeking the false promise of the American dream. This is the reality presented in Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), one of “the rawest, most hot-blooded, provocatively audacious, dangerous movies to come of out Hollywood” (Morris, 1999). Through the diverging personalities of the films central characters, Fincher provides a satirical analysis and powerful criticism of consumerism, “echoing countless social critics who bemoan the emasculating effects of consumer culture on once self-defined and autonomous individuals” (Robinson, 2011).

The film is focuses primarily on the life of the [unnamed] narrator, “an exhausted and numb narcoleptic/insomniac suffering from the failed promise of self-fulfillment in a brand-name, corporate driven consumer society” (David, 2002, p. 504.). Completely immersed in consumerism the narrator obsesses over IKEA products in the hope of replicating the so-called perfect and extravagant representations of apartments illustrated in IKEA catalogues. He asserts, “Like everyone else, I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct…I would flip through catalogues and wonder ‘what kind of dining set defines me as a person?” (4 min.) The quintessence of a materialist, the narrator is clearly the product of a consumerist society. His identity crisis is ...

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...for Cultural Research, 11(3), 232-241. Retrieved January 22, 2014, from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14797580701763830

Lockwood, R. D. (2008). Cults, Consumerism, and the Construction of Self: Exploring the Religious within Fight Club. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 23(3), 329. Retrieved January 22, 2014, from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13537900802373320

Lyon, David. Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Post-modern Times. Malden, MA: Polity P, 2000.

Morris, W. (1999). Critic reviews for Fight Club. [Review of the film Fight Club]. Metacritic Reviews. Retrieved Friday 7th, 2005 from http://www.metacritic.com/movie/fight-club/critic-reviews

Robinson, S. (2011). Feminized Men and Inauthentic Women Fight Club and the Limits of Anti-Consumerist Critique. Genders Online Journal, Spring(53), 3. Retrieved January 31, 2014, from http://www.genders.org/g53/g53_robinson.html

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