Fighting the cult
Initially criticized for its violent content, Fight Club (1999) directed by David Fincher is a very complex and clever film that warrants discussion on different subjects. A prominent theme that can be seen aside from violence is the religious aspect. Tyler Durden can be seen as a spiritual leader and Christ figure who turns his following into a cult-like culture. Tyler begins Fight Club as a spiritual connection with religious references, but as the club develops Tyler established himself as a God through his speeches and initiations into his community to cultivate cult behaviors.
Throughout the film Tyler Durden (Jack) use religious references to gain a cult-like following of men. The end of the movie establishes that Tyler Durden and Jack are the same person, thus in the beginning Jack foreshadows the use of religion in a desire to form something more than a group but something spiritual. When Jack was attending various support groups he narrates, “Every evening I died and every evening I was born again. Resurrected”. This line refers to the bible, and illustrates how he wanted to connect with the group on a deeper level. Shortly after this connection had been taken by Darla, he had met Tyler Durden. Tyler and Jack had started fighting in public for no apparent reason. This act was repeated until it became a ritual. This ritual is what attracted people to the community, Jack and Tyler started, called “Fight Club”. Jack refers to Fight Club as church-like, describing the hysterical shouting during fights as a “Pentecostal church” and that Fight Club was not being about winning or losing but “when the fight was over, nothing was solved, but nothing mattered. Afterwards we all felt saved.” Fight Club was a way...
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... that monks do this to bring them face to face with death and after they were transcendent. Tyler Durden makes the members do this to purify and test them. Tyler has told Jack that, “only when you've lost everything are you free to do anything”, and this is seen when the members are giving everything to Tyler before even entering the house. Tyler becomes this all-encompassing deity to Fight Club members which brings about the cult like behaviors.
As it stands today the movie Fight Club is one of the most misunderstood films, being predominantly criticized for its gruesome violence. However, there are numerous layers in this film that could be explored from its socialism aspect to the self-conscious nature of the film. There are several deeper meanings to which this story could be further explored even after looking at the religious aspect to this.
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Society strives to feel a sense of belonging. We want to be a part of something that shares the same beliefs as us. We spend our time trying to place ourselves in a group to satisfy these needs, whether it is in a hobby club, a group of friends, or religion. Some people go to more extreme measures and find this in what we call a cult. According to Henslin, a cult is a new or different religion whose teachings and practices put it at odds with the dominant culture and religion. (2013:405) Cults are often identified with the ideas of mass murder, deviant behaviors, unusual beliefs, and extremely devoted members. Cults are also highly known for their leaders. The leaders of cults usually are the ones that portray the image for the entire group. Successful cults take a strong-minded and, according to Max Weber, charismatic leader.
The only real way to truly understand a story is to understand all aspects of a story and their meanings. The same goes for movies, as they are all just stories being acted out. In Thomas Foster's book, “How to Read Literature Like a Professor”, Foster explains in detail the numerous ingredients of a story. He discusses almost everything that can be found in any given piece of literature. The devices discussed in Foster's book can be found in most movies as well, including in Quentin Tarantino’s cult classic, “Pulp Fiction”. This movie is a complicated tale that follows numerous characters involved in intertwining stories. Tarantino utilizes many devices to make “Pulp Fiction” into an excellent film. In this essay, I will demonstrate how several literary devices described in Foster's book are put to use in Tarantino’s film, “Pulp Fiction”, including quests, archetypes, food, and violence.
The satanic cult panic in part contributed to the conviction of Misskelley, Echols and Baldwin. Baldwin himself describes this assumption; “I can see where they might think I was in a cult,” he said, in that 1993 interview, “because I wear Metallica T-shirts.” (Rich, 2013). The article goes on to explain that the crime happened at the end of the five-year satanic panic period that had plagued American popular culture. These boys did not dress like other teens; they did not listen to the same music. Metal music especially music from bands like Metallica were frowned upon because of their expletive lyrics. When the public established that the boys were different from them, they developed stories that would align with their beliefs. The article establishes that after several weeks of investigation and no clear leads, “rumors of satanic involvement assumed greater urgency” (Rich, 2013) By doi...
achieving his goal of placing doubt into the minds of the religious. Making this a poorly-argued film due
Another reason I’ve found in my opinion that AA is so cult like is because of what the “Big Book” teaches, as well as what the big book means to its members. At one point of the book, chap...
“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
...psychological offenses, the people that belong to their cults are brainwashed into doing things they wouldn't normally do in their right state of mind. Cult leaders used various ways of molding a follower's mind and brainwashing them to do things for them. Some cult leaders used punishments as a way of breaking the follower's that were resistant to their demands. Others used and perfected the art of persuasion. Either way, the mind of their followers or 'family' are in total control of the leader.
"How Fight Club Relates to Men's Struggles with Masculinity and Violence in Contemporary Culture." HubPages. Web. 22 Feb. 2011. .
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. Society becomes so rationalized that one must push themeself to the extreme in order to feel anything or accomplish anything.
Opinions vary as to why people are drawn to cults. “Martin Marty, professor of religious history at the University of Chicago, attributes the growth of cults to the frustrations of seemingly rootless people”(U.S. News and World Report 23). Marty’s classification of a rootless person is a person who is overly frustrated by modern life and is at a loss for direction. Often the rootless individual will “short-circuit and try to hook their lives to any guiding spirit” (U.S. News and World Report 23).
In the Club men get the true sense of being a man. Fighting is a way of releasing testosterone and helps the men feel like men again like they are truly “alive”. Fight Club became helpful when the white male failed as a consumer and needed to be apart of something real. The only way to achieve it was through pain. The fighting in Fight Club can be seen as a way of showing men to take responsibility for their actions and not to blame it on
Friday, Krister. ""A Generation of Men Without History": Fight Club, Masculinity, and the Historical Symptom." Project MUSE. 2003.
Barker, Jennifer. "'A hero will rise': the myth of the fascist man in fight club and Gladiator." Literature-Film Quarterly 36.3 (2008): 171+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 Dec. 2013.
Throughout Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, masculinity is a reoccurring theme that is present throughout the novel and is directly linked to the creation of Fight Club in the first place. After meeting Tyler Durden, the narrator’s masculinity and outlook on life starts to dramatically change. In result of this change, the theme of masculinity becomes very disastrous throughout the novel very quickly because Palahniuk uses masculinity in order to explain the many problems the consumer driven males may struggle with. In this case, the narrator’s masculinity is constantly in question because of his struggles with insomnia, consumer driven lifestyle, and Marla Singer.
It can be argued that most of David Fincher’s films share stylistic similarities in narrative and story more than any other way. This is a very interesting claim considering that Fincher does not write his own screenplays, yet most of his movies deal with similar overall themes and characters. This can be best illustrated by looking at films from different points in Fincher’s career. Fight Club is a film that heavily criticizes materialism, capitalism, and even religion at some points. In fact, mostly everything that Tyler Durden says is largely anti-western culture in general. Until the very end of the movie, society is in some ways the largest antagonist in the story. Se7en also shares a similar distaste for society. In Se7en both Detectiv...