Movie Fight Club - Book Report/Review Example

The plot begins with the narrator who is a lowly worker in a large automobile manufacturing company. His job is to see if a car recall would be beneficial for the company in economic terms rather than in terms of saving the lives of their customers. He suffers insomnia and finds solace in the problems of others with support groups. However, there is something missing in his life which is offered to him in the shape of a fight with a rather strange man he had met recently on a flight, i.e. Tyler Durden (Wikipedia, 2007).

Tyler becomes the hero of the film for the most part and it is only at the very end that the audience is shown that Tyler is only a doppelganger for the narrator. It is Tyler who starts the fight club, gives the rules for the club and then initiates project mayhem with the help of other members of the fight club (Wikipedia, 2007). The real meat of the message carried in the movie comes from the various speeches and monologues that Tyler carries out and in the conversations that he has with the narrator and other characters.

The members of the fight club are actually trying to get rid of the tyranny imposed on them by the culture they are born into. Living paycheck to paycheck, being a part of the corporate systems, understanding their place in the social hierarchy as well as being unable to get everything that they want to get. However, what they find the. pears to be a result of their disillusionment with the 'system' which keeps them down and it seems that the story as well as the events within them are a more modern take at the Arthur Miller classic, Death of a Salesman.

The loss of one's dreams can certainly make a person react emotionally but in the case of Fight Club, those emotions come out in the shape of violence and negation of a very well established system. While the direction, lighting, cinematography as well as the acting by Edward Norton and Brad Pitt are superb, it is the message which makes the viewers think about their own lives. As discussed by Giroux (2000, Pg. 1), "Fight Club appears to offer a critique of late capitalist society and the misfortunes it generates out of its obsessive concern with profits, consumption, and the commercial values that underline its market driven ethos".

This is certainly true when it comes to Tyler's approach towards what he thinks should be the way humans should live and how they should functions as masters of the world.However, it is not clear what exact social message the film is trying to pass on to the viewers. How would Tyler react to a paraplegic that can not help but be dependent on others' Would Tyler put a gun to his head and threaten to kill him just as he threatened the store clerk that did not go to college' This makes Tyler a more one dimensional character than he seems because he appears to be devoid of any compassion or mercy except for those from whom he has to gain something in return.

Of course the fight club has no female members and there seems to be a utter lack of function for women in Tyler's world except as sexual conquest and gratification. It is essentially a male society where everything happens as Tyler wants it to happen. Giroux (2000)