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2007 Abstracts Stage 2

Fight Club: what effect has consumerism had on personal identity?

Holly Bamford, 2007, Stage 2

Insomnia/Society of the Spectacle. The narrator suffers from insomnia, he describes this feeling as being ‘never really asleep and never really awake…everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.‘ This, Guy Debord says, is caused by a veil that has emerged between us and society, where nothing is real. We have moved from Being into Having. What we ARE is no longer important; what we HAVE is. The expanse of mass corporations has created a society controlled and driven by consumerism. People have forgotten their aims and goals and have become obsessed with material possessions. Masculinity has hit a crisis point as the dynamics of society life have changed, namely by the increasingly common absence of the father figure. These men are in search of validation as men, something which they will not find in the consumerist society. Men have become servants to large corporations and through fighting each other they are able to feel something real, and therefore are able to catch a glimpse of the reality they seek. This has caused identity to be something elusive and missing, due to the subduing effect of consumerism. Nietzsche’s Herd/Nihilists/Free Spirits analogy. Modern society has become what Nietzsche would describe as the Herd, a majority of people who are preoccupied with their own ‘game’ and the never-ending pursuit of owning better objects. The narrator undergoes a journey from Herd to Nihilist when he splits his personality, to Free Spirit when he kills Tyler in the final scene of the film.

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