30 Movies In 30 Days. Day 11 – Fight Club
Put it in context. I was eighteen when it was released. I’d gone to University not two months before, hoping to expand my horizons. Naturally, I was hooked.
Fight Club was a rare moment of stunning realization. Like hearing Bill Hicks or reading Neuromancer for the first time, as I watched it I could felt my brain being rewired.
Most of which has long since faded. Like Taxi Driver, Fight Club is for young angry men. I’m neither. But the residuals still linger. Fight Club is about action, self-responsibility, self-determination. Trimming fat, cutting distractions and dismissing excuses. I still believe in all of it.
In fact, my favourite scene of the movie is about precisely that. A college dropout, working at a convenience store, is forced by Tyler to suck the butt of a pistol. Whimpering, the kid reveals he wanted to be a vet, but the college courses weres too expensive. Too much effort. Too hard.
“Would you rather die, out here, in the back of a convenience store?” Tyler asks. The clerk shakes his head. Tyler removes the gun and tells him that if he’s not on his way to being a veterinarian in six weeks, he will be dead.
I would bet he lived.
Tyler is a brutual creation, but gloriously motivating. As the narrator comments: “No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”
Tags: 30_days
