Fight Club, novel in 1996 by Chuck Palahniuk, movie in 1999 by David Fincher

The movie Fight Club was directed by David Fincher in 1999, and was made after a novel written by Chuck Palahniuk in 1996. The main character, (SPOILER) later to be named Tyler Durden, finds himself living out the life of an everyday white collar worker. He is content with his job, as a motor vehicle safety analyst flying around the country, and is content with being told what to do and how to do it, "You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O'Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time."(Fight Club) The protagonist struggles with insomnia, as we see throughout the film, yet constantly finds himself perusing catalogs for items as a way to define himself as a person. He is a product driven consumer, who finds self worth in owning physical items. Some way along the film, the protagonist meets an unlikely friend on an airplane. They manage to move in together after an accidental explosion, caused by a gas leak, destroys Tyler's entire apartment. A very significant scene is were the main character looks up at his blown apart apartment, and realizes that everything he had owned and collected was now gone. Who was he now that what defined him was obliterated? As two friends living in a house, they develop an enigmatic fight club that gains a large following. During a fight club meeting, the protagonist's friend says,"Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."(Fight Club) Long story short, through a crazy plot twist, we later find out that the friend Tyler meets is actually a projection of his imagination, someone that he created as means of escaping the life that he had been living.

Although the movie contains many subtle themes, the one that I will connect with postmodernism has been illustrated above. Throughout the movie, characters struggle with a longing for defining characteristics in their lives, and have a sense of meaninglessness. The main character, so controlled by consumerism and pre-destination, physiologically breaks free in the only possible way. Creating a fight club, he takes action and starts to define himself through his actions, and not through his possessions. The Postmodern era is often characterized with complete subjective relativity, as objective truth broke down after the great wars. However, what happens when everything is taken subjectively? The movie is a great illustration of this question, however, you must answer it for yourself. Do we need an objective baseline within our society? Or can we take things how we want to, and decide to believe whatever we want...