YOU MUST fill in the blanks and consider the connotations behind this diegetic “dialogue” between Jack and Tyler.

Entrance Activity

N________ ihilism

• ‘…It pushes the concepts of subjectivity and identification to extremes to suggest a male identity that’s not only fragile but frangible. Jack is so filled with self-loathing and repressed rage he’s desperate to get out of his own skin and into someone else’s.”

– Sight and Sound (Amy Taubin – 1999)

Title:‘Fight Club’ –

Ritualistic Violence

Thursday 23rd April 2015

FM4: Varieties of Film Experience – Issues and Debates

Section C: Single Film – Close Critical Study

(30 Marks)

Why?

Aims & Objectives

• YOU WILL establish HOW an ideology and critical approach you need to know for the exam applies to the text.

• YOU WILL develop an understanding of the ‘Ritualistic Violence’ represented in the text and HOW the male gender is perceived as a result.

• Review the learning.

AO1

Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of film as an audio-visual form of creative expression together and

AO2 Apply knowledge and understanding, including some of the common critical approaches that characterise the subject, when exploring and analysing films.

Tyler Durden -

“You were looking for a way to change your life. You could not do this on your own. All the ways you wish you could be – that’s me”.

•WHAT did ‘Fight Club’ do for Jack in light of the points raised above?

Four subliminal Tylers appear at times of stress and pain

• WHAT is Jack emotionally incapable of?• WHAT does ‘Fight Club’ offer him and the men the chance to do?

“They discover they are exhilarated by this brute interaction” –

Sight and Sound (Amy Taubin – 1999)

Jack - “Repressed rage”

“It was on the tip of everyone’s tongue!”

YOU MUST watch the following 2 scenes:

1.‘Fight Club’ rules

2.Burning of the hand

Consider the messages and values to come out of these scenes, especially in relation to:

•Delayed adolescence•The male genders ‘need to belong’•The move towards Luddite Utopianism (Page 79 of study guide)

“Congratulations. You’re one step closer to hitting bottom”.

Luddite Utopianism

Main Body

“The central character is torn between tedium and torture”

(John McCullough – 2004)

Psycho-analysis (Sigmund Freud)

“He recognizes that his freedom is somehow connected to the end of capitalism”

(John McCullough – 2004)

Ebert (1999) states “The whole movie is about guys afraid of losing their cojones”

“the woman is the hunter and the males are the hunted”

(Chia & Wei – 2009)

“’The Narrators’ real comfort in a world of white middle class male alienation”

(John McCullough – 2004)

Fight Club “reasserts a masculine identity threatened by the feminization of American culture” (Suzanne Clark – 2003)

Oedipus complex (Sigmund Freud)

Coupland (1991) –

‘I just want to show society what people born after 1960 think about things... We're sick of stupid labels, we're sick of being marginalized in lousy jobs, and we're tired of hearing about ourselves from others’

• Choose some critical approaches (x3)• Write x3 PEA Paragraphs based around

these.

Robert Bly (1992) – ‘Iron John’

Critical Review