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Postmodern Cinematic Themes and Tropes in Fight Club - Coggle Diagram
Postmodern Cinematic Themes and Tropes in Fight Club
Self-reflexivity in Film
Fight Club indicates that it is a product by means of continual references made to film production procedures.
Some more metanarrative methods would be utilising slow motion as well as a handheld camera and the main character's fantasy.
Due to the fact that Postmodernism rejects the notion that there is only one truth, those who create postmodern texts use self-reflexive techniques in order to make threader remember that this is how they see the truth.
A narrative method where the author showcases the idea that the text is fictional and created by an author that is subjective in nature.
Fragmented Time and Space
Fincher carries this out a lot in the movie.
He also uses difference methods to showcase a hard relationship with time.
Fight Clubs is considered to be an anachrony. The best method to showcase this would be the montage. In giving the audience pieces of the fabula that takes place at various times as well as various settings, the director makes the viewer confused, making putting the events in order very difficult. This shows what the characters are feeling.
Satire
Tyler states that conquering existential angst necessitates that we should not be afraid of dying but we should know that it is going to happen one day.
The movie's tone would be disrespectfulness. The dark lighting emphasises the movie's dark tone. A majority of the movie is set in the night or dark places. Postmodernism had comically taken the existentialism which was highlighted in modernist works too far.
The society that it portrays are often parodied in postmodern texts. The consumer culture that it is a part of is what this movie parodies. Irony is dispersed throughout the movie.
Breaking the Fourth Wall
With regards to Fight Club, the main character sometimes stops so that they can talk to the audience.
What this does is that it takes that illusion that the audience has of seeing everything behind an unseeable wall.
This had been questioned though in postmodern cinema.
The audience is included within the action now whilst analysing the movie.
Even though cinema is a two-dimensional medium, it has continued to keep up the fourth wall appearance.
Intertextuality
With regards to Fight Club, the movie Blade Runner is what they make aesthetic references towards. Thematic overlaps with different movies are evident in Fight Club as well.
It references some older genres such as Gothic romance.
Smaller intertextual references are included as well and they work as self-reflexive parts within the movie itself.
Due to the fact that Postmodernism presupposes that everything is not the first of its kind, every piece of work has to be taken from different works.
Fractured Identity
An example of dividing one's. identity so that they could manage while living within a postmodern civilisation would be when the main character made Tyler, the alter ego of the main character. The movie implies, however, that everyone possesses the ability to divide their identity.
The importance of names plays a part in the idea of a fractured identity. The unnamed main character is a perfect example, however, the pseudonyms that he utilises purposefully when he goes to the support groups highlights this idea. Fight Club's confidentiality supports this notion that in the absence of the identities provided by society as well as our names, then could everyone actually feel free.
In the beginning of the movie, the main character possesses a surface-level of what identity is. His identity comes from this consumerist lifestyle that he has, which he calls 'the Ikea nesting instinct'. The audience is aware that his identity is not fulfilling due to the fact that even though he can possess everything that he wants, he feels dissatisfied.
Questioning what is real
The main character says as well that there are no more actually original things. This perspective upon the world indicates that everything seems to be not real. People may try to create the lives that they want, however it lacks originality.
Postmodernism asks the audience to think again about how we describe reality. The main character is unable to differentiate what is reality and what is a dream like when he has sexual intercourse with Marla that he regards as a dream as Tyler had been the one that had been having sex with Marla.
It is not easy to differentiate what would be real within a society that is very much fabricated. Obviously the big question within this movie would be if Tyler was real or if the main character was, however, the film brings about epistemological questions that have to do with how reality is. For example, what would be considered as actual suffering?
Postmodern Symbolism
The testicular cancer support group
This showcases the emasculation that is felt by the main character as well as the men during the postmodern era. When the Fight Club was formed, this was then destroyed.
Travelling
The single servings of the toiletries as well as the food is everywhere around the main character while he travelling. It represents his restricted lifestyle.
The film has many symbols which provides assistance to the audience for them to form a connection with the postmodern aesthetic. The landscape of the movies is made up of commercial culture symbols that were then attacked. In contradiction to these symbols, the place that Tyler lives in and what the main character moves into subverts the environment that is commercialised in nature. The place is deteriorating
Burn
Represents a sort of induction whereby the main character is able to surpass the fear that postmodern issues placed upon them as well as the pain. The scar represents status which goes against the representations of consumerist status which are sprinkled throughout society.
Unreliable Narrator
While giving the audience no actual answers. the unreliable narrator brings about many questions concerning the plot's subject as well as the narrative devices used to express the story.
Fincher's Fight Club implies that everyone could be schizophrenic where everyone has varying characteristics that could change how we live our lives.
The narrative frame has a double meaning, as it could comment on the metaphorical frame that the audience uses to analyse the characters as well as the actual camera frame. With regards to both, the directors of postmodern work creates a distance where the viewers would be able to improve upon the action as the viewers are unable to depend upon the narrator to give them a rendition that would be dependable.
Because Fight Club is considered as a portrayal of just a singular truth, the audience should not assume that the main character would showcase something else other than their subjective perception of the truth, or two perceptions on the occasion that the audience sees Tyler and the main character as two different people. This leads to the postmodern trope called the unreliable narrator.