Existential Thought in American Psycho and Fight Club

<p>Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho (1991) and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996) demonstrate a strong basis in existential thought. Both novels reference the philosophical and literary works of Sartre and Camus—two French intellectuals associated with the midtwentieth- century movement existentialism—as well as existentialism’s nineteenth-century antecedents Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche. More importantly, American Psycho and Fight Club also modify the philosophy and its expression, incorporating postmodern satire, graphically violent content, and the Gothic conventions of "the double" and "the unspeakable", in order to update existential thought to suit the contemporary milieu in which these texts were produced. This new expression of existential thought is interlaced with the social critique American Psycho and Fight Club advance, particularly their satirical accounts of the vacuous banality of modern consumer culture and their disturbing representations of the repression and violent excesses ensuing from the crisis of masculinity. The engagement with existentialism in these novels also serves a playful function, as Ellis and Palahniuk frequently subvert the philosophy, keeping its idealism secondary to their experiments with its implications within the realm of fiction, emphasising the symptoms of existential crisis, rather than the resolution of the ontological quest for meaning. While these two novels can be considered existential in relation to the tradition of classic existentialist texts, they also represent a distinctive development of existential fiction—one that explores the existential condition of the postmodern subject at the end of the twentieth century.</p>

Existential Thought in American Psycho and Fight Club

<p>Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho (1991) and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996) demonstrate a strong basis in existential thought. Both novels reference the philosophical and literary works of Sartre and Camus—two French intellectuals associated with the midtwentieth- century movement existentialism—as well as existentialism’s nineteenth-century antecedents Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche. More importantly, American Psycho and Fight Club also modify the philosophy and its expression, incorporating postmodern satire, graphically violent content, and the Gothic conventions of "the double" and "the unspeakable", in order to update existential thought to suit the contemporary milieu in which these texts were produced. This new expression of existential thought is interlaced with the social critique American Psycho and Fight Club advance, particularly their satirical accounts of the vacuous banality of modern consumer culture and their disturbing representations of the repression and violent excesses ensuing from the crisis of masculinity. The engagement with existentialism in these novels also serves a playful function, as Ellis and Palahniuk frequently subvert the philosophy, keeping its idealism secondary to their experiments with its implications within the realm of fiction, emphasising the symptoms of existential crisis, rather than the resolution of the ontological quest for meaning. While these two novels can be considered existential in relation to the tradition of classic existentialist texts, they also represent a distinctive development of existential fiction—one that explores the existential condition of the postmodern subject at the end of the twentieth century.</p>

Television kasvattamat

Fight Club toimi uusliberalistisen yhteiskuntajärjestelmän työhön liittyvää affektituotantoa mallintavana ja tuottavana elokuvallisena koneena. Analyysi perustuu Jonathan Bellerin elokuvallisen tuotantomuodon teoriaan. Elokuvalla katsojat kalibroitiin tekemään huomiotalouden vaatimaa katsomistyötä. Palkaksi he saivat erilaisia viihtymisen muotoja. Gilles Deleuzen ”ajattelun kuva” -käsitteelle rinnasteisena kehitellään ”työn kuva” -käsitettä.Elokuvassa tuotettiin metaelokuvana sekä kuluttamiselle perustuvaa katsojakokemuksen tilaa että yleisempää työn kuvaa. Tuottavana koneena eli metaelokuvana Fight Club koetti paeta työelämän tuottamia vieraannuttavia affekteja marginaalisuuden ”mustiin aukkoihin”. Huomiotalouden spektaakkelina se kuitenkin kietoi katsojansa globaaliin kulttuuriteollisuuden verkostoon muuttaen katsojakokemusta yhteiskuntien sosiaalisella kentällä. Artikkelissa pohditaan, miten Fight Club vaikutti uusliberalistiselle yhteiskuntajärjestelmälle tyypilliseen työn kuvaan.Avainsanat: affekti, metaelokuva, työn kuva, huomiotalous, uusliberalismiRaised by TV. The Meta-Cinematic Image of Work in Fight ClubThe film Fight Club was a cinematic machine, which modelled and produced the affective labor of work in a neoliberal society. The analysis is based on Jonathan Beller’s theory of cinematic mode of production. Spectators were calibrated to do the viewing work required of attention economy. As a reward, they attained different modes of entertainment and enjoyment. In the article, Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “the image of thought” is reformulated and put to use as the concept of “the image of work”.At the metacinematic level, Fight Club is argued to produce an image of spectatorship as consumerism, as well as a generalized image of work. As a producing machine, Fight Club tries to flee the alienating affects of working life to the “black holes” of marginality. As an attention economy spectacle, it simultaneously enfolds the viewers in the web of global culture industry, transforming the viewer experience in the social field of global societies. The article centers on the question of how Fight Club effected the typical image of work in neoliberal societies.Keywords: affect, meta-cinema, image of work, attention economy, neoliberalism

Fight Club

At the very beginning of Fight Club, the Platonic critique of art and everyday life is echoed when the nameless protagonist, the Edward Norton character, says that with insomnia “nothing’s real. Everything’s far away. Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy.” With that clear invitation, this chapter argues that Fincher intends a conversation with the Platonic critique of appearances. Fight clubs—in their retreat from the world and providing for meaningless but intense feeling—are to be understood as allegories of works of art in a consumer society that enable temporary release from it through pain induced enlivenment. Fight Club goes on to track how a political aesthetic can topple into fascist aestheticized politics. Finally, enlisting T. W. Adorno’s “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” the chapter argues that the bond between the charismatic Tyler Durden / Brad Pitt character and his fascist followers is deeply akin to that between Donald Trump and his followers.

Writing With Aphra: Solidarity, Generosity, and Fight Club Rules Beyond Summer 2020

A short piece in praise of the summer Write With Aphra program for pandemic support of women and non binary writers and a discussion of how the program is useful beyond its original parameters

Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club, Anna Kornbluh (2019)

Review of: Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club, Anna Kornbluh (2019)New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 187pp.,ISBN: 9781501347306 (pbk), $19.95