"What kind of dining set defines me as a person"

Fight Club Official Trailer


In a book called “Culture Jamming” Kalle Lasn claims we live in “global Capitalist culture”. He claims we eat too much healthy food, watch too much television and are the subject of manipulation on a regular basis. He hopes for less dependence on global corporations and more people leaving their couches and be activists. After reading a little bit of Culture Jamming and Pranking Rhetoric by Christine Harold, I couldn’t help but want to watch Fight Club. Which made me rent Fight Club.

For those of you who haven’t watched Fight Club (shame on you), it’s about an insomniac who seeks an escape from his mundane life style. He talks about being a slave to Ikea. In one scene he goes through a list of all the things in his house he had bought from Ikea, from dishes to furniture, he lists off the prices for each and how they define him as a person. He finds release from his “global Capitalist culture” with help from a soap salesmen and is introduced to underground fight clubs. Harmless pranks and boxing matches lead out of control and that’s where I’ll stop. I don’t want to ruin it. The Narrator subtly points out the consumer society he was built on. During his waves of insomnia he realizes this and searches for a cure. At the beginning of the movie he talks about his job, working for a recalls for a car company. He tells a lady on a plane about an accident he had to look at for work and in a panic she asks what car company he works for.

When The Narrator meets a soap salesman named Tyler he points out that they are consumers, owned by television and celebrities and advertisements. He wants to “evolve” so that “the things [he] owns doesn’t own [him]” (Fight Club). For me personally it was weird to think about fighting being an answer to global Capitalist culture. It seems animalistic to me, but it also makes sense. It gave them a new light; able to see what “true men” were rather than the “true man” the Calvin Klein said they should be. Fight Club was often compared to going to church by the Narrator. Tyler and The Narrator decide to lose fights against total strangers. The Narrator beats himself up to frame his boss, this giving them more money for Fight Club. They start “fighting the system” through pranks.

Beating cars with bats, causing pigeons to poop all over them, defiling fountains and office spaces, doing anything they could to fight back against corporate America. In Pranking Rhetoric Harold says “Media pranksters, an increasingly active type of consumer activist, prefer affirmation and appropriation to opposition and sabotage” (194). What Harold means by this is that media prankers, Tyler and The Narrator in Fight Club, are activist that use aggressive tactics to send their messages out. Tyler and The Narrator’s activism is most certainly aggressive; explosions, vandalism, violence.

The reason I had thought of Fight Club while reading about culture jamming wasn’t just the general plot of the movie, but was also the irony behind it. Fight Club is about fight against corporate America, yet the film is made by what Tyler and The Narrator fight against. Not only that but it is filled with advertisements like IBM and Starbucks. It just goes to show how corporate our world really is. Not even a movie about protesting against large corporations can avoid advertisements.

Works Cited

Fincher, David. _Fight Club_. Perf. Brad Pitt, Edward Norton. Fox 2000 Pictures, 1999.

Harold, Christine. “Pranking Rhetoric: ‘Culture Jamming’ as Media Activism” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 21: 3, 189-211.

Lasn, Kalle. Culture Jam: the Uncooling of America. New York: Quill Inc., 200.