I remember than a few years back, when Trainspotting was released, some people used to talk about the movie in terms of being the "A Clockwork Orange for our generation".
And I have always thought that those comparisons are actually meaningless. That if Sweet Child of mine it's our Satisfaction; or that Coldplay it's ready to be the "new" U2... Wouldn't they be better praised if they were regarded by their own merits instead of being compared to the past? Granted, it must be nice to being held yourself or your work as equal with people or works regarded as icons that set standards in their fields, but that doesn't mean that it's not still annoying to be compared.
Having said that I found myself in the rather difficult position to have to accept that sometimes it's useful to use comparisons as a way to better explain some works characteristics. So, to get back to the above example, I disagree with the idea that Trainspotting would be to our generation what A Clockwork Orange was to our fathers. I guess that somebody decided to pair both films based upon the decadence and corruption of youth portrayed in them. But for me, A Clockwork Orange it's more about the alienating effects of modern society on certain individuals, showing what it is like to live in a big city, surrounded by millions of people but feeling lonesome nonetheless, exploring at the same time what any individual could resort to in order to fight against the system.
And with that personal interpretation on mind, I think that Fight Club would be a better match than Trainspotting. Or maybe even American Psycho. Trainspotting it's a good movie, but I guess you'd have to be close to the drugs world to be capable of understanding all of its elements, and even under the assumption that you get all the references in the proper context it's important to point out that Trainspotting it's not even Danny Boyle's best movie (IMHO that would be Shallow Grave). American Psycho it's a critic look at the way that our consumer view of the world can affect the way we interact with other people, as we value appearances over anything else. But I found to many problems with the way the story is told to make the movie as effective as it could have been.
So we're left with Fight Club. To me, Fight Club is one of the most intelligent and thought-provoking movies made in quite some years. David Fincher has had a reputation for his stunning visual style and his narrative skills for some years now, but in Fight Club he takes those skills to the next level. As the movie starts and we are introduced to the main character we see that he is submerged in the machinery of the system, an office worker with an ordinary life, a stable income and a shallow life. He lives alone and spends most of his spare time looking at furniture catalogs trying to decide on how to better fit his house with whatever he thinks i'ts expected of someone like him, as if his possessions were to be the defining element of his personality. There are some lines in the movie that point to the loneliness I mentioned earlier. As he travels because of his job and gets to meet people for small periods of time he becomes aware of the implications of having only "one-serving friends" and being unable to relate to others in any other way.
But all of this is just a little bit of the topics explored in the movie. The whole thing about the underground revolution, of being able to fight the system from its own innards, the power of the common people when it's one unified force can be at once warming and terrifying. The hopelessness and abandon preached by Tyler Durden as the way to embrace his cause, the nothing-to-lose attittude, it's something that those of us who live in the big cities of the 21th Century ought to be aware of.
The mere fact than a movie may be able to make people think about anything at all should be enough to praise it and it's one of the reasons for my love of the medium, and Fight Club being one of the prime examples of it it's another reason to regard it as one of my all time favorite movies.
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