Brand's Blog

Fight Club

A friend of mine was complaining that her teenage daughter came home with bruises. The daughter's explanation was that her friends had been watching "Fight Club" over and over, and had decided to try it out. For those of you who happened to be wintering over in antarctica in 1999, Flight Club is a cult film about guys who form clubs where they beat each other up.  Well, theres alot more to the movie, but thats its core.

Whats the point? I tried to explain to the distraught mom that the guys beat each other up to feel alive, to feel real. Its the testosterone-fueled version of mediation, where one clears ones head of all conscious thought by repeating a mantra. Here, breaking an arm definitely focuses ones mind. Or breaking someone elses.  In any case, the mom didnt get it.

Beating each other up is perhaps not the optimal way to feel alive. But the goal, that feeling of pure living, is something that most of us desire.  We want to puncture that fog of drifting through life.

I was thinking about this conversation when I wandered into a meeting of my cohousing community, a meeting that was a bit contentious and tense on issues that clearly involved not only the present but the past.   The analogy of this meeting to the movie 'Fight Club', although not perfect, was interesting. Here were adults, in a mild way, and with words and not baseball bats, beating each other up.

I have to admit to myself that the community would be less interesting, and I would feel less a part of it, if everyone got along perfectly.  The conflicts focus my attention, stress people, make it easy to delve into the personalities of the members of the community, in a way that would be impossible in totally polite and kind world.

Now if the conflict was intense and all consuming, well, then, I would run away, as would most people. Its like adding spices: a dash of black pepper can enhance a dish, but too much, and you cannot eat it.

So perhaps we as individuals, as groups, as societies, as a planet, need the proper amount of conflict. Too much, and the system degenerates. Too little, too much agreement, and nothing happens.  The proper balance. Not that the planet is ever in any danger of too little conflict. But it is interesting to think about, as a point of human nature....

Why should I watch a movie?

There was a documentary a couple years ago called cinemafile, about a group of new yorkers who live for movies. literally. All they do, day in and day out, is watch movies. For them its like a drug.

I understand that,. Drugs give you an emotional change, make you happy, alert, mellow, whatever. Movies can do the same thing.  I guess Music can do that do, but listening to music all day isnt as debilitating as watching movies all day, as you can do other things while listening to music.

There have been a few moments in my real life where I have felt very powerful emotions, as you know, but for me, most of my strong emotions relate to film, to incidents in films that really resonate with me. And Im clearly not alone.  Do having strong emotions in a fictional setting make us better or worse people?  Well, for the most part we were taught that it was good to read lots of novels, that reading fiction was a broadening experience. I submit that movies are also a broadening experience. I can experience, though the movie, places, people, situations, that I could never do in real life. And I can and do learn from those fictional experiences.

The trick, of course, is to choose what one learns from the experience. For example, reading 'the brothers karamazov" to get life lessons is very different that getting life lessons from romance novels.  Same with movies.  To my mind, the greatest movies are the most, well, enobling, in terms of shared experience, shared emotion.  Like any great art.