Watching “Fight Club” again today is a strange and very interesting experience.
So much has changed since the book / film came out. It is clearly set in a different epoch.
Its character ‘Tyler Durden’ says:
God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables;
slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars
and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.
…
We've all been raised on television to believe
that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods,
and rock stars.
But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact.
And we're very, very pissed off.
It seemed fitting at the time. What happened since then?
Many of those jobs are gone. People in that slice of society
make less money today. Sometimes even in absolute dollars.
Certainly corrected for inflation. In the same time the share
of the upper sliver of society on the other end of the wealth
distribution has nothing but exploded.
So why seems the portrayed unrest even further removed
from reality than less than a score years ago?
The answer might lie in the proliferation of computer games and the Internet
during that time.
Both soak up all that extra male testosterone and time that would
otherwise find not much constructive application in the world of 2013.
Oh, and it looked absolutely awesome. I miss movies shot on film.