Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

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> Objects, like sports cars, no matter how beautiful and rare, are there to be used and enjoyed, not hoarded and held in pristine captivity in fear of negative consequences.

I saw it more as, the Ferrari represented Cameron and his father's damage relationship. Cameron was the way he was, because his father was the way he was, and Cameron knew the Ferrari meant a lot to his dad. Him smashing it was basically a self-destructive cry for help (in my eyes). I felt like the viewer is left knowing Cameron and his dad will "work through something big/transformative" given the colossal impact the son (who the dad probably doesn't really care for) smashing his prized possession (that he really cars for) would have.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off - 1986

Fight Club - 1999

Doesn't Fight Club have the same kind of "life isn't about possessions, step out of your comfort zone while you are still alive otherwise you're wasting your life chasing Ikea furniture" message?

I think the message of fight club is that while life isn't about possessions, it can be equally empty to chase a nihilistic idea of masculinity that doesn't connect you with others in a meaningful way.

It's satire - it's making fun of the protagonists as much as it's commenting on them. Ferris bueller doesn't strike me as satire in the same way.

To me Fight club is a boy meets girl story.

The whole Fight Club and later Project Mayhem id a complex digression he invents to avoid facing the fact that he wants to get close to Marla.

i love this interpretation, and i hadn't considered it before reading your comment.

the destruction that follows from his desperate avoidance of this relationship nearly results in his own castration. his last gasp at being an independent man threatens his very manhood. damn.

I can't find the write up, but there was a compelling post that Marta is Jack. So is Robert Paulson.

The vibrator in his suitcase? No accident, just there when he was Marta.

Note the ending when they're hand in hand, they look identical.

I'm not doing the critique justice, but I found it compelling enough to remember it and share it here.

Yeah, I've read that. Why aren't any men upset that there is a woman in a testicular cancer survivor group? Because the narrator is the only one that can see her, she's not really there.

You are right, it was about smashing his relationship between his dad. It wasn't about rejecting materialism at all. Cameron used the Ferrari as an example of how his father puts so much time and effort into things other than his own son, and he was kicking it as a way of getting back at his dad but also make him notice him as well.

I don't necessarily agree about what the fundamental message of either film is.

That said, Ferris is using middle class objects (and using tricks to hijack upper-class objects) to have a good time.

Fight Club Tyler is rejecting middle and upper-class objects as fundamentally opposed to some poorly specified and wholly imagined idyllic life.

If Bob had joined Ferris for a Cubs game and brought a souvenir ball back to the house, he would have been kicked out of the cult.

Fight Club is a coded (biased) subliminal message about the internal (psychological) process of radicalization of the modern young man. Thinking about it now, it reminds of the “Obey” nonsense that supposedly was designed as an “ironic comment on contemporary society” that regrettably served the function of having the word “Obey” appear wherever you looked.

Now that said, criticism leveled against regime du jour is merely the contextualized social barb (“consumerism”), with the substance of the intended strike aimed at the confining and defining social norms (which are present for any social regime whatsoever save pure anarchy). The process of destabilization necessary for revolution invariably entails undermining and devaluing foundational norms of the ancien regime.

As to the sanity of our hero, the reconstructed modern man, the message posses the question: did neuroses engender a ‘shattered social self’ or was the neuroses the side-effect of a misguided social condition?

> Thinking about it now, it reminds of the “Obey” nonsense that supposedly was designed as an “ironic comment on contemporary society” that regrettably served the function of having the word “Obey” appear wherever you looked.

Wasn't it lifted from They Live?

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