Capitalism And Consumerism

Capitalism And Consumerism

Capitalism and Consumerism: Alienation

“Fight Club”

Schmitt says, “Living one’s own life, making sense of it, being oneself, is not a project one accomplishes once and for all. In many different situations throughout one’s life, events call it’s meaning into question; the self is thrown into confusion by external forces.”

Alienation, self-destruction, and revolution have been entangled for quite some time in the modern world. My presentation is about the movie Fight Club. In this roller-coaster ride of a movie, the filmmaker allows the viewer to really see capitalism and consumerism for what it is, and how it has left the everyday worker in the growing service industry without a sense of personal identity or a sense of hope. "Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer. Maybe self-destruction is the answer," Edward Norton states in the movie. The narrator of the story has no name throughout the film. We enter not knowing we’re stepping into a world of consumerism, the world in which we actually live but think we don’t. We meet our narrator and a man named Tyler Durden, who happens to be pointing a gun into the narrator’s mouth. The narrator then begins to recount the tale of how he got to this place for the audience.

The narrator’s insomnia is causing him to feel distant from the world and question the meaning of life. The narrator works a dead-end job and he is clearly the type of person who came out of college not knowing what he wanted and ended up a pawn in the world of the service industry. This is very important because a whole generation feels that such an endless routine is sickening and yearn for something more, very similar to the story of Emma Bovary. The subject of alienation from our own reality often leads to self-destruction, because that’s all people can do in their isolation within such an endless routine.

“Schmitt”-Our society, in spite of extolling individuality and independence, makes it very difficult to lead lives of our own.”...