Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by petew (i) on June 22, 2000 at 07:20:07:

In Reply to: OK, I'm confused. posted by Tom §. on June 21, 2000 at 18:42:38:

I'm going to give away the key to understanding Fight Club, so if you haven't seen it, and plan to, stop reading now.

About one in one hundred people suffer a popularly misunderstood mental disorder made famous recently by the Unabomber. I'm talking about schizophrenia. It seems to run in families. It generally manifests in young adulthood--around 20 something. The range of symptoms is wide. In extreme cases, a complete disconnect with what we know as reality is the endgame. When we "hear a voice in our head", that's not what the schitzophrenic experinces. With schitzophrenia, the voice/s are outside the head. The voices are as real as any real person--even more so. Visual halucinations may also manifest. At first, sometimes, the subject may adapt, and even befriend, these voices. But inevitably, without medication, their world becomes filled with horror beyond imagination.

Of course they can't sleep. They are never alone, so they tend to shun human contact. They are paranoid. They distrust athority and then lash out at it. They don't care about their appearance, where or how they live, or contact with other humans, even family. They lose their souls. I've seen them walking the streets of Philadelphia, released from medical supervision by "compassionate conservative" Republican tax cuts, they soon stop taking their medications, and sleep on the steam vents, or wander jabbering and gesturing to demons...It is the most cruel torture imaginable--to be a host body to aliens, and know it. We think they're doped-up. The irony is, they are not.

Now watch Fight Club again. How much is real? Which people exist in reality, and which are manifest visual halucinations? Which events are really happening, and which are fantasy gone amuck? The director gives us a clue in the scene where we see the protagonist fighting himself in the street outside the bar. How many people in his world are real? He returns to an empty house. Was it ever full of people? In the end, we see him tracking down his split personality, but we see the reactions of his human contacts thru his paranoid eyes--his interpratation of what they are saying. Everyone is in on it--everyone knows, he's completely alone, knowing he's insane, and everyone he meets is "in on it". But at the same time, now that he's met the enemy--the enemy is him. Winning back his complete awareness is everthing, and at the same time--the worst thing.

This is not a film about apocalyptic organized violence and cult-terrorism stemming from frustrated, testosterone-juiced, disfunctional, worker-bees rising up against an incorporated, faceless, sub-human society (as the Inquirer reviewer implies). This is a metaphor for a madness that lives inside us--all of us. This is a man losing his soul. This is the Eagle tearing away the chords that connect us to our world. This is our awarnesses being consumed by a monsterous parasitic force beyond comprehension. This is a man being eaten alive at the moment he wins his freedom and learns how to live. This is a glimpse into the mind of Theodore Kaczynski, and the hellish world he lives in, but for the painstaking pharmaceutical research, and a society that is willing to help him, and keep helping him.

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Recommended reading: check out this month's (june 2000) issue of The Atlantic Monthly and find out how Harvard might have predetermined the Unabomber's fixation.

The Horror. The Horror.