Tuesday, July 07, 2009



His name is Robert Paulson! He is the middle child of history, no place or purpose... he has no great war to fight, he has no great depression. His only war is a spiritual one, his only depression is his life.

Is it just him, or is it us all?

What a thought... that only in death do we have a name! A name that will be etched on to our tombstones! That is all that we amount to at the end of the day. That is the only mark that we leave behind. And that is the only way that we are ever known by other people. Not unless we do something big. Not unless, perhaps, if we let ourselves flow along with what we really want to be.

Positivity and negativity are really two sides of a coin. As far as I can understand, it will be absolutely a cardinal sin if we look upon these terms as absolute. It is just the way we want to make the whole story out ourselves is what really adds that dimension to the whole picture.

I know that most people would love to call this a negative nightmare. One that Edward Norton claims to have had. But like I say, it should perhaps more be looked upon as a negative dream. The word dream is always ascribed to something that is considered to be negative, isn’t it? And when we get up all sweaty and scared, we claim it to be a nightmare – a negative imbalance. However, as I was just saying a few minutes back, if the terms are null and void, then the prefix doesn’t amount to shit.

That was my opinion when I finished with Fight Club. Make no mistake about it, not just me, everyone loved it. Because this may be the only movie that we have all seen in a while, which allows us to negotiate answers from the questions we prop. It allows us to gather a vent to the most problematic delusion that we all face in the world today.

We so badly want to be someone today that we never really realise what we are right now. The present is sold for the future, leaving us just with the gory past at the end of it. We do not know what we are doing, we cannot sleep; we live like a consumer product because we are all so full of them that we have become them.

Not unless we all display the potential courage required to unleash the Tyler Durden in us. He’s the man that we all have inside us, the one that we all confide in and the one that we all want to become. Only that we do not have the guts to be anti-establishment. We are all, somewhere or the other, escapists. We all want to have the hottest people around us, we want to fuck the sizzlers, but seldom do we realise that we are nowhere close to getting that – because we are no one in ourselves.

We are all so bothered about living the ‘right’ life that we forget the third party intrusions in our life. And we are so normal with that, that we do not even realise that we are no longer ourselves. We all want the best in life, without being bothered about the fact that we really don’t deserve it. We all think that we are so god dammed talented that we can do anything that we want – only that in the process, we end up being able to do nothing. And yet that does not dampen our spirits, because when people ask us whether they’re talented or not, we generally offer condolence lines, because who want to be known as a party pooper, even if the response in a few light years away from the truth.

Fact be told, we all are living a life of utter confusion, but such normalised confusion that we are not aware that there exists any confusion within us.

But not anymore! Now we all know about Tyler Durden. And if we want, we can invoke him to come to our rescue. For that we need no one else, just to be ourselves at the end of it all. But that is really the most difficult part. Because then we have to tread a rather difficult path. And if we knew how to do it, then we all wouldn’t be in this mess, would we now? Oh yes, there will be ten people who after watching this movie, will start hallucinating that they are Tyler Durden. But he was just a prototype. To become what he is, we have to all try and be a little different. That is, we all have to be ourselves. Never mind if that overlaps with someone else, but as long as it is YOU, till then it’s all fine.

Now if you look at it positively, you will be able to see Tyler in yourself and make the final push towards the envelope – else just look at it as a morose affair and get rid of the whole feeling.

Whether you want your name to be remembered because of what you did when alive, or whether you want to become a tombstone at the cemetery, is something that you will have to decide for yourself. The choice is yours...

(PS. If you ask me though, I would perhaps have preferred to see Mathew Perry in the shoes of Edward Norton. Not that I think that the latter was bad or anything in the movie, there is just something that tells me that Perry would have been able to balance the dopey look and the button pusher role a little more charismatically. That is the only observation that I have from the movie that could perhaps have been given a second look. Otherwise, it was off the hook!)

2 comments:

Phoenix said...

hmmm really something so meaningful at last that it makes all your other writings look meaningless... this seems to be coming from a man who has not only seen the movie but also has seen life.. life enough to know what lies behind the movie. identity. finding the powerful you. the one whose potentialities are not far away from actually being. it reminds of beast of Bethlehem by yeats...

riddhiculous said...

hmm Name... Fight club for me was not just jostling with names. But, with identities it self. As in ofcourse the idea here is the same. But I would take it as the mad run for having an identity that forced tylers' of the movie to take what they took.
Like the struggle to be someone, the Multinational companies luring you with huge sums. Sounds and feels fascinating enough for a bit. But then what after that?
A sense of Deja Vu. Insomania not just of the body but of the self, that is blinded by a hypothetical goal that when aceived seems dissatisfying.
Ok I have probably written another review.
I love the female lead in the movie though. She is too good.