Fight club / American beauty

Résumé du document

At a first glance, such movies as American Beauty and Fight Club have few things in common, both from the point of view of style and the scenario they offer. They present different images of late twentieth century America, though the core of both movies, released the same year, 1999, is quite identical. A middle-age, middle-class man comes at a turning point in his life and decides to change it all.

Extraits

[...] They are typical anti-baby-boomers heroes. The two characters have to cope with the same question: how to be different, how to lead their life as they want and not as the society, in a way, imposes its values and lifestyle on everyone. At the beginning of Fight Club, the narrator complains about his constant travel: wake up at SFO, LAX. ( ) Lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. [...]

[...] These two individual stories reflect well the doubt and hesitations of the main group in American society, the idealized middle-class. These two protagonists seem to be the weberian ideal-type of the average American that has everything to be satisfied. And yet American middle-class is confronted to many problems, among which the most important its stretching on the social ladder due to increased income inequalities in the last twenty years. The disparities among American society may lead to more interrogations and wonders because what used to be the American Beauty, its huge middle-class, believed to rally every American citizen, has begun to crack. [...]

[...] In that sense both movies are very critical to the American contemporary society. The critique is visually visible in American Beauty, inasmuch as Sam Mendes is not American but British. As a former stage director he pays much attention to the very details and is very attentive to making the scene look true, sometimes confining to caricature. Still the caricature helps the critique (regarding the type of the characters it can be discussed), at least regarding the depiction of the characters' lifestyle: every detail reflects the middle-class aspiration and on screen looks ridiculous. [...]

[...] Though, the core of both movies, released the same year is quite identical. A middle- age, middle-class man comes at a turning point in his life and decides to change it all. The anomy of the average Generation X middle-class man Both Edward Norton / the narrator (Fight Club) and Kevin Spacey / Lester Burnham (American Beauty) experience the same kind of process that sociology names anomy. Indeed both protagonists have a breakdown in the values that used to lead their life until that point. [...]

[...] Materialism and consumerism are symbols of modern America. Still, the end of the 20th century carries a certain amount of doubt that can be linked to the end of the Cold War. Indeed the ideological tension that characterized the second part of the 20th century, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, reserved little space for ideological protest in the US, apart from specific group protest like the 1960s student movements. Not only did it leave little space for protest but it also consolidated this ideology by creating a true Manichaeism: who is not for is against, reaching its climax during the McCarthyism years. [...]