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The impact of modern society and the urban environment on anxiety.
by Sheng Chen
In the industrial society of the late 20th century, there was consumerism, nihilism, and end-of-life sentiment in the capital world. By analyzing David Fincher's Fight Club, this article will explore the impact of modern society and the urban environment on people's anxiety.
In the movie, Jack (Edward Norton) is an ordinary office worker, He has insomnia and is dissatisfied with life, and his status is on the margins of society. At one point, all the accumulated emotions in his body made him suffer from dual personality. He fancied Tyler (Brad Pitt), a person he wanted to be. Jack is on edge, desperate, and not enough masculinity. Tyler is a man at the center. He is smart, charismatic, and capable of leadership. He has gradually become the head of the fight club. People who participate in the Fight Club, the club members, beat each other to vent their dissatisfaction in life and work and express emotionally intense needs. The practices were to fill their psychological gaps through physical struggles. However, with the command of Tyler, the Fight Club is no longer just an evening event. They began to make some vulgar pranks in the city, such as finding strangers to fight, destroying vehicles, and breaking the shop window. It finally evolved into spectacular urban violence.
Personality splitting and environment splitting
Jack's severe insomnia is the representative condition of people living in modern industrial societies. He was doing repeated work every day in a monopoly factory. The material world and a variety of spiritual paralysis surround people. He is losing the self, losing the self as an individual's uniqueness, becoming a "one-sided person" with spiritual emptiness and numbness of consciousness. This long-term depression has caused extreme physical and mental suffering to Jack. Because of these long-standing anxieties, Jack fantasized about his ideal self, the soap salesman Tyler. Tyler is a phantom created by Jack's subconscious mind to overcome inferiority. This character is also a weapon created by Jack to vent his desires. Tyler dares to say anything and do anything, even if it goes against common sense. Tyler represents the biological instinct of human nature and is the illusion that Jack's suppressed instinct impulses are not released. Tyler's revolution "is full of unwarranted violence and terrorism." Tyler's mantra is "self-improvement is masturbation." "Self-destruction is the right way." Tyler's army has been fighting from the ground up to the destruction activities carried out across the country. A large number of believers blindly, madly, vent their dissatisfaction with the entire capitalist society and ultimately lead to everything. The collapse of the value system, the modern spirit, fell into the quagmire of nihilism.
The place where Jack and Tyler live also symbolizes their two different personalities. Jack's apartment was neat and clean, and Jack bought many beautiful furniture for the unit (Figure 1). But it corresponds to a closed environment. Because of Jack's mental depression, he can only paralyze himself through material consumption. Tyler's home is a run-down house, not much furniture, often trips when power is off, and the stairs will make a sound. But also because Tyler doesn't care about material enjoyment, his spiritual world is fascinating. Tyler is Jack ’s fantasy, and Jack worships Tyler ’s personality. Tyler ’s home is also Jack ’s longing place for life. Jack has schizophrenia because of chronic depression, but the fantasy Tyler has also realized that Jack has never dared to achieve it.
Figure 1: The furniture Jack bought for his apartment
Jack's apartment (Figure 2) is a typical residence of people in most modern societies and also represents a material lifestyle. It was a private space, but it depresses people's emotions. Tyler's old house is the opposite, and there is no substance in the old house. It's more like an open space where people can liberate their hearts. If the old house is the starting point of Jack's personality split, Fight club is the tool Jack uses to bring what he wants to others. The fight club is in the basement of a small bar. It is dim and cramped. It is a remarkable combination of industrial layers and faded glamour. By nature, when people fight, they forget their exquisite apartment and material lifestyle. Everyone is happy to experience Tyler's concept. Everyone is the epitome of Tyler, even if Tyler is just Jack's fantasy.
Figure 2
Freedom and environment dominated by consumer ideology
At the beginning of the film, Jack felt depressed and incompetent when he was working on the boss. But when he returned to his apartment, he was very confident in the decoration of the furniture. In contrast, modern people had an excellent white-collar job. The heart is indifferent, lonely, selfish, and only has exclusive freedom when reading catalogs and buying luxury goods. The rich material in the consumer society surrounds people, but the soul feels empty. Then he fantasized out an ideal person - Tyler. Tyler said the reason for their anger: "In the Fight Club, I saw the strongest and best people ever, I saw the potential, but they were wasted. Damn it. A whole generation is a fuel worker, a receptionist, or a white-collar slave. Advertising allows us to pursue cars and fashion, let us do our hateful work so that we have the money to buy those shit that is not needed."
Consumption controls the whole life. “The consumer society is like a besieged, rich, and threatened Jerusalem. Its ideology is born here.” “The logic of blind worship is the ideology of consumption.” The consumption logic of goods is everywhere. It governs the entire culture, sexual desire, interpersonal relationship, and the illusion and impulse of the body. Capitalism does not rely on suppressing consumption, but by suppressing people's desires and stimulating labor. People are influenced and manipulated and cannot freely determine real needs. The need to create through media such as advertising, radio, and television is false. “The spare time of laborers will only be spent on consumption. The more free time left for him, the more greedy his desire will be. The wishes will become more refined so that consumption is no longer limited to necessities but Mainly concentrated on unnecessary luxury goods. Still, these changes will not change the nature of this society. On the contrary, it contains a more significant danger: in the end, no one can escape the devour of consumption without being destroyed.”
Jack lives in the city but has no freedom because the desire of consumers restrains him, and Tyler has been resisting this symptom. He believes that man has become a slave to consumption, “abandoning everything to be free.” At the end of the film, the building that symbolizes the entire material civilization collapsed, meaning that the elimination of this false “imaginary world” is the only way to gain freedom.
At the end of the movie, ten skyscrapers were blown up by members of Tyler's fight club. Those buildings are credit securities companies. Tyler hates those companies that distinguish each person's place in society because of the capital they record. He also hated those buildings, the skyscrapers standing high, like the walls of a class made of capital. These buildings, together with this society, use the capital to distinguish people into different levels and statuses. These buildings represent the consumer society that Tyler and other members of the fight club hate.
Consumption awareness also affects the environment and the form of architecture in modern society. Architectural and environmental design in contemporary society is not only individual artistic labor but a mature business behavior. The purpose of most architectural designs is to cater to the consumer psychology of the masses. For example, in the design, bright colors and exaggerated forms are used to obtain a beautiful visual experience, and architects design uniform buildings to meet the investor's budget. These design techniques have significantly shortened the artistic life of the building and reduced the cultural value of contemporary architecture.
The architectural design concept opposite to consumer society architecture should take into account the local environment, social economy and culture, and the real needs of local people, rather than satisfying the vanity of the minority in the upper class. This architectural concept does not exclude technology, materials, and capital, but everything must consider the real needs, that is, the rationality of architecture and people's lives. This design concept is also the value concept that Tyler passes to fight club members. Vanity material and consumption are not the most important. Real needs and cultural spirit are the foundation of people's lives in society.
Depressed emotions and circumstances cause anxiety
Human needs to liberate instinct, but modern capitalist society suppresses human's ability. I believe that the release of emotional desire is the liberation of labor, that is, the liberation of man. Industrial society not only contains people's emotional desires, but also makes them tamed, passive, uncreative, fulfilling specific duties without aim, working for work, and producing for production.
With the rapid development of science and technology, the increasingly specialized division of labor, people are increasingly tedious and monotonous in their work, and people are increasingly becoming a tool. Modern capitalist society not only suppresses the emotional desires of human beings, but also imposes things that are not human nature, and puts people's wants and needs into the entire capitalist order, making people change and numb. In the movie, Jack was indifferent and mentally sleepy. He participated in various treatment groups and met Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), who had insomnia like him, but Jack's sober consciousness suppresses the love for Marla. Jack can only use Tyler to liberate his instinct to achieve a relationship with Marla. In Jack's real-life world, there is no ability to love.
Long-term depression can lead to the most primitive and savage nature of madness, with unpredictable consequences. The only way for them to restore their individuality is to return to the most natural, brutal, painful, and violent animal instinct. Fighting is not only a confrontation in the post-industrial era but also a means of freeing people from the alienation of labor and liberating the suppressed erotic desire.
Moreover, the space of depression can be anxious. In the movie, Jack has three main places to live, an apartment, a company, and a mutual aid society. Jack's apartment is small and closed, and Jack's life at home is monotonous and lonely. Jack's company also has a separate environment. Because of living in these two places for a long time, Jack has insomnia. Only when he goes to the Mutual Aid Society can he feel comfortable and relaxed, and he will not lose sleep at night. Because the space of the Mutual Aid Society is quiet and empty, and the people in communication will honestly express what they think to others. People and space together constitute the environment in which people live. Jack's home and company are the epitomai of the modern capitalist social environment. It is separated and suppressed, restricting the expression of real emotions, the release of authentic desires, and forcing people into numbness life.
CITATIONS
1. Ahi, Mehruss Jon, and Armen Karaoghlanian. “Fight Club (1999).” Interiors, 2014.
2. Baudrillard, Jean. The consumer society: Myths and structures. Sage, 2016.
3. Arendt, Hannah. The human condition. University of Chicago Press, 2013.
4. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and civilization. Routledge, 2012.
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