Fight Club:"SIR! THE FIRST RULE OF PROJECT MAYHEM IS....."

David Fincher's Fight Club is a quintessential generation X movie. Teen angst on a global scale, the characters lament for days gone by when men were men and blowing up skyscrapers was a cool solution to societies problems(stick it to the man)! Addressing a sort of societal rebellion against the dehumanizing, emasculating effect modern civilization has on humans, who adapt much more slowly than we'd like to think(thanks biology).

Fight club's premise confronts many issues simultaneously it's a little hard to keep track of them. I'd almost need a second personality to manage all these themes(*wink*). Right of the bat you have economic distress of the lower-middle class, a theme this film shares with the classic boxing films of yore. The hotly debated relationship between gender and society, in this case, examining a population of men forced to define their own masculinity in a society tries to suppress it. It addresses the shift in family structures that resulted from the combination of women's liberation, continuing societal pressure to marry, peer pressure to be promiscuous, etc, and it's effect on a generation raised without a "traditional" family. It explores the phenomenon of settling for mediocrity, criticizes the cultural institutions that prevent us from achieving our full potential, as well as addressing the intrinsic ones.

Fight club rejects the idea that longevity should be a priority in life. Rejects the industrial influence on our society that created a generation of unambitious, middle-achieving, long-lived obedient drones, and challenges us as a society to rethink our priorities. If we are not happy or in the process of achieving happiness then what are we even doing? It flips the status quo on it's head and asks not if "fight club" is good for society, but if society, but if society is good for humans. It is easy to get caught up in our modern world, with no room for any outside experience's it is easy to forget, or never now of anything different, creating a sort of bliss-through-ignorance that has been explored since Plato's Allegory of the Cave all the way to Fight Club and The Matrix.