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Memento and Fight Club “We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we really are. I’m no different.” As heard by Leonard Shelby in the movie Memento, we all need to look at ourselves once in a while and figure out who we are and what we are trying to become. Fight Club attempts to answer some of the same questions. How does one think about their identity in relation to society? Do our actions determine our identity? Can a person have identity without society? Fight Club is a movie based on the novel of the same name, written by Chuck Palahniuk. It is about Jack, a guy who is suffering from insomnia, is falling apart from his job, the people around him, and the society that he should be fitting into. He goes to support groups for diseases like tuberculosis and cancer in order to feel like he is trying to get some form of help for himself and as an escape from his insomnia. Jack owns a condominium that has everything. He is the kind of person who thinks his material possessions define who he is. He soon meets a soap salesman, Tyler Durden. Tyler Durden is smart, funny, good-looking, and “the most interesting single-serving friend he’s ever met”, says Jack. Days after he meets Tyler, his apartment blows up. He later learns that Tyler blew up his condo in attempt to redefine him. Jack thinks his life is over since he had everything in that condo. The two go drinking at a bar one night out to and afterward Tyler asks Jack to hit him as hard as he can. Jack thinks Tyler is insane but hits him in the ear anyway. Soon, they are fighting for fun on a regular basis and thus, form a Fight Club. Jack is the kind of guy who questions everything, to why his life is going like this to who he is. He is too stuck in his own reality to get back in society. According to Jack, “With Insomnia, nothing’s real, everything is far away, everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.” Jack participates in the fight club to get away from society and the problems in his life. But is everything he is experiencing in his new life real? Memento is movie of dazzling originality and complexity that is told literally backwards in a series of flashbacks. The film moves backward from the first scene of the movie, in around five minute increments, and ending at, what chronologically, is the story’s beginning. As the movie progresses, the viewer learns more and more about what is going on the beginning of the film which chronologically is the end of the film.
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