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The film “Fight Club”, with its critique of 1990s American mass consumerism and its effect on the country's majority of movie-going audiences should be considered a controversial film. A film of such immediacy and power would, in any other time or society, most likely have incited some form of public response. But it didn't. Not to my knowledge. Therefore, the most important question “Fight Club” is that in a society considerably tolerant of controversy, is it still possible to be controversial? When rebellion becomes mainstream, what is there left to rebel against? With these questions, the nihilistic virtues of “Fight Club” are revealed. A possibility is that “Fight Club” is really not about revolution at all - but the impossibility of it. The film's criticism does not stop at corporations or media - but even goes so far to criticize any organizations seeking to react against them. In this case, the film's “Project Mayhem”, which seemingly begins as disorganized chaos, anarchy, descends into men wearing identical clothing and chanting in unison: the termination of individualism that is one of the key attributes of any revolution, be it fascism, communism, whatever. The argument of the film is that individualism as it is sold to us is not individualism at all, but a carefully crafted homogenization of the self, which serves only to benefit the powers that be.
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