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Fighting For Beauty
In the movie Fight Club the narrator, who is never given a name but simply referred to sometimes as Jack lives a very monotonous life. He’s a self-diagnosed insomniac who spends his evenings going to support groups for people with conditions. This is the only way he can feel and the only way that he can get to sleep. Sounds like a great time, right? His routine is interrupted when another “faker” as he calls her starts showing up at all of his groups. Her presence there disrupts him to the point that he can’t feel anymore. And since he can’t feel, he can’t sleep. This turn of events brings Tyler into the picture. Tyler is everything that Jack wishes he was. He’s there to liberate Jack from his current situation and to re-align his perceptions of the world. Jack moves in with Tyler after his apartment is blown up under suspicious circumstances. It’s then that Tyler shows Jack the error of his ways. After the movie plays through you realize that Tyler is just a figment of Jack’s brain and is Jack’s subconscious response to the fact that he secretly despised his life. Now if Jack were to continue his life he would have grown older to be someone like Lester.
Lester is the main character of the film American Beauty. He is a man who doesn’t really live a monotonous life but instead he lives a shell of a life. He and his wife are not on good terms but nobody has any clue due to the fact that his wife insists on a perfect outward appearance of success and happiness at all times. As a real estate agent she holds an exceptional high regard for outward appearances and conforming to general suburban lifestyle. Lester went along with this way of living for a good while until one day he realized that it was all doomed and wrong. So he quits his job, blackmails his boss for about 60 grand and started living his life again. It’s then that he starts working out, smoking marijuana, and working at a fast-food restaurant. He feels happy and content with his new way of thinking about and living life. Ultimately his new way of life inadvertently leads to his demise. Right before it happens the viewer becomes aware of Lester’s current feeling of happiness and enlightenment. He completed his metaphorical journey to happiness and went out on top.
These movies both share a common theme. Society has such a profound and dire effect on people in general in such a way that there are people who get swept up in the current and have no say as to what’s going on around them. This is truer for Lester than for Jack but Jack is a victim of as he says “the ikea nesting instinct.” Society has showed him the way that he should go about his life and he feels that the only way to feel fulfilled is to accomplish those set goals. Lester is trapped in a life of comfortable conformity and desperately seeks the rush of living again. Jack seeks to liberate himself from the life that society tells him to live. Both of the movies have epic buildups with everything going that lead up to in the end a moment of clarity and awareness of what’s really going on. In a way I feel that the characters themselves could be considered similar.
If Jack would have gone on with his life without Tyler intervening he would have most likely continued his monotonous job and life until he got married and threw a kid or two into the mix. Then one day he’d wake up and realize that his life, his job, his existence, it was all wrong. That sounds a lot like this one movie that I… oh yeah, that’s right. Jack is a perfect example of someone that is likely to end up on a track through life that very closely mimics and could end up like Lester. Lester didn’t get to where he was by living life the exact way he wanted to. He did the adult thing and made compromises with himself until the life that he lived didn’t resemble the grand scheme that he had for it earlier in his life. It took him until well after his prime to finally get his childhood dream car but he did reach the point where he felt his happiness was worth the consequences that would ensue from his wife. Compromise leads to unhappiness and unhappiness leads to movies like these.
If you don’t take time in your life to simply hit the metaphorical pause button and see what’s going on, where it’s going and how you got there then you could end up in an unfavorable position in life. If you are satisfied with where you are then you have a much higher chance of living a satisfying life in the future. It shows that you know what you want and that you are able to provide yourself with a content and satisfying life to live.
