In the 1999 film, Fight Club, Tyler Durden proclaims, “we’re the middle children of history. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off” (Fincher) Then, through the 2000’s, we experienced a highly televised war and an economic crisis. When the idea of upheaving the economic structure of society from the bottom up came forth in Fight Club it gave the basic blueprint for the Occupy movement. People all over the world watched the Occupy movement through screens as you would watch a film. Was it real though? Was it really trying to effect change or were
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This was two years before 9/11 and the weapons of mass destruction stunt by the Bush administration, 8 years before the stock market crash and twelve years before the Occupy Wall Street movement. Most Importantly, Fight Club paved the way for conversation about anti-consumerism and justice for the people who have been cheated by big corporations. The main character, Tyler Durden, looks critically at the archaic way people consume things and what dehumanization took place to make those products. He points out that “the things you own end up owning you” (Fincher) meaning that the population is at the mercy of companies who sell them things. The whole movie is scarily prophetic at anticipating the uprising of millions in the United States that see the culture they live in has merged New Age spirituality with consumerism, benefitting few and dehumanizing the rest. It delves into the lives of the hopeless, angered Americans who have been cheated by the system. In Fight Club, these people are marginalized white people who feel that their health is not cared for. 12 years later, this fictional idea became reality during Occupy Wall …show more content…
The lack of knowledge came from the amount of exposure they had to simulated worlds. Many in this generation did not live through successful historical social movements and can only base their experience off of what they have seen in films. Black says that we have “produced a public dream world of real virtuality – the use of factual material to satisfy a fictional world”(Black 14). Fight Club is an example of a fictional world that motivated Occupy Wall Street. It gave a fictional hope of complete financial destruction that was completely unrealistic in reality and gave a false representation of how change is gained. To help assess the effectiveness of Occupy Wall Street I turn to Martin Luther King Jr. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail he writes, “In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action”(King 1). Participants in Occupy Wall Street did not have any concrete facts to back up their claims other than their unhappiness with life in general. The ambiguity of their goals for the movement and lack of communicative ability (if there were specific demands) was their first downfall. In the original blog post sent out by Adbusters, it outlines the purpose of Occupying Wall
This was two years before 9/11 and the weapons of mass destruction stunt by the Bush administration, 8 years before the stock market crash and twelve years before the Occupy Wall Street movement. Most Importantly, Fight Club paved the way for conversation about anti-consumerism and justice for the people who have been cheated by big corporations. The main character, Tyler Durden, looks critically at the archaic way people consume things and what dehumanization took place to make those products. He points out that “the things you own end up owning you” (Fincher) meaning that the population is at the mercy of companies who sell them things. The whole movie is scarily prophetic at anticipating the uprising of millions in the United States that see the culture they live in has merged New Age spirituality with consumerism, benefitting few and dehumanizing the rest. It delves into the lives of the hopeless, angered Americans who have been cheated by the system. In Fight Club, these people are marginalized white people who feel that their health is not cared for. 12 years later, this fictional idea became reality during Occupy Wall …show more content…
The lack of knowledge came from the amount of exposure they had to simulated worlds. Many in this generation did not live through successful historical social movements and can only base their experience off of what they have seen in films. Black says that we have “produced a public dream world of real virtuality – the use of factual material to satisfy a fictional world”(Black 14). Fight Club is an example of a fictional world that motivated Occupy Wall Street. It gave a fictional hope of complete financial destruction that was completely unrealistic in reality and gave a false representation of how change is gained. To help assess the effectiveness of Occupy Wall Street I turn to Martin Luther King Jr. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail he writes, “In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action”(King 1). Participants in Occupy Wall Street did not have any concrete facts to back up their claims other than their unhappiness with life in general. The ambiguity of their goals for the movement and lack of communicative ability (if there were specific demands) was their first downfall. In the original blog post sent out by Adbusters, it outlines the purpose of Occupying Wall