If you don't claim your humanity you will become a statistic

Some readers might recognize the title as a quote, whereas to some the style of the message might simply feel familiar. It's an outtake from a longer text quote, here for your viewing in full:

WARNING. If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second off your life. Don't you have other things to do? Is your life so empty you honestly can't think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority that you give respect and credence to all who claim it? Do you read everything you're supposed to read? Do you think everything you're supposed to think? Buy what you're told you should want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you're alive. If you don't claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have been warned ...... Tyler.

The name at the end, for most people of my generation or around it, will ring a bell. This quote appears at the beginning of the Fight Club DVD, as a form of mockery for the corporate label warnings usually found on DVDs. Now, I know it's not very hip to say you like the Fight Club nowadays, since it has become such a huge cult item, an idea in and of itself, that simply voicing that you like it is considered, in today's cultural rush for uniqueness and originality, crass. While the movie has been analyzed piece by piece with such scrutinous detail that there is in reality nothing that I could add, I'd like to bring it out to the table for a minute anyway.

I like Fight Club. I'm not even hipster enough to claim that I liked it "before it was cool". Hell, I didn't even see it the year it came out, but only two years later, in 2001. Most people claim that cult classics are getting too much credit without ever stopping to wonder why. Fight Club, for me, is a movie that drastically changed my world views. It did not make me an anarchist, it did not make me burn down buildings, beat up people or blow up a whole banking district. Actually, I have to make a derailed argument here, but it's only a short one, so bear with me.

Intermission

I watch a lot of movies, I play a lot of games, I spend a lot of time on the internet. The movie theater Batman shooting that happened only a short while ago is still on the public wall, and with the Norway police report out at the start of this week, there's been a lot of talk about how we could prevent stuff like the horrible, horrible scenes of Norway and Colorado. Here's my two cents: we can't. I'm sorry, but that's the short of it. For a bit longer explanation, here goes. The big three things I mentioned at the start of this paragraph do a lot to define me as a person: they are my cultural backround. A lot of the stuff I watch and play is violent, some of it excessively so. Now comes the important part, so listen up: these things do not make me into a cold-blooded, crazy killer. I will not go on a killing rampage due to any of the things I've just mentioned. Get that? Good.

We live in a chaotic, uncontrollable world. That's scary, and I get that. People want control over their lives, and events like these take that away, which makes us feel insecure, and that's not a nice place to be. But entropy is a part of what life is: we can't control all the parts, we simply need to go with it. And unless we want to live in a world where there is no free will (and I'm not even going to go into the amount of violent problems something like that might cause), there is no way we can prevent all of these kinds of events. Some, we can, and those that we can we should. But there have always been people who have gone stir crazy, and for some you just couldn't tell until they snapped. Biggest difference now is that it's easier to go crazy with a bigger volume of destruction. The world is not a perfect place, and it can't be fully controlled.

/Intermission

So, Fight Club. While I don't agree with everything (or, actually much of) what is done in the movie, I appreciate it for what it's trying (and, atleast for me, partially succeeding) to do. The whole point of movies is to depict things that would be atleast partially impossible for the average viewer: to show them something from beyond their own little bubble of a world. And Fight Club is a wake-up call. Here's what I think it's trying to say.

Wake up, people! Your life is here and now, and if you don't do anything with it, it's done. The movie goes to an extreme: in today's bland, toned down world, the only way to feel alive is to start a fight: to punch the lights out of a guy, and get yours punched out too. I learn something new every time I watch Fight Club (which I do about once every two-three years), and my view of the movie has changed between each watching: as I change, my perception of the movie changes. But it is still good, and the message is still valid. Life is now, and you don't have save points. Get out there, do something that matters.

(Edit: Read that last sentence in a Christopher Walken voice, in your head. So much better.)