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[The Armorman]

man you really have a blunt instrument view of media don't you

I bet Tim Rogers of Action Button Dot Net would say: Bottom Line: This post is the blunt instrument of media.

[rj]

likely yes

[Manuel Magalhães]

I want to see Get Out but none of the cinemas near me have it, ugh.

[Manuel Magalhães]

http://www.whatismymovie.com/

Whatismymovie.com is a showcase of the technology of Valossa, which is a spin-off company of the University of Oulu, Finland. We aspire to create a new, descriptive way of searching video content. Our technology understands the contents of video files itself. Ranging from text to pattern recognition, we reach down into data that has not been searchable in the past.

[Artsicle]

I watched The Hole (not to be confused with "Holes")

[s0]

I can really recommend the emoji film

[s0]

the emoji movie was awesomesauce! it had so many epic lulz in it. i wish it were 1337 minutes long XD

[jesserahm]

i watched "The Shining" a couple days ago, really good horror movie, maybe not as good as the book though...

[ViktorTheBoar]

My hype is real!

[Pfotegeist]

Screw the rules.
Fight club


I watched fight club yesterday.

The biology and actual dialogues in fight club movie are false and misleading, but I assume it's to assert that all agency is good. You can't have freedom with responsibility or rules, only anarchy is true freedom. Your agency is your talent, resources, and a willingness to use it, so it's good.

I did not check the chronology of this.

Narrator's super power
Narrator has insomnia, but it won't kill him *cough* so false *cough*, that's his talent he won't use it so he has nearly zero agency, he sees his talent as a bad thing and gives up agency to therapists and support groups.

This is like a game
There are several points in the movie where the narrator takes back his agency because of revelations, like when the girl reflects his tourism he begins to have insomnia again, he gets his talent back momentarily.

Tyler is conscious of the power system
Tyler takes agency from narrator, he encourages narrator to let go just like a support group and recommends nihilism and destroys his resources, blows up all his things that used to define him, and tries to keep him away from the girl that gave him agency before, and the narrator's character thinks it's a good thing because in case you haven't figured it out the narrator can do the boring stuff like eat and sleep and clean and feel satisfaction while Tyler does the fun stuff.

People see Tyler fighting. Fight club is founded and Tyler experiments with taking away people's agency by making rules.

Narrator takes agency from his place of work by hitting himself, and he does it alone so he probably takes back his own agency then and there.

Tyler points a gun at someone, trying to prove a point, he asserts stealing that person's agency for a moment gave him freedom, obviously not to prove what he says now, but to assert his power to the narrator softening him for later.

Tyler creates an army by putting them in the same frame of mind as the narrator. Movie has established people give away their agency and the places they do it are easy to find, but the indoctrination process is probably longer than we can appreciate.

Narrator doesn't acknowledge Robert's individual skills would in fact make him a bad soldier.

The narrator gets mad there are so many people acting just like him. Every nameless soldier reflects his own lack of agency or a lack of name for that matter (just like the girl reflected his tourism at him)

The narrator tries to take agency by hitting another person, and fails.

The dead soldier got his name back. His name is Robert Palmer.

Tyler is god now? ...
Tyler becomes omipresent and teleports into probably a closed room, bragging about his agency and taking even more.

The symbolism of 'the gun' apparently escaping Tyler's mind, he points it at the narrator to take his freedom. Maybe Tyler didn't know Robert Palmer or the symbol of the dead, but he granted freedom with a gun before. Narrator in a moment of clarity points the gun at himself and he pulls the trigger to get his name back.

Some flimsy conclusion about the 'game' that was played
In black and white terms you're like Tyler or someone who gives up their agency to someone like Tyler willing to use it.

In gray, Tyler believes he had the power to grant someone freedom with a gun, but only asserts that he took their agency. There was no evidence the person he threatened could succeed without agency of their own. The symbolism of the gun became freedom in his own mind. Tyler only ever controlled the people who let him, and never gave them anything.

God is dead? Nihilism, God isn't real? Actually, the narrator is god
According to a quick check up on the book I never read, the narrator meets god and still believes something like nihilism, this is the same as someone talking to himself, but a real person could change their mind or learn something new, and the book's depiction of god the narrator admits he can't.

edit:
ok so there are some mistakes while I wrote this

first the narrator 'voice' keeps using passive language, and accepting everything is normal, he says insomnia is bad because you're never really awake, but fight club is good because you're numb? He even copies the third person voice of a dead poet to distance himself from the character on screen, although at the end he redeems himself by recognizing the situation was not normal and retracing tyler's steps. The story ends with an introspective comment to the girl in first person, something like "this is a strange time in my life".


third the narrator uses the queen bee symbol pejoratively.  She doesn't have freedom. Tyler is the queen bee, this is foreshadowing tyler's flaw that he can't be free and omnipresent at the same time


second it looks like the narrator attempts to steal agency by hitting someone, but fails, more importantly he broke (his own) tyler's rules, but he's not aware of his position in power, so tyler invites him on a car ride, and shows his supporters he can be careless with his own life too while telling the narrator to let go again


Afterthought:
what inspired the author, probably the Psychology of Karl Jung
It's unrealistic that the main character is empowered and protected by the system, and subconsciously seeks to destroy it.

Another take is society was feminizing the mc, and he became fully immersed at support groups, he was almost a woman. Marla resembled the mc's anima so closely she is basically Tyler, the person the mc wishes he was. The anima and animus struggle for control, engage in a series of interpersonal dialogues that suggest a deep philosophical meaning to the viewer, and comment on society.

The animus repeatedly uses logic (asking questions), emotion (fighting), spirituality ("i am enlightened"), and the anima obsesses over death, and freedom, while exerting control of resources.

The anima creates an army mirroring its potential animus partners (1 anima : n animus). Because of that the mc chooses Marla, because she's paradoxically devoted to him and carefree, and represents a better partner than Tyler who chooses to be with anyone and control everything.

Feminized men like Tyler are given control of society for seemingly no reason, not because of the way they look, but simply their desire to take control. The end of the movie could be about rejecting status, or how the mc became antithetical to Marla's desires of death and poverty, so her natural conclusion should be to reject him if she understood he was keeping her alive, and he was some kind of sovereign.

Also the mc got sponsorship showing resource acquisition skills Tyler lacked, then made a mockery of Fight Club. It was then Tyler had to form a socialist armada and blow up the credit card companies with inexpensive nitro, just like he blew up his apartment he acquired by working. The power struggle here appears to be social status vs economic status, the person with the most clout wins but they do it with force.

I guess the mc thought he knew what it was to be a person, then he thought he knew what a woman was, and he thought he knew what a man was, but these were just impressions of society. By the end of the movie he was fully split and seeing himself as the evolutionary archetype of male and female, he consciously chose at the last moment.

Bob
There is one more character with an arc of their own. Bob was a strong independent man, physically. He was the hyperbolic, hyper-masculine, voluptuous, the most powerful and aggressive in Fight Club. But he sees himself as a victim, and later he becomes a victim trying to fit the utilitarian mold rather than acknowledging his own individuality.


There's also some anecdotal evidence different parts of your brain handle individuality and feeling connected with the universe, so there could be something to that too.
Oh yeah, I looked into this some more two posts down..

[michaelplzno]

There is a lot to unpack here @Pfotegeist and I don't really have a good grasp on your style of writing, coming from a smarmy, privileged, elitist school of writing that I basically hated when I was growing up.

You touch on a lot of the themes of Fight Club pretty well. The movie has a lot of motifs about agency and femininity.

Just in terms of my own personal view: it is difficult to accept structure and control systems and hierarchies for me at least and I think a lot of people have that too, to some degree. Even the MC of fight club has his life in the insurance company picking out furniture in the IKEA catalogue, where I suppose he rails about not being enough of a man and at the structure the world has laid out for him, but consciously he accepts it is what it is. Eventually the MC splits his personality so he can sort of have both sides of the issue, Tyler is the controlling dictator who wants to raise an army, and the narrator is a stand in for the audience who are attracted to the idea of having their own army but not really accepting that structure as a good thing.

And that's the thing: for all of us who dislike the world as it stands, and see the flaws, and rail at the dictators who lay out how our lives should be, is what we really want just to be the big swinging dictator ourselves? The movie is well done for all the troubled young dictators out there. The MC essentially wants to remake himself into Tyler but can't really accept that is what he is. For all the railing on a world that wants the MC to be feminine and let others take power from him, in the end, what he wants is to simply be on the other end of that gun.

And so that's my meta issue with Fight Club: really that most of the riffs on power in fiction involve the weak replacing the powerful and doing it their own way. One could imagine quite simply a young man who grows up in Tyler's world where there is an expectation for men to live like secret soldiers who thinks that all the fighting is unpleasant and he wants to start an underground "hair club" where men focus on getting their hair and nails done and try to take over the world Zoolander style.

Is that the nature of power, we are just swinging from dictator to dictator with the sort of tacit acknowledgement that its all bullshit and who knows, maybe one day I'll be the dick?

[Pfotegeist]

I like to take a game and psychology angle to my analysis.

Tyler is easily compared to the id or more likely the shadow.

In this scene...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvtUrjfnSnA&ab_channel=Movieclips?


Through ample use of the royal We, Tyler is protesting the narrator is his version of god. By hurting him, he hurts himself. He can't have everything until the mc's ego and superego are completely erased leaving nothing.  What does pain have to do with losing everything in this scenario, unless he means giving up, or losing your mind.

While fighting and going to work, the protagonist seems to come close to losing his mind. But due to some lucrative serendipity he gets plenty of rest each day midway.

More psychology. There's a phenomenon known as split-brain. Theoretically, if the mc can't escape Tyler he could shoot the side of his head Tyler represents, "The neural system for emotions linked to approaching and engaging with the world – like happiness, pride and anger – lives in the left side of the brain"(1) and is reverse in left-handed people (1). According to what I see on the web he didn't even scare Tyler away for good by blowing a hole in his cheek.

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2018/06/left-right-and-center-mapping-emotion-brain

[Pfotegeist]

@michaelplzno

I just want to address experience.

I think I had similar ideas about Fight Club in the past. A world conflict is also symbolic of inner world conflict.

I've done a lot of writing, but I was a little out of practice. The agency state of the main character is probably the closest thing to my own idea there, and I had it somewhat organized. The concept of player agency comes from Extra Credits youtube channel, it might be well known, but I know that helped introduce and solidify it in my mind.

I went back and made it slightly easier to read by adding bold subsection titles.

If I wrote it more like a story I would have used my four step pattern introducing the concepts, use case in the movie, repetition by comparing acts in the movie, and the creative step is to create some ownership of characters (ie the narrator tried to blow out the left side of his brain and missed, but he got the girl (and technically couldn't have if he succeeded in losing his emotions)). The approach I prefer is a bit different from what I was taught in academics, because the steps are framed a little differently based on the situation, and the fourth step is almost always missing. In elementary school, rote is completely useless - I'd like to think this.

[Pfotegeist]

I think the audience of Fight Club catch on that Tyler is portrayed as a real person. The way characters given backstories make us empathize with them, this is Tyler's story.

Tyler also displays symbols of status people will remember, his knowledge of science, economy, philosophy, psychology, karate, and sex. Tyler can make soap and explosives. Tyler brings up consumerism. Tyler espouses ideologies. Tyler talks about anesthetizing passengers on a plane using oxygen. He's hedonistic and never appears to do anything. It seems like he is living in reality. When he "worked in the past" he even took something away from his customers without their knowledge, or so the narrator tells us.

The narrator isn't any of those things, he's a faker, he's a loner, he's immoral for wanting nothing, and he finishes his character arc by changing who he is fundamentally, people hate that. When Tyler talks to the narrator, he's talking to himself, he sees a real person and becomes consumed with their ideology.  When the narrator talks to himself to formulate a new idea, he rambles, makes nothing out of it.

"In 2008, readers of Empire ranked Tyler Durden eighth on a list of the 100 Greatest Movie Characters." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club#Cultural_impact)

[Pfotegeist]

In Fight Club 2 the story goes meta, I watched it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axekgahhK7g&ab_channel=ComicIsland?

ok so did you watch it? Read on.


The meta story doesn't really seem to be an extension of the book or movie.

In this context Tyler is a memetic parasite with some low level mind control powers and direct links to the genes of the narrator who is now named Sebastian.

The message that ideas make people gets brought up a couple of times. Tyler is an idea.

With the narrator taking full control, he fights Tyler by avoiding sleep, makes sense. For some reason he goes back and gets pummeled by "Angel Face", and despite favoring Tyler with a KO, Tyler whips out a random rule nobody heard of to end the fight. So this is true fascism.

The fans are really mad about the direction this is all going and make a happy ending where a figure clad in black t-shirt offs himself, and Tyler becomes a real boy.

Back to theories:
Tyler could be a memetic parasite in an alternate retelling of the story where he's not obviously part of the narrator's psyche. Wow I thought of that just in the nick of time, how cool is that.

People don't make ideas. Ideas make people. God doesn't make people. People make god. If every human tried to kill god and take over his place as ruler over all creation this would be a perfect metaphor.

[LucierBlazquiz]

I'm catching up on Carpenter films. John Carpenter films, not the fun ones like instructionals on how to carve wood. Finished the apocalypse trilogy a few weeks back.

Three very interesting movies. The Thing being the best. Albeit, At the Mouth of Madness was a very impressive mobius strip of a film. Prince of Darkness is a very interesting film. too. Alice Cooper impales somebody with a bicycle, and the main character who is supposed to be a super smart scientist jumps out the window into an alleyway that has demon possessed zombies on both ends...

Still gorgeous, very creative, effects I enjoyed all three quite much.

[michaelplzno]

Just watched the Jay and Silent Bob reboot, good fun, well done, lots of meta humor. The kids did a good job too. I wish there was more stuff that wasn't afraid to just be goofy and nonsensical.

[Pfotegeist]

I watched Fight Club again. Now I can clean up some of the mistakes.

Wimpy narrator
A few minutes in the movie begins a long flashback, in fact the sweat at the start could be said to engage the narrator's fear and rejection of death. Either fear or the symbol of the gun gave him his power back. It could go either way.

The narrator is passive, soliloquy and monologues, he could just be talking to himself, and Tyler talks to him during some asides. Very theatrical, passive to the eye, inconsequential to the plot, more for the audience's benefit.

Hefty villain
Tyler breaks the fourth wall at least four times after convincing the narrator he has improved someone's life - not including easter eggs where he's there for one frame. He splices his subliminal message in to enlist the audience, causes warping vignette after effects like a film strip, says "you" (to the audience) instead of us (to himself) when he speaks of his vision of society's collapse - the narrator appears to be there but it's a sleep he can't wake up from, Tyler says "flashback humor" outright admitting it's a movie, then he splices an image at the end of the movie after he's dead but not completely gone. Tyler is aware of the game, his alter ego, and the movie, and says so.

Bee poem redux
I didn't make the connection but after having lots of zen and enlightenment the narrator was actually a passive aggressive ball of cynicism, who foreshadows Tyler's soon rise to power, decadence, domineering, and hypocrisy.

Tyler's game
Tyler displays some passivity, but it's subtle for he can't allow himself to disappear or look too weak. The only clear cut case is when narrator earns sponsorship he announces "Tyler participates in class action law suit" and "The leader idly watches from the crowd" implying Tyler's a powerless figurehead in the world he's nurtured together with the narrator. He is a symbol, from business man to club owner.

Tyler on the plane is a business man in a dress shirt, a critic about society. During their dinner conversation Tyler wears leather, hopeful the narrator would accept each proposal he makes he shakes his head insecurely making his sales pitch. Of course he inevitably becomes godlike and wears that fur coat, endgame he's in a 'special' tank top suggesting his heart wasn't really into complete societal destruction.

"If you could fight anyone who'd you fight?"
Narrator: "My boss." true, and foreshadowing
Tyler: "I'd fight my dad." Tyler, don't you mean the person you're talking to is your dad and your god?
Narrator: "I never knew my dad. Well actually! He! Has! So! Many! Families!" Well that was a lie.
Tyler: (describes the narrator's real dad)
Narrator: "That sounds familiar."

Narrator's acknowledgement of his own existence and mortality
"I'd never been in a car accident before."

Tyler: "You just had a near-life experience." that's some laugh. This was definitely a meta joke because Tyler tells the audience his vision of the future, and sets it all in motion, then goes to sleep for the first time in the movie, making him disappear and miss the death symbol Bob sets in motion.

[Pfotegeist]

I think Fight Club is Psychologically intuitive. But most people who watch it will take it face value and suffer because of that.

The very point of the movie is its Psychological manipulation tactics, in practice, work on a naive audience.

Now that I've had some time, and learned a bit more. Fight Club also depicts how little society regards physical health at the time, and the present. Everyone wants to be a portrait. The lifestyle of characters are unimportant in drama. Everything that wasn't superficial, anything unsolvable, had to be a problem in their head. The main character was falling apart like any other anemic, so maybe he barely ate at all, and he believed he was at his peak, some kind of psychological dysmorphia about how well he felt vs. how damaged he really was. Instead of concern with his own Biology, Tyler subverted the realization by looking fantastic, and voicing more criticism about culture.

This is the lie: You, your body, it's all subjective to society, an object of affection and ridicule like the Mona Lisa, and there is no objective truth about health. That was the lie.

The fact is if you aren't careful, your body can easily fall apart, but not in a literal way like they show you in the movie. If you saw the damage smoking did to your lungs on your face immediately most people are too superficial to smoke again. But, our concern about health is subverted by culture, we don't know what to eat, we know too much or too little, and the people who argue what is too much or too little are the loudest health critics of all.

In fact I was thinking about the Overton Window, regarding this. That's all I'm going to say about that, I expect a nice fat shut up paycheck from the food and drug companies or I will talk about it eventually. Meanwhile, it's up to the individual to educate themselves.

Ok I talked about potassium, so this isn't different from what I am currently talking about. Potassium deficiency weakens your stomach lining and gastrointestinal tract, reason: fluid inefficiency. Inflammation means you must eat more to digest the same amount of nutrients. Rather than awareness of a missing vital nutrient, we develop a universal deficit until our body stores more fat or we suffer from clinically acknowledged danger signs of stress and metabolic factors.

So, I'd suggest, the public's being weaned away from respecting nutrition, and thus they believe they must eat more to be happy. Everything else is a trickle-down effect from this founding notion that, the food we eat is adequate, as long as it fills our stomach now.

[GianCann]

This year was not so cool for movies (except for Dune and Spider-Man)