{"id":775,"date":"2016-05-06T10:07:01","date_gmt":"2016-05-06T16:07:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/?p=775"},"modified":"2016-05-06T10:07:02","modified_gmt":"2016-05-06T16:07:02","slug":"the-distancing-irony-in-fight-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/2016\/05\/06\/the-distancing-irony-in-fight-club\/","title":{"rendered":"The Distancing Irony in Fight Club"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to Sturken and Cartwright, a distancing irony is used to \u201cask viewers to notice the structure of the show in order to distance them from the surface pleasures of the text…” and helps “viewers be engaged at a critically conscious level.\u201d Quoting can be a reference to something, in manner, mode, or style, and in postmodern examples, irony is usually used to reflect on different aspects of contemporary culture.<\/p>\n

David Fincher\u2019s Fight Club<\/em> (as well as the original novel by Chuck Palahniuk) integrates many postmodern ironies into its narrative structure. Overall, the film displays a flattening of affect<\/a>: using hyper violence, media, and drug use\u00a0to depict an emotionless, detached, and unauthentic life of the main character, while commenting on society as a whole.<\/p>\n

The unstable narrator immediately makes the audience suspend their belief in the alternate reality and aware of their own existence. The story is framed by entering the ending first and tracing back from the beginning.\u00a0Everything that the main character is thinking, he is directing towards you, in your seat in your world.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The plot turns the \u201ctruth\u201d in many human events that we see as normal on their heads, which is a component of postmodern work. This includes the notions of empowerment and masculinity, the redundancies of a desk job, hurting the ones you love, consumerism, and even the illusion of safety on airplanes.\u00a0The narrator is a\u00a0character that is struggling with his identity and one aspect of this is tied to the consumerism of the culture he inhabits. When looking through an Ikea catalogue he asks the viewer: \u201cWhat kind of dining set defines me as a person?\u201d He is placing what is on the surface as the \u201ctruth,\u201d which is another point of postmodernism.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

He\u00a0attends an \u201cAA\u201d style meeting in the beginning of the film called \u201cRemaining Men Together.\u201d This scene draws on the stereotypical support group setting, and is ironic in itself due to our societies beliefs on how to \u201cbe a man.\u201d\u00a0Then as he sits at his numbingly painful desk job, like millions of Americans do each day, he states \u201ceverything is a copy of a copy of a copy.\u201d This disassociation from reality and popular thinking is a technique to distance the character from society, and make the audience think critically about their own reality.\u00a0This is coupled with a fourth wall break, where his sidekick (ahem) goes from questioning him to speaking to the audience directly. He calls out the \u201ctruth\u201d that society feeds us, and how we as individuals proliferate all of our own made up problems.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

By the end of the film, the narrator’s own sense of self-awareness is what brings the\u00a0narrative\u00a0full circle. Although we want nothing more than to escape from our\u00a0perceived\u00a0\u201ctruth,\u201d ironically we are just trapping ourselves in our\u00a0own irrational desires.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to Sturken and Cartwright, a distancing irony is used to \u201cask viewers to notice the structure of the show in order to distance them from the surface pleasures of the text…” and helps “viewers be engaged at a critically conscious level.\u201d Quoting can be a reference to something, in manner, mode, or style, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":164,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/164"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=775"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":782,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions\/782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/visualrhetoric\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}