“We are the all singing, all dancing SHIT of the EARTH!”

I am just going to start off by saying genious… GENIOUS!!!

After having our discussion in class i realized that some of this stuff I realized before taking the class, or maybe it was just got the general concept of the movie.  But after the class I realized that I did not really have any general conception of the movie other than the fact collective cohesion was possible only in the ability of the leader to both present in inspiration but absent in physicality.  Which in my mind was a very niave assumption.  And then it dawned on me that in terms of media and postmodernism, specifically television and cinema, it is our biggest production and reserculation of ideas, images, art and literature.  Which brought to mind the one of the postmodern ideas of taking art and literature out of the avant garde and bring it to the masses, while simultaneously bringing the popular into the avant garde.  This idea of fusion was so prevelent in the movie.  The fact that Ficht Club is probably in every movie library of most college students, while also being spoken about in literature classes is in a way proof enough.  But my question is did it really fuze the barriers between the avante garde and the popular culture?

Through out the movie it was constantly noting so many artistic movements and ideas, as well as famous writers, and some of the most well known figures, like Ghandi.  But for some of the things that really you have to go to college to understand, like deconstucturalist theory or futurism, do the masses of students and adults get the references.  One thing that I think is extremly postmodern is the time in which art is continously referencing itself with in itself and breaking down the seems of its purpose.  In a way this movie was a chapter in an art textbook put into popular terms, but what is the point?  Was Fincher and Palaniuk before him, commentating on how the self referential nature of art falls on deaf ears (the return to the metanarrative of the love story)? 

And then I thought about the line “We are the all singing, all dancing shit of the earth” made me think of the ways in which we as a culture even a species has recorded ourselves and for what purpose, we still make the same mistakes and revert back into old habits.  Are we essentially still in cave and recylcing old ideas and shadows of a better human being.  In many respects most of the metanarrative that we know to be intergral parts of our society can be dated back in many ways to when we were first able to record history.  For instance such a prevelent metanarrative with in the movie “Masculinity”, which can be traced back to before Christ with Egyptians and Romans, and their nessesity to have male heirs because in many historical contexts history can only pass from one male to the next. So yet again with this movie the re-occuring metanarrative are further implemented into todays generations through a popular means.  During the Renniassance (the time of rebirth)  most patrons where churches or very wealthy families who through another rising medium of their time reinstituted their power and ideas among the masses.

However maybe in this postmodern era with all skeptability towards truth, maybe art and education through media forms about history has taken on a new role, of no longer instilling truths but showing how each truth collapses under itself like the crashing buildings at the end of the movie.  But do the masses grasp that as a possible reading of this movie or do they just see “Anarchy… SWEET!” and think that these things in the movie are just cool, and not sound pretensious, but mostly do to an ignorance.  And not because the very things that we talk about in class are not in the media, because they are everywhere, re-occuring constantly, but because they do not see the historical corrilation or have the educational textualization.  So even if the point of the movie is to point out how we are creatures of habit, in the post modern idea of fusion between the masses and the avant garde and mass production, it falls on deaf ears with out the ability of contextualization.