Fight Club:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTSxGpD4uuM
- Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer… maybe self-destruction is the answer – pp.
- …maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves (the shell/remnants of the recent past. Like a Phoenix reborn at a higher vantage point or possessing the beauty of hindsight as we quite so frequently quote to younger generations)
- It’s only after you’ve lost everything, Tyler says, ‘that you are free to do anything. What I’m feeling is premature enlightenment.
- I should run from self-improvement, and I should be running towards disaster. I just can’t pay it safe anymore
- Only after disaster can we be ressurected
- …our culture has made death something wrong
- Disaster is a natural part of my evolution, Typer whispered ‘ toward tragedy and disillusion
- …because only through destroying myself can I discover the great power of my spirit
- Because everything up to now is a story, tyler says, ‘and everything after now is a story
High Rise (JG Ballard):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yvtDHv68cY
- “Pandora’s Box whose thousand lids were one by one opening inward”
- But distance lent disenchantment – a feeling of disappointment about someone or something you previously respected or admired; disillusionment
- In many ways, the high Rise was a model for all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly “free” psychopathology
Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn)
http://english4success.ru/upload/books/1793.pdf
- It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative).
- We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I’ve literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet.
- We are all working from the same dog- eared script. It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters.
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Page 330 – (Nick would hate that joke. Derivative! And then he’d add, ‘although the word derivative as a criticism is itself ‘derivative’.)