There was a repeated concept threaded into both movies
Fight Club and
Sixth Sense. A
duality existed that was unknown to the unwilling participant in both cases. For the audience,
the element of surprise, I would say, was well constructed, because we saw the ideas being presented in front of us as being more logical than the
alternative truths behind them. For a change, we were surprised by the diversity of human capacity rather than the typical
shock value that movies are presenting of late.
Fight Club had a few overlapping points to make, most of which had to do with corporate America, disenchantment and the reaction to hopelessness and inactivity. The problems I had with the film didn't have to do with gratuitious violence as a means of reaction to the numbness that comes from conformity, per se. But my problems may stem from the fact that I am a female and violence has not done much to boost my deflated soul. I need to be more creative than that. Not that violence has not reached a creative level, but I'm sure you can finish my argument in your own words.
The focus of the violence seemed to be directed at faceless corporations, funneled so precisely that the people acting out the violence were no longer important enough to warrant names. I question the validity of the concept that the only way to fight a system is to create a system identical to it in structure, order, and execution. How is the system that Tyler constructed any different than the one they were rebelling against, and is the only reason it was thus because Tyler's thought processes were the result of a split personality? We are certain that Ed Norton's character would never be capable of escape from complacency without splitting his personality, that Tyler was as close to absolution as he could get.
If anything, the movie is an oversimplified view of the mutation of the human condition in America. There is a shift from privatization in a family sense to one in more and us-against-them sense, one where the motivation to fight the system is due to a respect for community is not the focus anymore but instead is replaced with a feigned sense of togetherness through a loss of the indiviudal.
People once owned family businesses, which were integral to the family structure. As we evolve as a society, the concept of togetherness is slowly lost, and we are detached from one another.
I wonder if this us-against-them attitude produces anything but more detachment.