I think my favorite book by far is Fight Club, the one I selected. No surprise, eh? Well, it's good, so stuff it.
One of my favorite passages is the one where Narrator is picked up for a car ride by the mechanic and taken on a suicide run, where the mechanic locks the car into a collision course with an oncoming truck. Where he does this and asks, “What will you wish you’d done before you die?” and counts down the seconds before impact – demanding an answer or else he will crash the car.
There is a lot of intensity here: there is a lot of thought provoking, heart pounding, brain-cell killing intensity. When you combine a scene calling attention to the fragility of your mortality, along with a question asking whether or not you're doing what you wanted with your life (indeed, the most important thing you want to accomplish before dying: whether a self portrait, building a house, or quitting your job...whatever), in the psychotic dashboard setting of a maniac driving you towards doom - well, you can only get an interesting result. Actually, I asked myself this question and found I really wanted to kiss this girl I just met. Wow, no apprehension when you think about how you could die at any moment. So the mechanic says, "You had a near life experience." This scene is a drug.
The movie is full of amusing anarchist/nihilistic/just plain crazy counter-culture jingoisms and anecdotes as well. Of course, since I'm in the library and I left my notes at home, I can't go into those much. However, I will throw this one out just for kicks: "God I haven't been f@#*ed like that since grade school!" Of course, the movie also rips quotes straight from the book, so it holds a lot of literary depth for a Hollywood production. In a punk, grunge, industrial "Tyler Durden sort of way," it can get pretty deep. That other line is just a cheap gag by comparison. Well, maybe you just think it's crass. It is. But I laughed.
In the movie we learn how to make napalm by mixing equal parts of gasoline and kitty litter, or how to make fancy soap from human lard scavenged from liposuction clinic dumpsters labeled "Infectious Waste", or how to make dynamite from said soap. We finally resolve questions of identity that nag at us all in life: "You are not your job. You are not your wallet. You are not your car. You are not your f#$%ing khaki's. You are the all singing all dancing crap of the world. You are part of the same compost heap." And if you want to truly be free, you have to lose everything.
Oh, Fight Club, shall I compare thee to a summer's day - one gone horribly, horribly, insanely, bizzarely, disturbingly, so very sexily wrong? Tap it.
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