Word: angstful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...opening of Fight Club makes it clear that the movie's a satire. It's supposed to be a biting mockery of yuppie angst. When Norton starts attending testicular cancer and TB support groups to release his anger and built-up anxiety, we laugh (albeit uncomfortably, but we laugh). When he meets Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), a fellow support group squatter, and they divide group therapy sessions between them, we laugh. But when blood starts flying, Norton starts crying, and buildings start frying, we stop laughing. (It almost reminded me of Showgirls, the way the movie just loses...
...That's right: if movies are any indicator of the American psyche, even the high priests of American consumer culture have been bit by the Y2K bug. There's a new genre in Hollywood that is threatening to flood out the competition from the tide of teen comedies: yuppie angst. Friday night at your local theater means choosing between American Beauty-in which a quiet suburb of yuppies cracks under the vacuousness of their up-and-coming lifestyle-and Fight Club, where nameless corporate yupster Ed Norton finds the only way to reclaim his micromanaged and overworked sense of self...
...idea of "yuppie angst" seems inherently oxymoronic. Yuppies are clean-cut, clear-headed people with successful jobs, shiny new sport utility vehicles, a weak spot for IKEA furniture, and happy families barbecuing behind white-picket fences. With such stability in their lives, what could yupsters possibly have to be all worked up about or dissatisfied with? Well, precisely that: stability. As Brad Pitt's character Tyler Durden mentions in Fight Club, thirty-somethings are the "middle children of history:" forgotten in the shadow of those who come before and after them. Yuppies are expected to make it through somehow, become...
...sense, then, yuppie angst is the dysfunction that dares not speak its name. Edward Norton's character in Fight Club is so ashamed of the fact that he is bored with the Gap(tm)-bland banality of his successful life he is forced to pretend that his affliction is something completely different. Hence his addiction to group therapy sessions, where he can pretend that his unhappiness springs from testicular cancer or OCD rather than from the cookie-cutter pointlessness of his life. Carolyn Burnham (Annette Bening) in American Beauty faces the same dilemma: she's wealthy, she has a nice...
...commercial that's become popular recently chirps "It's about suppression." The commercial is referring to a sexually transmitted disease, but it could very well be referring to yuppie angst. Pop psychology saw this coming: because it's not really socially acceptable to be unhappy about happiness, the Carolyn Burnhams of the world can't really make any sort of change to it. How to cope? Why, by suppressing everything inside, be it good or bad-thereby further emphasizing the emotionless tedium of yuppiedom. After all, the first and second rules of Fight Club are that you don't talk...