Word: fight
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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 an accountant, and show up for Thanksgiving with a crock-pot or two of mashed potatoes as bland and frothy...
...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...
...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 about Fight Club...
...activity-i.e. violence; repress your IKEA-fueled angst long enough and it'll explode in your face like a computer at midnight on New Year's Day 2000. Aggression seems truly to be the key to defusing the ticking time-bomb of yuppie angst. This is obvious in Fight Club: the entire movie is centered around the premise that yuppie poster boy Edward Norton finds escape from his micromanaged world only when he is pounding someone else to a pulp with his bare hands. Everything is frenetic, violent, and rough-cut in retaliation against the stuffy conformity of yuppie...
...anyone really care about Last Days of Disco?), Smith began a series of post-yuppie angst-noir with 1994's Clerks, a grimly hilarious movie that combined Seinfeld's inane blabber and outlandishly tragicomic situations with more angst than you could scrub out with a bar of Fight Club's Paper Street soap. After that came Mallrats and Chasing Amy, more dismally delightful chronicles of the post-yuppie malaise, all starring the director (in a requisite self-referential flourish) as the omnipresent Silent Bob. Not content with Stillman's trilogy concept, Smith has spawned an entire cottage industry with this...