Fight Club explores themes common in postmodern works, such as the construction of unstable identities and a cynical view of culture as lacking originality. Postmodern texts often feature circular narratives, characters who feel alienated, and self-referential elements that disrupt linear storytelling. Fight Club incorporates postmodern techniques through its examination of constructed masculinity and distrust of societal institutions, though it also employs traditional Hollywood conventions.

1. Fight Club and Postmodernism
How far is Fight Club a Postmodern text?

2. What is Postmodernism?
Postmodernism is a term that is used to characterise the type
of society and culture that has developed in western societies
since the 1970s and into the beginning of the 21st century.
Partly based on a particular view of contemporary life- a high
tech, post industrial society dominated by the flow of media
images and information around the world. We live in a
postmodern world.

3. A cynical view that in contemporary culture nothing is new
or original
Everything is a copy (of a copy of a copy)
Because nothing is new we receive repeated images and
ideas and become de sensitised to everything (advertising/
violence)
Parody (makes fun of the original)
Intertexuality
Hybridity
All examples of
postmodernism
In our postmodern age identity is no longer fixed but constructed and
can be manipulated by individuals.

4. Characters might stop and talk directly to the audience
They often re-arrange or disrupt strict linear narratives,
instead using circular narratives and open ended closures
They often involve characters that feel disconnected or
alienated from their environment and distrust
authorities.

5. Examples that show Fight club as a postmodern text…
Examples of Fight Club following classic Hollywood conventions

6. Essay question
How far does Fight Club rely on typical narrative
and stylistic conventions of Hollywood
mainstream cinema and how far does it break
from these?

7. Jean Baurillard: Simulacra
Simulacra are copies that depict things that
either had no original to begin with, or that no
longer have an original.
What the media offer us is not the ‘real’ but the ‘hyper real’