Rhetoric to Recruit Radicals: Tropes and Schemes in Fight Club monologues
Everyone
knows the first two rules of fight club. “You do not talk about fight club.”
The film based on a book of the same name is highly quotable, which likely has
something to do with its place as a widely recognizable film and cult classic.
But surely this can’t be the only reason that the film from 1999 based on a
book from 1996 remains a cultural staple in 2013. Beyond quoteability there are
forces at work in this film that make it a cult classic, and keep it alive in
today’s rapidly changing culture of flashes and fads.
Tyler
Durden, an anarchist revolutionary played by Brad Pitt, is introduced and
dramatically changes the life of the unnamed insomniac main character of the
film played by Edward Norton. This reckless character is enthralling in
his opposition to the capitalist lifestyle that the narrator and much of the
films audience have accepted. This exciting agent of chaos makes the film the
staple that it is. Throughout the film he has several monologues and lines that
challenge the lives we live and present an intriguingly different ideology.
He suggests at one point of the film, “You're not your job. You're
not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're
not the contents of your wallet. You're not your f---ing khakis. You're the
all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.” These claims juxtapose
contrastingly with the narrators consumerist life. Before meeting Tyler the
narrator has an inner monologue about the comfort of buying furniture, the
comfort in knowing that when you bought a sofa, at least that was one problem
in your life solved. Consumerism at its finest.
In, perhaps, Tyler Durden’s most famous monologue from
both the film and book, he delivers the rules of fight club. This creatively
written delivery has many aspects of plain style writing, as would be expected
from a set of rules. They are made more memorable, however, by a distinct set
of schemes which revolve mainly around the word ‘fight.’ If we look at rules
three through seven, which are as follows: “Third rule of Fight Club: if
someone yells 'stop!', goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over. Fourth rule:
only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule: one fight at a time, fellas. Sixth rule:
no shirts, no shoes. Seventh rule: fights will go on as long as they have to,”
we see epistrophe in rules three and four as fight is used at the end of both
these rules. We also see anaphora as rules five and seven reiterate “fight” at
their beginnings. There is also a parallelism throughout these rules that aids
in memorization for both film watchers and the members of Fight Club.
The second monologue that I chose is a sort of call to
action that Tyler makes, again in front of fight club. Although this second
monologue uses parallelism its tropes are what make it notable. In this speech
Tyler uses hyperbole when he calls the members of fight club “strongest and
smartest men who've ever lived.” This is used in the intro and perhaps a method
to flatter his audience. He uses auxesis calling the men “slaves with white
collars.” This makes their station in life seen much worse than it is. This is
likely to rile them up so that they will act on his agenda. Finally Tyler
alludes to the “Great Depression” of “our” lives and out “Great War” a
spiritual war. These allusions have a similar effect to the auxesis.
By the end of the film there is a desire in the reader to
to take on Corporate America a desire to disregard social norms and start
fights with our friends. The audience wants to know what it feels like to be as
alive as Tyler seems. Here lies the success of the movie. There is an intense
reliability, made more impressive by the fact that we, the audience, are
relating to a character who is extremely radical in his defiance of the common
American ideology. This all speaks to the intensity and mastery of
rhetorical devices.
Spencer A.
No comments:
Post a Comment