Daily Post prompt: Take a quote from your favorite movie — there’s the title of your post. Now, write!

There are too many good quotes in that movie to just use one. Fight Club is my favorite movie. The title used to be held by Blade Runner and it still is depending on how you ask me. But Fight Club won me over the second I saw it and I have not stopped watching it since. When it first came out on DVD, there was a two-week period where I watched nothing but Fight Club. I said I would keep watching it until I didn’t see anything new. I still watch it at least once a year.

I read the book, which I didn’t like as much. The movie is so much better. The framework is there in the book, but the screenwriters did all the heavy lifting. They pared down the unnecessary plot points and added others to streamline it to perfection.

It pisses me off when people entirely miss the point of this movie. Like one of my other favorite movies, A Clockwork Orange, a lot of people seem to think Fight Club is just about violence. For example, Roger Ebert:

“Fight Club” is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since “Death Wish,” a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up.

Sometimes, for variety, they beat up themselves. It’s macho porn — the sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights. Women, who have had a lifetime of practice at dealing with little-boy posturing, will instinctively see through it; men may get off on the testosterone rush. The fact that it is very well made and has a great first act certainly clouds the issue. more

And Kenneth Turan, film reviewer for the Los Angeles Times and NPR:

“Fight Club,” a film about men who like to fight, is an unsettling experience, but not the way anyone intended. What’s most troubling about this witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone-crunching violence is the increasing realization that it actually thinks it’s saying something of significance. That is a scary notion indeed. more

Way to miss the entire point, fellas. Ebert’s assumption that men would only enjoy it for the testosterone rush and that women, like me, would only see it as “little-boy posturing” is insulting. You only saw the surface. To quote myself from the post A Fight Club Moment, this is the point:

This life of ours is so goddamn short and so full of nonsensical, man-made distractions that it’s hard to keep perspective at times. Sometimes we lose focus on what actually is important in life and it’s not your bank account or who’s going to win the next American Idol. It’s what you do with the time that you have and what you leave behind you. Have you done everything you could do to make this life worth living? Have you tried everything you could have? Have you been too scared of living to actually live? “If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?” Have you even thought about it? It’s just people out there. People like us. Rocks, water, sky, fish, birds, clouds, grass and trees on a tiny globe wobbling around in infinite space. That’s all there really is. That’s all that’s important anyway. “This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time.”

That is what Fight Club is about and that is why it’s my favorite movie. It reminds me how much of my time on this planet is spent worrying and fussing over triviality. It reminds me that this life of ours is so short that you can blink and miss it if you’re not careful. It reminds me to take note of the little things. Look up at the stars and realize how tiny we all are. Smell the roses. Find shapes in clouds. Drive with your windows down. Go skinny-dipping. Take off your shoes. Scream if you have to, but live and enjoy it.

This life we have is not about how powerful or rich you are; it’s about living life to the fullest. It’s about finding joy in everything. It’s about being really, truly alive, not just going through the motions. It’s about remembering that it can end at any second, so make the best of it while you can.