Week 3: The Handmaid's Tale & Fight Club

This week really focussed on the difference or possible similarities between a utopia and a dystopia. Taking a sideways approach to these words definitely helps process each film we watch. This week was especially interesting due to the combination of films. Handmaid’s Tale clearly from a woman’s POV as Fight Club is of a man’s, which causes an interesting shift when watching the films one after another. 

Handmaid’s Tale hit home a bit more than Fight Club although I’ve seen Fight Club ten or plus times. This is possibly because I was watching it for the first time and also because I am a woman. About 1/4th of the way through the film a reporter calls fertile women “our most precious resource” as if being fertile makes you property of the government. For the wealthy population the position of Handmaid is a necessity and part of a utopia in their war stricken country to keep the population from becoming only the old. For everyone else it is a forced servitude in a dystopian war ravaged country to a strange couple to then be raped and impregnated to bear their child.

Fight Club is not like Handmaid’s Tale in the sense that it isn’t an account of a current dystopia it is rather the beginning of a transformation of a dystopia to a utopia (at least for some). The narrator as he will always be called, due to the impersonal lack of a name, finds himself stuck in a bland world full of mundane tasks and subconsciously decides to change everything. By the end a massive data bank full of million’s debt records is blown up as the narrator and Marla watch as a budding new couple in a new world.

Whether it’s the creation of new life in a world thats crumbling to pieces or the lighting of a fuse that would change the world both films are about escaping from a dull broken day to day life and being able to become an individual.