Fight Club, American Psycho & Horrible Predictions…
When Fight Club – Chuck Pahlaniuk’s seminal and now legendary novel – came out, the critics and the public were divided. Some loved the concept of beating the crap out of one another in a dingy basement, week after week, while others called it nothing better than cheap porn. But one thing they did all agree on: the message in the book is strong. In my opinion, one of the reasons why that book made such an impact was its timing: like American Psycho, it was one of those rare novels which seemed to be predicting a future that we were all on the cusp of, whether we liked it or not, we were there.
Fast forward a few years and the sick jokes in American Psycho – as well as the running theme of man’s obsession with material things – have become a main-stay of modern society. Now, commerce is more obsessed with money and violence than it ever has been before. Reading those books now, it’s a strange feeling. It’s almost as if both those authors had insight into a window of the future and wrote about it with raging honesty to warn us. Not that we bothered listening, of course.
No: we want our dog insurance, and we wants our levitating toilets that can easily be cleaned under. We want the best of everything, and are duped into buying it while the government spends money on things to keep an eye on us. Call me a crackpot conspiracy theorist if you like, but take a walk down your city street and count the CCTV cameras, then get back to me.
Of course, Pahlaniuk and Easton Ellis didn’t really see into the future. They merely took their cues and unravelled where we were going. Strange, then, that so many people complained about those books. Or who knows, maybe people complained because they could see themselves in the faces of the protagonists?
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