How to Watch a Movie

I’m assuming that you’ve seen at least one, maybe more, of Falling Down, Fight Club, American Beauty and One Hour Photo. There are surely other movies of their ilk, but these are the ones that spring most immediately to my mind. My question – which you may choose to answer by email, or simply by shouting and hoping I’m near, or perhaps by mentioning it to everyone you meet, thereby creating a new social meme that will spread through the social ether to me – is this: How closely is one meant to identify with the protagonists? Are you meant to feel, as my viewing company generally does, that these movies are ‘warnings’ that such socially skewed people exist, or are you meant to think "Yeah. Society is crap. Why play by those rules?" I don’t think I’ll be shooting up a burger joint in the near future, or creating an anarchist regime – the anarchist magazines I see in college are too contemptibly stupid for that – but I always seem to relate more to the freaks then the norms. I’ve never felt that kind of imprisoned feeling that seems to motivate the characters, but it’s very easy to imagine. So are you a William Foster, Tyler Durden, Lester Burnham or Sey Parrish? Could you be?

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