The Scanners blog, and Fight Club & consumerism

If you’re into film (I mean actually into film, not just “Dude, I love Tarantino” into film), head on over and check out the Chicago Sun-Times blog Scanners from Jim Emerson (who works with Roger Ebert, amongst other things). Here’s a great paragraph from his analysis of Fight Club that he reposted recently:

“‘Fight Club’s jabs at consumerism seem to have particularly upset certain critics, because the movie doesn’t typecast its corporate villains. “Why pick on IKEA?” wonders David Denby. It would have been easy to get an audience to hate ruthless, faceless, monolithic monsters of greed like IBM or Microsoft. Everybody hates them already. But “Fight Club” targets a more insidious kind of corporate enterprise — the kind that markets itself as your best friend and uses cutesy branding images to get under your skin and into your wallet: IKEA, Volkswagen, Apple, Starbuck’s. If you don’t get some sort of vicarious thrill from seeing one of those insufferably precious (and overpriced) new VW bugs receive a facial with a sledgehammer, or from watching that smug Apple logo blown to bits (how’s that for “Think Different”?) … well, as they say, check your pulse.”