Project Mayhem: Creation in Destruction

The film ‘IKEA Disobedients’, instantly sparks a memory for me of my Freshman year in college writing a paper for my English class on my favorite film, ‘Fight Club’.  ‘IKEA Disobedients’ almost acts as a perfect summary for the iconic film…

“The film opens with an unnamed insomniac who surrenders himself to a fictitious man named Tyler Durden, who teaches him that the only way to be free is to reevaluate his mindset and destroy all of his objects of consumerism. Then help rid the world of such superficial thinking.  This rebellious perspective through which the film is written has pent up angst that can almost be felt in his opinion of what the world stands for.” – A quote from my essay, “Building from the Rubble”.

The very first act of rebellion in the film is the Narrator’s destruction of his own apartment, the apartment he so perfectly curated and customized with pieces of furniture he ordered from the IKEA magazine.  ‘IKEA Disobedients’, implies that the people often buy from the IKEA magazine for the same purpose, to buy themselves a piece of this perfectly blissful slice of everyday life. The ‘IKEA Disobedients’ them flips this narrative upside down and reinvents everyday life by questioning the typical order and use of things.

“The home is a site of confrontations and encounters, with all that is different, unfamiliar or under dispute.” – ‘IKEA Disobedients.

‘Fight Club’, follows the same philosophy but takes a different approach.  Once the narrator destroys his own apartment he moves into an old abandoned house with his new friend, ‘Tyler Durden’.  The house floods and is severely decrepit, they ride on bikes inside the home to avoid the water.  They then form a cult of revolutionaries who enact, “Project Mayhem”, or the destruction of all things that represent ‘Consumerist America’.  The film for me essentially holds a mirror up to society. It destroys our notion of the everyday idealic life and forces us to question the norm.

“It is only after we have lost everything that we are free to do anything” – Fight Club

Stating that ‘….you are not what you own, you are not your job, you are not who your friends are; it is once you have lost all the things you think make up who you are, are you truly free to create and do anything.’

A scene from 'Fight Club'