Fight Club and D&D

The film begins with a flashback, going straight to the heart of the end of the story, —— Taylor, holding Jack hostage, waiting for the bomb he and his men to install to explode. The director also asked Jack to throw out a verse “I know this because Taylor knows these.” What —— put into a lot of information will be the film’s earliest hint of a split personality.
Then it tells some of Jack’s daily life events to create characters (participating in meetings, chronic insomnia, buying IKEA furniture), revealing the passivity, weakness, escape, and even hypocrisy of his character (to relieve insomnia, Jack chose to participate in mutual meetings for terminally ill patients)

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Mara and Jack are both healthy people (compared to the terminally ill), bringing the character back to their former state of insomnia and anxiety. Jack is still in a state of insomnia, and trance, which sets the way for his second personality. So Mr.Taylor appeared. Taylor’s appearance disrupted Jack’s life layout, so Taylor had to try to change and indulge, when trying to have the fun of indulgence, he continued to try to seek a more exciting lifestyle. In the process of seeking stimulus, jack more than once told Taylor, told him to do it wrong, to obey the rules of the society, but Taylor broke the rules again and again, to jack show his behavior style, under the guidance of, again and again, jack began to stand with Taylor, break the rules, move forward together.
It looks like Dorian.
Let’s take a look at their character: Jack is a conservative, introverted, abide by the rules of social workers, and relative, Taylor, is an open, outgoing, dare to break the rules, Taylor has jack does not have brave and decisive, at the same time, will do some jack once wanted to do but did not do things —— such as seeking violence (liberation) and sex (satisfy self). So in this film, the conservative and introverted office worker is Jack’s external personality to society. Jack, on the contrary, belongs to the hero’s inner personality.

Dual Personality and Split Personality

  1. Schizophrenia

This is a kind of mental illness, which is considered a serious one. The split of schizophrenia refers to the split between thinking and reality.

Typical symptoms are:

Hallucinations: including auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations, smell hallucinations, etc.
Delusions: Delusions of being victimized, always feeling that someone is trying to harm me, being followed, being monitored, etc., as well as delusions of jealousy, delusions of relationships, etc.
Mood: emotional instability, excitement, irritability, depression, and anxiety. (This point needs to be distinguished from simple depression and anxiety, or symptoms of finesse)
Behavior: Aloof, passive in behavior, reduced activity, waning interest, no concern for the future.

2, dual personality, multiple personalities

Multiple personalities, and dual personalities, all belong to split personality (these three belong to the same category), which is called dissociative disorder in psychiatry. If each personality is a different role, then these different “roles” each have their behavioral habits, ways of thinking, their living environment, and their perceptions, and they take turns dominating a person’s behavior. Several souls live in the body.”

The main feature is the identification disorder of self-identity, so this multiple personalities will be called hysterical identification disorder, identity conversion (dissociative) disorder.

Note that split personality (dual personality and multiple personalities), not multiple personalities, or imagining a person to help you and chat with yourself, these are different, different. The two personalities in a dual personality do not share memories, nor can they exist (active) at the same time.

Desire and Morality

Through Henry’s mouth, Wilde expounded his thoughts on aestheticism. The meaning of beauty lies in providing human beings with sensory pleasure, rather than transmitting certain moral or emotional information. We should not be subject to moral “self-restraint”, but should do our best to let our senses enjoy and experience beauty.
Through Henry’s mouth, Wilde expounded his thoughts on aestheticism. The meaning of beauty lies in providing human beings with sensory pleasure, rather than transmitting certain moral or emotional information. We should not be subject to moral “self-restraint”, but should do our best to let our senses enjoy and experience beauty.
“Who needs happiness, I only seek enjoyment.”

To enjoy and experience beauty regardless of the consequences, in Wilde’s eyes, is the nature of conforming to desire. This consistency is positive because it contains human rationality and conforms to the laws of society and nature. This is the value and significance of human life. However, people often restrict their desires because of the moral standards in society. It all comes from people’s inner weakness and fear. and is “thrifty for the poor”, “to praise the generosity of the bankers in order to make them agree to our overdrafts.” All the so called virtue is downright fear.

Before Dorian Gray met Henry, he had peerless appearance, a wealthy family, and  high morality. He was a complete aesthete, but he chose to ignore the moral restraint, indulged his senses to enjoy wantonly, searched for sensory stimulation endlessly , and experienced all novelties regardless of morality. His life was like a work of art since he had an fanatical adoration for beauty and sensuality, pushing his life into the abyss.

“Every good thing has some kind of tragedy behind it”

Henry believed that comedies and tragedies are born accompanied. This is the original sin of beauty, morality, and desire. The ultimate cause of Dorian’s death was the irreconcilable contradiction between the portrait and Dorian himself, which symbolized the separation of his flawless body and decadent soul. This reflects Wilde’s artistic idea: consciousness and the real world are opposite. Dorian’s beauty was immortalized, and his sin, his punishment, and the most hideous part of human being, all remained in the painting. His gave up the pursuit of spirit, but excessively pursued material and physical pleasure. This is not Wilde’s pursuit of values, but it  reflects his experience in life. Wilde, through Dorian Gray’s experience, shows that the art he pursues is being destroyed in real life.

“Complying with desires and self-restraint are actually mutually reinforcing”

Complying with desires and self-restraint are actually mutually reinforcing.

Even though Dorian was addicted to drugs, promiscuity and indulged in pleasure, he still felt frightened and uneasy. Because one can never get rid of morality. After experiencing murder and witnessing being killed, Dorian wanted to be a good man and redeem himself. When he thought he was a “moral” person again, the portrait was still ugly after he lifted the canvas.

His “morality” and “self-restraint” was nothing but hypocrisy to satisfy his own vanity and his real face and soul have already rotted and degenerated.

He couldn’t accept a soul like himself, and couldn’t bear the sins caused by himself. When he finally took up the knife and stabbed at the portrait, it was precisely his performance of killing his evil side and returning to the original. Wilde wanted to reflect the return of kindness.

He stabbed the portrait and killed himself.

Doppelgängers & Doubles in Art

I was first exposed to the concept of Doppelgängers & Doubles formally in this class, which often has many hidden meanings and also represents the hidden expression of the creator of art.

The Yellow Wall Paper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1860-1935 was a feminist activist who published the short story The Yellow Wallpaper in 1892. In the novel she depicts her life under the control and captivity of her husband.

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In the article, I noticed a lot of details, which reflected the author’s psychological changes and the oppression of women in the society at that time.

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The article portrays a woman who is “incarcerated” by her husband due to insanity, and in the process of being dominated by men, the disorder descends into an even stronger madness. The author believes that madness here is not an accidental setting, or just the author Gilman’s projection of his own experience, but it also represents Gilman’s cry for the inequality of the status of men and women.

The madness of the woman in the text seems to stem from a “phobia” of her husband. At the beginning of the article, the woman is uncomfortable with the house, but her discomfort cannot be expressed because women are in an oppressive position. So the heroine’s thought is: “Leave it alone for now, let’s talk about this house.”


It just keeps repeating itself: the heroine is afraid of her husband’s accusations, so she hides what she writes, keeps the disgusting wallpaper, and gets used to the room. But it’s still getting worse, the heroine can’t escape the wallpaper she hates, and she doesn’t have the power to switch rooms. And this yellow wallpaper, as a symbol of male discourse power, repeatedly stimulates the heroine’s nerves. The heroine stares at the wallpaper day after day, and eventually loses her self-awareness in the fear of the wallpaper, has hallucinations and enters a state of madness.
It was the absolute power of men in the patriarchal society that caused the heroine’s madness, and it also reflected the social problems of the time, but Gilman’s heroine not only showed the tragic situation of women being oppressed by the patriarchy, but also provided The way to liberate women.
In the second half of the text, the image the heroine sees in the wallpaper is a “woman”. The woman crawled around in the wallpaper, imprisoned in the yellow wallpaper. This constituted woman represents the heroine herself. When the protagonist tore off most of the wallpaper and climbed out of the wall, she broke through the constraints of patriarchy. That is, “madness” that is not defined by patriarchal logic in order to achieve the liberation of women.