Integration and Rebirth through Confrontation: Fight Club and American Beauty as Contemporary Religious Parables

In this article, I discuss the religious significance of two recent American films which raise pertinent questions about the nature and quality of human existence, its anxieties and aspirations, at the turn of the millennium. Both David Fincher's Fight Club and Sam Mendes' American Beauty wrestle with the efficacy of confrontation as a means of attaining redemption from the disconnectedness and estrangement that characterises the lives of the protagonists in each of these pictures. The import that the trajectories of these characters have for the film audience will also be examined, insofar as these films are accredited by some viewers with helping to facilitate a remedy to the malaise and disaffection in their lives that these protagonists exemplify.