Social Monsters: a Social View of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and David Fincher’s Fight Club

Social Monsters: A Social View of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and David Fincher’s Fight Club The pressures of today’s social issues have made us within society so insane that we are compelled to create monsters of ourselves and view our lives as God like and perfect in order for us to survive. Victor Frankenstein from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Narrator from David Fincher’s Fight Club thought so. They both were so desperate to extract a purpose of being from the shackles that society had placed upon them they tried to find a sense of being, love and purpose within themselves and were blind to the affections of others around them. Victor Frankenstein was so distraught over his mother’s death that he became obsessed with the power of creation in his yearning to cheat death. The Narrator, was tranquilized and numbed by modern life and its possessions that he longed to be someone else, someone free of society’s stranglehold’s and the need of possessions. These two characters are much like us in society today. We are all lost in the stigma society places upon us to look and act like someone else. Longing to be free of the constraints society has placed upon us of being shackled down by our possessions and obsessions. We have accepted these pressures placed upon us which society uses to define us as a person and how we live today. We are pawns of what society dictates, which creates the social monster within all of us. Like these two characters, each of us has a social monster inside us that desires to be free. For some, it could be the social monster of The Narrator, who feels the need to destroy the things in a society that have shackled him. For others it could be the Frankenstein Monster who on the outside looks hideous but has a loving, compassionate side that society does not get to see because of the way they have perceived him. Much like the racial and gender profiling of today or the way society has a perception of a so called

Cited: Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. Perf. Brad Pit and Edward Norton. Twentieth Century Fox, 1999 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Dir. Kenneth Branagh. Perf. Robert De Niro and Kenneth Branagh. TriStar Pictures. 1994 The Holy Bible. New International Version. Michigan: Zondervan, 2001