So that's What Cool Is...

How much cooler can you get than a schizophrenic blowing up all the credit card companies in America? Most wouldn’t grieve the loss of all their debts in these hard economic times; in fact, many would argue it’s downright cool. Fight Club had a cool storyline, characters, and even casting.

The storyline is what has made Fight Club what it is; people love it because of the shock factor. It’s so unpredictable, and each time you watch it, you notice a new detail that adds meaning, depth, or humor to the movie. This is obviously following in the footsteps of Quentin Tarantino who popularized a discontinuous plot line. The humor and criticism in the writing is cool. The writer of the movie was willing to criticize the very people watching his movie and open their eyes to the society that they live in.

We haven’t talked too much about casting this year, likely because most of the movies we watched, the actors were pretty unfamiliar. So, in this movie, we can finally discuss casting. Brad Pitt was a great actor to choose for the “cool” character; Tyler seems to have it all together. He is what we have labeled all semester as cool. He does his own thing and has all the answers to the hard questions. He’s put together, powerful, and calm. Tyler was the perfect culmination of cool because he didn’t have materials that made him cool, which is all too often how we think of cool, he just had the “natural-seeming” cool persona.

Ask someone if they’ve seen Fight Club and the average response is something like, “Yeah! I love that movie; it’s so cool.” I’m not sure many could give you good reasons as to why it’s cool, but it just is. This is a great way to finalize cool because although we had great discussions and debates about cool throughout the class, I believe we all came to respect cool a lot more and to realize that cool is not a definite concept.

After all the movies and all the analyses, I’ve come to the conclusion that cool is indefinable. Cool is cool. It’s fleeting and ever-changing, but one thing is for sure, there is no formula for cool. Cool doesn’t discriminate on race, gender, or age; it doesn’t follow rules; it looks, feels, smells, tastes and sounds different to each individual; it will never disappear but doesn’t stay anywhere too long either. Cool is playing an eternal game of hide-and-seek with society. Good luck on your search!