Read Online Like Tears in Rain: Meditations on Science Fiction Cinema by Alex Kane - Free Book Online

when a cherry bomb explodes near his face. Lee’s mother warns him that “He won’t learn to like you . . . He’s past the point where he can learn to feel for people. He’s not interested in you, or anyone, and never will be” (271). This bit of advice foreshadows Lee’s own monstrous fate shortly before he sets out to befriend the cat, to tame it and disprove his mother’s hypothesis about the animal’s antisocial nature.
    When Lee finally gets close enough to pet the cat, he’s balanced atop a fence, and when he moves to touch it, the cat “[lashes] out with one claw” (274), and Lee “[falls] sideways into the corn” (274). Falling six feet from where he stood on the fence, “The pitchfork that lay in the corn had been there for over a decade, had been waiting for Lee since before he was born, lying flat on the earth with the curved and rusted tines sticking straight up. Lee hit it headfirst” (274). Even though the pitchfork may be seen as a symbol of the modern, traditional Satan, this scene establishes that Lee’s future misdeeds are not the product of some abstract, cosmic evil, but rather the eventual tendency of one who has suffered from childhood head trauma. Loy and Goodhew write that the essence of compassion is that “we commiserate with the suffering of another because we share in it, because we are not other than it” (32). If Hill has been successful in convincing the rest of his readership, one may argue that we feel Lee’s suffering in this one chapter of tragic insight with the same intensity that we experience Ig’s suffering throughout the rest of the novel.
    Perhaps the most potent example of Buddhist philosophy in mainstream Western culture, however, is the cult success of both the 1996 novel and 1999 film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s  Fight Club . In his introduction, Palahniuk describes the novel as “‘apostolic’ fiction—where a surviving apostle tells the story of his hero. There are two men and a woman. And one man, the hero, is shot to death . . . a classic, ancient romance but updated to compete with the espresso machine and ESPN” (xviii); but one could argue that the narrative, and the “rules” that propel it, are really a kind of Dharma, or sutra, intended to show white-collar American males a new way to live their lives free from the dissatisfaction of an empty, consumer-driven existence.
    Take the ideology of the protagonist’s “apostle,” for instance: Tyler Durden is the embodiment of the bodhisattva ideal, if one can overlook the necessity for consensual violence in the novel. Mitchell explains that the “bodhisattva life begins with what is called the ‘arising of the thought of Awakening,’ or   bodhicitta  . . . the altruistic desire, or heartfelt aspiration, to attain Buddhahood so that one can help others gain freedom from suffering” (104).
    In   Fight Club , Tyler Durden’s motivations for starting fight club, and later Project Mayhem—a kind of Zen monastic society within a soap production company within an urban terrorist organization—all stem from the most basic desire to jar hard-working, dissatisfied individuals out of their complacency and into a position where they can regain control of their lives and of their spiritual paths. Of the actual violence, the narrator explains that “Nothing was solved when the fight was over, but nothing mattered” (45). Fighting, for Tyler Durden and our unnamed narrator, is an enlightenment in itself; an escape from that which causes our suffering. The narrator describes fight club as a means of overcoming the fear that leads to  dukkha : “Most guys are at fight club because of something they’re too scared to fight. After a few fights, you’re afraid a lot less” (45). In other words, a member of fight club is not really fighting his opponent, but is conquering his own inner turmoil. It is not a contest of violence so much as it is a therapy session.
    The sense of community within