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Notes -
Before the valentine's day post massacre (never forget) I was having a conversation about Fight Club which made me want to watch it again, so two nights ago I watched it with my brother and his teenage son. My brother and I discussed if it was appropriate for my nephew to watch, given its mature content and themes, some of which would go straight over the head of teens, but I convinced him by pointing out that I watched fight club as a teen.
But I must have been arguing about it with myself in my sleep last night, because I woke up this morning with a burning conviction that I had convinced my brother to fuck up his son - does he want him to turn out to be a ridiculous nihilist misanthrope like me?!
So here's my question - can anyone think of movies with the opposite philosophy and message to fight club? I think I'll need a few of them - I imagine if there was a movie like that that did as good a job presenting its philosophy as fight club did I'd have heard of it already, but maybe we could brute force him back into sanity by inundating him with them.
You have already successfully inoculated him. If he had found Nihilism on his own, it might have intrigued him. But now it's just 'that boring movie my uncle made me watch'.
On a more serious note, the hero's journey is inherently life-affirming, so there's plenty of media to go around. Most Shounen, for example. Lord of the Rings also manages to be quite dark and somber at times while still fundamentally being about hope and progress.
This probably sounds pretentious, but if he was still at that "adults are dumb assholes with terrible taste" stage we wouldn't consider him mature enough to watch movies like fight club. He watches movies with us because whether they are good or bad we have fun watching them (we were watching fight club that night, the conversation was whether my nephew was allowed in the room.)
The cute thing about it is that I'm pretty sure the movie that convinced him adults weren't dumb assholes with terrible taste was The Shawshank Redemption, which you could definitely say my dad (his granddad) made him watch (he sat all the grandchildren down in front of it and told them they could watch it or go to bed - at 3 in the afternoon.) The thing is though, when we watched the Shawshank Redemption the first time, my brother was a little younger than his son is now - and before that film, convinced that adults were dumb assholes with terrible taste. I don't know if that movie will cure any developing teen of that issue, but it's batting 1000 in my experience.
On the more serious note, you might be right and he's already inoculated against it anyway - he spent years pretending to be Aragorn and about the only tv he watches are shounen anime.
Sounds good, just continue what you're doing honestly. In general I wouldn't worry too much about this. Aside from probably overestimating the effect of a single movie, Nihilism is not only not very appealing to begin with for the great majority of people, the larger current media landscape just doesn't lend itself very well to Nihilism. I'd be more worried about Idealism, Escapism, Hedonism and Moralism given both people's natural inclinations and the general contemporary climate.
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