Rage

The overpowering surge of feeling that I experienced just a few minutes ago was rage. It wasn't the first time that I have experienced it.

I was at work, in my comfortable and well paid 9-5 office job, when it came over me like a wave breaking on a beach. The trigger was reading an email that related to a piece of work I had done yesterday, but the underlying cause was more seismic in nature: a grating rumble that welled and rippled from the deep until it broke out of my visage and crashed into the environment around me.

The result wasn't spectacular in any objective sense. I screwed up the email and threw it across the desk. I then stewed for a few moments, feeling the hate and anger swell in my stomach, then my chest and then my face. My senses sharpened and my muscles tensed and I little part of my snapped; I had to get out.

I grabbed my computer card, my pass and my bag and walked. I walked out of the building, up the road and into a small local coffee shop, which is where I am now. I will have to go back soon, before I am missed.

Rage in the movies:

A good example of rage, the sort of rage I can identify with, is exemplified in a scene from the 1999 film 'Fight Club', directed by David Fincher (buy it here).

The film is about an underground club where men from all walks of modern life come together to fight each other, not out of hate but out of a need to be men. As with boxing or rugby, the violence is a release more than anything else and members are friends when not fighting.

Edward Norton's character, a founding member of the Fight Club, fights an young blond man, brutally beating him around the face until he is dragged away by onlookers. Norton's alter ego, played by Brad Pitt, casually asks 'what got into you, psycho?' As Norton storms out of the scene, the rage only just beginning to dissipate, he replies 'I wanted to destroy something beautiful'.

That isn't to say that rage is always about wishing to destroy something beautiful, more often than not it is about wishing to destroy something ugly, but it does reflect the irrational will to destruction that is rage. As the film develops we come to see that, at heart, the rage of Edward Norton's character is ultimately a rage within, and directed against, himself.