In Fight Club Brad Pitt saw the stagnation of the modern Western male as a problem that could only be overcome by returning to our primal patterns, which is to say fist-fighting. “We have no Great War, no Great Depression,” he preached. “We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.” In a vicarious way, the post-zombie society has the same rejuvenating effect as the punch to the face that Pitt advocates. It’s the ultimate “fuck you” to our humdrum workaday lives. If flesh-eating zombies ruled the earth, we’d all become action heroes just by getting out of bed each day. 
I think we can’t overestimate the degree to which this kind of cinematic storytelling has shaped the modern American consciousness. Not “cinematic” in the strict sense of images on celluloid, but this particular brand of narrative that is grandiose, symbolic, and—to use that finest of clichés—“larger than life.” Had cinema never been invented there is no doubt we would still have campfire accounts of our own Revolution, of the struggles of the Depression, and of the horror of World War II. (Not to mention the time when your cousin Joey set the living room couch on fire, etc.) Storytelling is in our nature. But it seems to me that the compulsion to render our own stories in surpassingly epic terms is a uniquely modern phenomenon, a byproduct of the ubiquity of the Hollywood version of history—where nothing from Pearl Harbor to child kidnapping is complete without someone outrunning an explosion. 

We also have access to more stories than ever before. Whereas the campfire sessions throughout history were largely limited to local lore or family histories, now there isn’t a war, plane crash, hostage-taking, disease outbreak, multiple homicide, or military coup that goes unreported. We are inundated with stories that are “newsworthy,” which is to say outlandish or grotesque in some fashion or another, and we have become hardly interested in stories which are quiet, thoughtful, or—horror of horrors!—ordinary. Yasujiro Ozu made films for 30 years that were about families, feelings, and the passage of time, and today almost no one has heard of him. 

The will to create our own narratives is also a uniquely privileged drive. I’ve just finished reading Dalton Conley’s achingly insightful autobiographical novel Honky, in which he observes that one of the simplest differences between white people and not—as well as between middle-class and not—is that white people get to tell their own stories about who they are and how they got here, whereas everyone else’s stories are pre-packaged by the media. And white people lately (substitute “men” of any color in the case of the rest of the world) seem to be trying desperately to paint their stories with the kind of grandiose strokes culled from our most epic historical narratives. 

This isn’t precisely a new phenomenon, of course. The enduring allure of the Christian Rapture, no doubt, is that it transforms the ordinary life of the believer into a tale of great melodrama at the end of which lies the most awesome spectacle of all time. As a Christian, Mrs. Pembrooke of Hillhurst Lane isn’t just a dental hygienist; she’s one of a legion of soldiers pitted against the ultimate evil, whose redemption will come in a whirlwind of spirits rising into the air amid the demise of billions of sinners. Sounds pretty cool, huh?