Fight Club film discussion

Cinematically, Fight Club uses a huge amount of different techniques and devices: freeze frames, many zoom-in and panning shots, shallow-focus and processed shots, medium close-up and long/full shots; the film also has a dark tint to it all the way through that maintains a peculiar atmosphere; and also Edward Norton’s character narrates in voice-over nearly the entirety of the film. Visually and stylistically, the film is very interesting and really draws you in. The opening sequence uses super-detailed CGI to create the illusion of moving through the main character’s damaged neural networks, and many times we are pulled through a scene this way, e.g. when showing how the apartment had blown up. There are many shots where a deep chiaroscuro effect is created, like when Edward Norton’s character (who is never given his own name) and Tyler Durden are standing in the parking lot after the apartment had exploded, and Tyler says “I want you to hit me as hard as you can”. There are also throughout the beginning of the film flashes of Tyler being created, showing how the seemingly insurmountable empty demands of Edward Norton’s character’s life led to a schizophrenic split in his mind. The film creates a great dark, dirty atmosphere; lots of the lighting that creates shadow effects with a lot of shallow focus; much of the movie happens at night, reflecting Norton’s character’s insomnia.

The film did not register as dystopian in Orwell’s sense of dystopia at all; but it does create a great sense of what is written in the essay Naturalism and Dystopia of the atmosphere of living in an urban, “post-industrial, Post-Fordist … service economy”, and the emptiness of Norton’s character’s consumerist life of “working jobs we hate to buy shit we don’t need”. There is the scene where the film deals with this, re-creating how the apartment had been decorated in minute detail from Ikea catalogues; but every detail was only a kind of emotionally empty, consumerist fantasy. The emptiness of the main character’s life obviously leads to the desperate split out of which Tyler Durden was created. The film is dystopic in the sense of the crushing sense of emptiness of the main character’s life; of not being able to escape the life of some kind of worker-drone within a personality-less corporation, as shown in the conversations between him and his manager, talking in businessese. He’s a “30-year-old boy”, living alone with single-serve everything. So through Tyler he is able to break out of this life and get revenge on the corporate forces that created it.

It also seems that Marla was the last straw; as soon as he found something that gave him solace and he was able to sleep, even though it was desperately psycho that he found it in support groups for diseases, someone else ended up taking that away from him. Tyler was born full-force soon after that. It might seem funny at times to watch someone suffer so desperately like this, but the film, as stated in the essay, is a kind of “dirty realism”, where “mere ‘realism’” becomes “an outright representation of our present”, and Fight Club does this in some ways, because the film can be said to work as an extrapolation on and depiction of the real circumstances and suffering of many people under the current circumstances of post-Fordism.