The Opening
'The sequence, which was digitally created from a series of still photographs, is both astonishing and oddly mundance in the sense that it's a fair representation of the visual component of everyday thought processes.' [2] '...it does seem transgressive to put a brain on the screen as an exhibit - especially when the exhibit is connected to the loss of self, in particular the loss of masculine self.' [2]Identity
Many people defined the alter-ego as a very unpredictable plot twist, however, if you listen really carefully, the first hint is already there in the opening, approximately 2 minutes in, when Jack (Edward Norton) says 'I know this, because Tyler knows this'. Second hint the flashing up one-second images of Tyler (Brad Pitt) in his red jacket at places where he's not even supposed to be. Third hint later on is when Marla asks after a cancer meeting 'It doesn't have your name. Who are you? Any of the stupid names you give each night?'. The rest is muffled by the sound of traffic and interrupted by a jump cut. Of course, later we discover that Jack introduced himself to her as Tyler Durden. Fourth hint when Jack is on his business trip and says 'If you wake up in a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?'. The drumming pattern in the music here changes which indicates that crucial information was told. Fifth hint is when Tyler tells him how he fucked Marla, Jack sighs 'I already knew the story before he told it to me'. Sixth is when Jack is chasing Tyler and flies criss-cross America and says 'wherever I went I felt like I've already been there'.Masculinity
Tyler: 'We're a generation raised by women'.And remember the dying Chloe, who just wanted to 'get laid for the last time'.
Society
Jack:'You feel like people really listen instead of...' Marla finishes the sentence '...instead of just waiting for their turns to talk'.'Society in a Fincher film is an urban nightmare labyrinth disrupted by the seething, denatured and corralled male ego it was built to control. The difference with Fight Club is that nearly every other male in the film feels the same way as the potagonist.' [1]
Insanity
We know it since Shakespeare, that harsh social/political criticism is often given into the mouth of a mad person (see Hamlet, King Lear's Fool, Poor Tom and many others). Well, Fight Club is an American movie, which provides an 'unamerican' social criticism, therefore it is very daring. To associate acts of terrorism with a completely sane person in the USA would be stupidly brave from a film-maker.Love
Sigmund Freud defined love as 'temporary insanity', which, by accident, perfectly matches the theme of this movie. Even at the beginning love becomes the central motivation when Jack confesses that 'suddenly I realized, that all of this, the gun, the bombs, the revolution...it's got something to do with a girl named Marla Singer'. Because he re-starts the story at multiple times, the appearance of Marla is postponed, therefore it has the utmost importance. It is possible that all of Fight Club, and what it became, Project Mayhem started out from the childish attempt to impress this one girl. Her hilarious appearance at the testicular cancer meeting reflects both her lies and her strange habit of going to places where normal people wouldn't.Philosophy
'Marla's philosophy of life is that she might die any minute. The tragedy, she says, is that she didn't.'.Technology
'We got a Nikon and took photographs looking out of a window down the street. We took them from every floor. And then we mapped them on to simple geometric shapes and did an incredibly fast camera movement over them, and it just drops.' [2]The ending
'Fincher ends Fight Club with the Pixies' recording of 'Where Is My Mind'. That's not all that's gone missing.' [2]Reviews
'This is a movie that makes your skin crawl in a strangely delectable way.' [1]'The hitting makes a sly, seductive spectacle of lightweight masochism, homoerotic display and sardonic wit. Later, in one horrific scene of unhingement, it is brutally sadistic. But it remains a baffling just-plausible compulsion.' [1]
'So Fight Club is all of the following: a conspiracy thriller that never leaves the splashy imagination of a paranoid narrator; a value-free vessel that offers conflicting views on Nietzschean ideas about men and destruction; a dazzling entertainment that wants us to luxuriate in violence as we condemn it; a brilliant solution to depicting the divided self as a protagonist; and proof that Brad Pitt, as well as Edward Norton, can really act.' [1]
'Still, one needs a new vocabulary to describe the vertiginous depoction of space and time in Fight Club. Pans and tilts and tracks just won't do.' [2]
Director David Fincher
Other films: Se7en, The Game, The Curious Life of Benjamin Button, Being John Malkovich.Fincher and Spike Jonze, who directed Malkovich, are colleagues in the production company Propaganda Films, so it's not surprising they share an idea or two. And perhaps these films are no more than another turn of the screw in Frankenstein or heady aspirations on Face Off. [2]
Sources:
1. Sight&Sound, Dec. 1999. review by Charles Whitehouse
2. Sight&Sound, Nov. 1999.
