David Fincher’s 1999 film adaptation of the Chuck Palahniuk novel Fight Club provides a uniquely slick, stylish filmic presentation of the book’s gritty, darkly comic sensibilities. Tracking the life of a disillusioned, emasculated, narrator (known only as Jack in the film, played by Edward Norton) and his newfound rebellion against the existential crises of modern American life with the help of charismatic lowlife Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), Fight Club explores both the immense appeal of rebelling against the hegemonic systems set up for men in late capitalist society and the unique beauty and eroticism of masculinity. Director David Fincher’s use of dark, grimy mise-en-scene and slick cinematography in Fight Club effortlessly explores its intense, macabre fascination with the dark underbelly of urban America.
One of the film’s central twists is that the alluring Tyler Durden is, actually, a figment of Jack’s imagination – his id run rampant in an attempt to break himself free of the boring postmodern anxieties that cripple him as a man and as a human being. Fincher’s cinematic approach is to inform the audience in bits and pieces, sometimes revisiting shots or moments to lend further clarity to the mystery. The first act of the film, before Jack meets Tyler, is filled with subliminal, single-frame images of Tyler interspersed within Jack’s field of view. Tyler will pop on screen and off again behind a desk at work, down an alleyway next to the church where Jack attends his support groups, or in the background of a hotel advertisement commercial. These moments are placed in the early film as indicators of Tyler’s increased presence in Jack’s psyche, his increasing desire to escape the everyday and inject some spontaneity and adventure in his life.
Once the twist is revealed later, some of Jack’s scenes with Tyler are shown again, Fincher keeping the exact same cinematography and camera movement, but replacing Pitt with Norton or just showing Norton in the frame. By maintaining this consistent cinematic language, but eliminating or adding Tyler as needed, Tyler himself becomes a ghostlike figure throughout the film – the kind of thing he might splice into the movies he plays as one of his frequent pranks in his day job as a projectionist. During one of his diatribes, Tyler even speaks directly to the audience, the force of his speech making the film reel itself shift and shake. Through these efforts, Fincher depicts Tyler as a trickster god of sorts, ruling over the diegesis of the film by existing somehow above and beyond Fight Club’s reality.
In some of the early scenes, and the occasional scene in which the fight club members must interact with people in the ordinary world, those are filmed with an alienating modernity. Fincher chooses extremely static wide shots, often capturing slick modernist architecture, to paint these environments and people as extremely orthodox and uncreative. Jack’s office is mostly white, everyone wears oxford-cloth ties and looks impeccable. Corporate architecture (like a giant golden globe that is vandalized in a later scene by Jack and Tyler’s Project Mayhem group of anarchists) are depicted as clean and flawless. However, the presence of these people break up the serenity and perfection of the regular world; the globe is taken into a coffee shop, and the numerous times in which Jack’s Oxford-cloth button-down shirt is caked with blood are visual reminders of the ugly, yet vibrant world that Jack inhabits in contrast to the day-to-day boredom of corporate America.
In contrast to the stiff, orderly nature of Jack’s office life and the ongoing lives of the people around him, Jack’s world is dimly lit, coated in dark, bleak colors to reflect his night-based insomnia. This is most closely seen after Jack moves in with Tyler at his abandoned house in which he squats; with no utilities, the squatters sit around in filthy bathtubs, lumpy beds and flooded basements, Fincher’s sharply detailed camera capturing it all. Dim lighting indicates a lack of electricity in the house, and the scenes themselves are perpetually in a brown or green color, making his own world feel sick. At the same time, as Jack learns to be free of the burdens of material consumption and the creature comforts, this cinematography becomes strangely normal as the audience member becomes accustomed to it. To that end, Fincher immerses the audience in the disgusting world of Jack and Tyler, and, as Jack notes, making them believe that “Losing all hope was freedom.”
Fincher makes heavy use of CGI in Fight Club to accomplish incredibly detailed and precise simulations of the kinds of objects that serve (or fail) people in their everyday modern lives. Numerous moments in the film serve as small vignettes by which the mundane details of ordinary American life are blown up and elevated to a frightening, overwhelming degree. One early shot in the film tracks out from Jack’s trash can – McDonald’s wrappers, a Starbucks coffee cup, and other branded objects loom in front of the viewer in seemingly immense size, the camera slowly panning out from the bottom of the trash can to visualize Jack’s monologue about “Planet Starbucks.” When Jack explains the details about how his refrigerator and stove blew up his apartment, Fincher zooms and tracks the camera through a CGI representation of the appliances at great speed and scale.
As he describes his obsession with home shopping, Fincher slowly pans around his apartment, which rapidly fills the apartment along with floating representations of the IKEA descriptions and prices, illustrating his increasing definition of himself by the things he buys and furnishes his home with. Even the film’s opening title sequence zooms out from a single synapse in Jack’s brain (the source of Tyler, Project Mayhem and the story itself) out through his brain and down the barrel of the gun shoved between his teeth, where the film begins. These elements all demonstrates Jack’s immense imagination, as well as his tremendous neuroticism at the elements of postmodern American life that bring him anxiety.
In addition to these representations of modern life, the male body (and masculinity itself) is eroticized in very unconventional ways throughout the film. Numerous shots display Brad Pitt’s Adonis-like physique, often in the dim light of the fight club itself. One particularly dreamlike love scene between Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter’s character Marla Singer emphasizes his abs and the sexual attractiveness of both people – the sequence is framed as a fading dream from Jack’s part, showing his own preoccupation with Tyler. The mise-en-scene around Tyler constantly emphasizes his allure, whether it is through his unconventional wardrobe choices (often wearing bolder, brighter colors and outfits than all the other characters) or the consistent low frames and medium shots to show off Pitt’s physique. At all turns, Pitt is a sexualized figure, inviting the audience (and the other men in the film) to worship him not just as a guru, but as an object of attraction.
The fights in the club themselves are depicted in slow motion, Fincher’s camera capturing the sweat and grit of huddled, excited men, creating a decidedly erotic display that manages to combine the horror of violence with the enticement of sexuality. Pitt, standing in the dim spotlights of the fight club, often with his shirt off or midriff exposed, is subjected to a form of gaze that is often reserved for beautiful women in films, as is many of the other men in the fight club scenes (King 368). During Jack’s over-the-top fight with Angel Face (Jared Leto), Fincher often cuts to POV shots of Angel Face being pummeled by Jack, the lens blurring with the sweat and fluid that the character is losing in the fight. By subverting the gaze to make the men be the eroticized figures in such a male-centric movie, the lines between male bonding and homoeroticism are blurred to an incredible and compelling degree.
All of these elements – the dark cinematography, schizophrenic cutting and moments of striking homoerotic intimacy – are most closely personified in the chemical burn scene in which Tyler burns Jack’s hand in order to convince him that he must let go of his obsession with material wealth and physical perfection. When Jack gives Tyler his hand, Tyler wets his lips and kisses it, Fincher framing this in a profiled close-up that makes the gesture look deeply intimate and prophetic, almost as if Jack were being anointed. When Tyler pours the chemicals on Jack’s hand, Jack crumbles in pain to his knees, immediately giving up the power relationship, while Tyler stands up and holds tight onto Jack’s hand, Fincher framing him so he now has the power.
Jack’s attempts to use guided meditation and find his ‘power animal’ are quickly edited into the darkly lit scene, the flash of a serene forest brightly lit with an intense, saturated green that starkly contrasts with the dark basement. Fincher quickly robs us of that catharsis by cutting back to Tyler, who wants Jack (and the audience) to remain in this painful, uncomfortable moment. Each time Jack cuts back to something different, the flashes are almost subliminal, lasting less than a second before Tyler yells, throws something or drags Jack’s arm further along the table that divides them. “Don’t deal with this the way those dead people do!” he shouts at Jack, Fincher cross-cutting between them in medium, over-the-shoulder shots to capture the conversation.
The turning point for the scene (and Jack’s perspective) comes when Tyler tells him, “First, you have to know, not fear, know that someday you are gonna die.” From here, the shots of Tyler and Jack become extreme closeups, almost matching eyelines to make the viewer a more immediate part of the scene. Once Jack eventually gives in to Tyler’s philosophy and ‘lets go’ of his need to play it safe through life, Fincher signifies this by panning from Jack’s face down to his burning, sizzling hand – the first time the audience has really seen the burn as it is happening. We also see Tyler’s hand letting go of Jack’s, Fincher capturing this subtle gesture of faith and commitment. Cutting back to a low-angle medium shot of Tyler standing tall (having won the exchange), he opens the vinegar and pours it on Jack’s hand to neutralize the burn. Falling to the ground, Fincher cuts to a medium shot of the prone Jack, yellow light crossing his face in a moment of grotesque beauty. This scene, and the intimacy of Tyler and Jack’s exchanges, highlight the fundamental themes of the film and of Tyler’s philosophy, likening the appeal of existential nihilism with the incredible intimacy of Jack and Tyler’s relationship.
All of these cinematographic and mise-en-scene-related decisions contribute to the film’s continuation of the book’s obsession with violence as it is connected with masculinity. Throughout the story, the overall anxiety Jack conveys is a fundamental unease with the way his life is going – a life dictated by late 20th-century norms of emotional unavailability, conspicuous consumption and materialism, as well as sexual frustration and the inappropriateness of violence. Tyler’s presence within the film disrupts this world, showing Jack a world where he can let go of these behavioral restrictions, free himself of the inherent violent impulses he feels as a man, and gains a sense of fulfillment and catharsis from them. By immersing the frame and the mise-en-scene with all manner of filthy colors, dirt, grime and blood, Fincher conveys Tyler’s ethos that men do not need things to be perfect – that perfect is the enemy of living. Just as Tyler gives the chemical burn to Jack so he can have a scar and forget being perfect, Fincher’s green sickliness and dim lighting echoes Tyler’s own disregard for aesthetics and modernity.
Fincher’s adaptation of Fight Club is a masterful exploration of the male body and male sexuality, offering an abjectly seductive escape from the doldrums of everyday living through the freedom of escape, violence and mayhem. As a result, the film successfully adapts the dark, detail-oriented sense of humor found in Palahniuk’s novel into a slick, stylized package that seductively teases the audience with the slick appeal of Brad Pitt’s character while consistently reminding you of the ugliness of the life he lives (and wishes to foist on others). Distinct contrasts are made between the shiny industrial world of ordinary life and the dirtier, but truer, life of Tyler and the men of Project Mayhem. While the film ideologically weaves between these two perspectives, its frenetic, schizophrenic editing and sickly cinematography showcase a world that can be both alluring in its bohemian rebellion and immensely unsettling at the same time.
Works Cited
Fincher, David (dir.). Fight Club. Perf. Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter. 20th
Century Fox, 1999.
King, Claire Sisco. "It cuts both ways: Fight Club, masculinity, and abject
hegemony." Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6.4 (2009): 366-385.
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. W.W. Norton, 1996.
