Fight Club (film) Totally Explained

Everything about Fight Club Film totally explained

Fight Club is a 1999 American feature film adaptation of the 1996 novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, adapted by Jim Uhls and directed by David Fincher. The novel was optioned by producer Laura Ziskin, who hired Uhls to write the script for the film. Several directors were sought to film Fight Club; David Fincher was hired to direct based on his interest in the project despite previous difficulties with the studio 20th Century Fox. Major actors and actresses were considered by the studio to help promote the film, and actors Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter were ultimately cast into the lead roles. Fincher worked with Uhls to develop the script, seeking advice from others in the film industry and his own cast members.
Fincher described Fight Club as a black comedy that applies heavy satire; he and the cast also compared the film to The Graduate (1967) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Thematically, the film was intended to represent the conflict between a generation of young people and the value system of advertising. The film's use of violence in the fight clubs was intended to serve as a metaphor for feeling based on the generation's conflict. The nameless protagonist, portrayed by Edward Norton, is an everyman and an unreliable narrator who becomes involved in a fight club with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) and is conflicted in a relationship triangle with Durden and Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter). The director carried homoerotic overtones over from Palahniuk's novel to implement in the film, believing that the overtones would make audiences uncomfortable and thereby keep them from anticipating the twist ending.
Studio executives were not receptive to the film, and they altered Fincher's intended marketing campaign to try to recoup perceived losses. Fight Club failed to meet expectations at the box office, and the film received polarized reactions from film critics. The film was cited as one of the most controversial and talked-about films of 1999. It was perceived as crossing a milestone for visual style in cinema and introducing a new mood in American political life. The film later found commercial success with its DVD release, which established Fight Club as a cult film. The film has also permeated American society, inspiring people to set up fight clubs.

Plot

The narrator (Edward Norton) is an automobile company employee who travels to accident sites to perform product recall cost appraisals. His doctor refuses to write a prescription for his insomnia and instead suggests that he visit a support group for testicular cancer victims in order to appreciate real suffering. By attending the group, the narrator feels important and cared for and then is able to sleep soundly and subsequently fakes more illnesses so he can attend other support groups. The narrator's routine is disrupted when he begins to notice another impostor, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), at the same meetings and his insomnia returns.
   During a flight for a business trip, the narrator meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who is a soap salesman. The narrator arrives home to find his apartment has been destroyed by an explosion. He calls Tyler and meets him at a bar. Tyler agrees to let the narrator stay at his home on the condition that the narrator hits him. The narrator complies and the two end up enjoying a fist fight outside the bar. The narrator moves into Tyler's dilapidated house and the two return to the bar, where they've another fight in the parking lot. After attracting a crowd, they establish a 'fight club' in the bar's basement.
   When Marla overdoses on Xanax, she's rescued by Tyler and the two embark upon a sexual relationship. Tyler tells the narrator never to talk about him with Marla. Under Tyler's leadership, the fight club becomes "Project Mayhem," which commits increasingly destructive acts of anti-capitalist vandalism in the city. The fight clubs become a network for Project Mayhem, and the narrator is left out of Tyler's activities with the project. After an argument, Tyler disappears from the narrator's life and when a member of Project Mayhem dies on a mission, the narrator attempts to shut down the project. Tracing Tyler's steps, he travels around the country to find that fight clubs have been started in every city, where one of the participants identifies him as Tyler Durden. A phone call to Marla confirms his identity and he realizes that Tyler is an alter ego of his own split personality. Tyler appears before him and explains that he controls the narrator's body whenever he's asleep.
   The narrator faints and awakes to find Tyler has made several phone calls during his blackout and traces his plans to the downtown headquarters of several major credit card companies, which Tyler intends to destroy in order to cripple the financial networks. Failing to find help with the police, many of whom are members of Project Mayhem, the narrator attempts to disarm the explosives in the basement of one of the buildings. He is confronted by Tyler, knocked unconscious, and taken to the upper floor of another building to witness the impending destruction. The narrator, held by Tyler at gunpoint, realizes that in sharing the same body with Tyler, he's the one who is actually holding the gun. He fires it into his mouth, shooting through the cheek without killing himself. The illusion of Tyler collapses with an exit wound to the back of his head. Shortly after, members of Project Mayhem bring a kidnapped Marla to the narrator and leave them alone. The bombs detonate and, holding hands, the two witness the destruction of the entire financial city block through the windows.

Production

Development

In 1996, a 20th Century Fox book scout sent a galley proof of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club to creative executive Kevin McCormick. Despite a studio reader discouraging a film adaptation of the material, McCormick passed the proof on to producers Lawrence Bender and Art Linson, who in turn also rejected it. Producers Josh Donen and Ross Bell then expressed interest in the project and arranged unpaid screen readings with actors, initially lasting six hours, to determine the length of a script. After cutting out sections to reduce the running time and recording the dialogue, Bell sent the book on tape to Laura Ziskin, head of the division Fox 2000, who after listening to the tape purchased the rights to Fight Club for $10,000.
   To adapt the story into a screenplay, Ziskin initially considered hiring Buck Henry; Ziskin thought that Fight Club was similar to The Graduate, which had been adapted by Henry. However, a new screenwriter, Jim Uhls, began lobbying Donen and Bell to be hired to adapt the screenplay and was subsequently chosen by the producers over Henry. For directing, Bell had four options in mind: Peter Jackson, Bryan Singer, Danny Boyle, and David Fincher. Bell considered Jackson the best choice and contacted the director, but Jackson was too busy filming The Frighteners (1996) in New Zealand. Singer received the book, but didn't read it, while Boyle met with Bell and read the book, but ultimately pursued another project. Fincher, who had previously read the book and tried to buy the rights himself, talked with Ziskin about directing the film, but was hesitant to work with 20th Century Fox again after his bad experiences with the studio during Alien³ (1992). A meeting with Ziskin and studio head Bill Mechanic restored his relationship with the studio, Mechanic and Ziskin initially planned to finance the film with a $23 million budget. Norton had also been approached by other studios for leading roles in films like The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and Man on the Moon (1999), and he temporarily pursued Runaway Jury (2003) before that project fell apart. To lure him away from the other projects, Fox offered Norton a salary of $2.5 million, but Norton couldn't immediately accept, as he still owed Paramount Pictures a film. Norton therefore signed a new contract with Paramount for a lesser salary, eventually and unwillingly being cast in The Italian Job (2003).
   Actresses Courtney Love and Winona Ryder were considered to portray Marla Singer, and the studio would have cast Reese Witherspoon were it not for Fincher's objections that the actress was too young.
   To prepare for their roles, Norton and Pitt took lessons in boxing, taekwondo, and grappling, in addition to soapmaking classes from boutique company owner Auntie Godmother. For the cosmetics of his role, Pitt voluntarily visited a dentist to have pieces of his front teeth chipped off, which were restored after filming concluded.

Writing

Screenwriter Jim Uhls began working on the adaptation from an earlier draft which lacked a voice-over due to the industry's perspective at the time that the technique was "hackneyed and trite". When Fincher joined the project, he disagreed with the approach, believing that the film's humor came from the narrator's voice, and described the film without voice-over as seemingly "sad and pathetic". The director and Uhls developed the script for six to seven months, creating a third draft by 1997 that reordered the story and left out several major elements. When Pitt came on board, the actor expressed concern that Tyler Durden was too one-dimensional, so Fincher sought the advice of writer-director Cameron Crowe, who suggested giving the character more ambiguity. Fincher also hired screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker and invited Pitt and Norton to collaborate on rewriting the script, which was completed after a year of work and five drafts.
   Author Chuck Palahniuk praised the faithful film adaptation of his novel Fight Club and applauded the fact that the plot of the film was more streamlined than that of the book. Palahniuk also noted the contention over the believability for film audiences of the novel's plot twist, the inclusion of which director David Fincher supported by saying, "If they accept everything up to this point, they'll accept the plot twist. If they're still in the theater, they'll stay with it." Palahniuk was, however, annoyed by the film's change of a single ingredient in its explanation on making napalm, which rendered the recipe useless, since the author had researched the components extensively. Palahniuk's novel also contained homoerotic overtones, which the director deliberately included in the film in order to make audiences uncomfortable and thereby accentuate the surprise of the film's twists and turns. The scene in which Tyler Durden bathes next to the narrator is an example of such overtones, although Durden's insight in the scene, "I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need," was meant to suggest personal responsibility rather than homosexuality.
   At the end of the film, the narrator finds redemption in rejecting Tyler Durden's dialectic, which is a divergence from the novel's end, in which the narrator is placed in a mental institution. Norton notes the film's redemptive parallel to The Graduate, as the protagonists of both films find a middle ground between two divisions of self. The director also considered the novel too infatuated with Tyler Durden and altered the ending to pull away from him, saying, "I wanted people to love Tyler, but I also wanted them to be OK with his vanquishing."
   Filming lasted 138 days, during which Fincher shot more than 1,500 rolls of film, three times the average for a Hollywood film. To enhance the scenes, makeup artist Julie Pearce, who collaborated with the director on The Game, studied mixed martial arts and pay-per-view boxing for her work on the fighters. She also designed an extra to have a chunk missing from his ear, for which she cited Mike Tyson's bite as inspiration. To create sweat on cue, makeup artists devised two methods: spraying water over a coat of Vaseline, and using straight water for "wet sweat". Meat Loaf, who plays a member of the fight club that has "bitch tits", wore a 90-pound fat harness that gave him large breasts for the role.
   Overall production included 300 scenes, 200 locations, and complex special effects. Fincher compared Fight Club to his succeeding and less complex project Panic Room (2002), "I felt like I was spending all my time watching trucks being loaded and unloaded so I could shoot three lines of dialogue. There was far too much transportation going on."

Cinematography

Fight Club was shot in the Super 35 format to give the director maximum flexibility in composing shots. To direct the cinematography for the film, director David Fincher hired Jeff Cronenweth, the son of the late cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth with whom Fincher had collaborated for Alien³ (1992). Fincher and Cronenweth drew from elements of the visual styles that Fincher had begun exploring in Se7en and The Game. For the narrator's scenes without Tyler Durden, the look was purposely bland and realistic, while for scenes with Tyler, Fincher chose a look that was "more hyper-real in a torn-down, deconstructed sense - a visual metaphor of what [thenarrator's] heading into". Heavily desaturated colors were used in the costuming, makeup, and art direction, and the crew took advantage of as much natural and practical light at filming locations as possible. The director also took various approaches to take advantage of lighting situations in the film's scenes, and several practical locations were chosen for the city lights' effects on the shots' backgrounds. Fluorescent lighting at practical locations was also embraced to maintain an element of reality and to light the prosthetics of the characters' injuries appropriately.
The film's title sequence is a 90-second pullback scene from the fear center of the narrator's brain, representing the thought processes initiated by the narrator's fear impulse. and the design was detailed using renderings by medical illustrator Kathryn Jones. The pullback sequence from within the brain to the outside of the skull included neurons, action potentials, and a hair follicle. Concerning the artistic license that Fincher took with the shot, Haug explained, "While he wanted to keep the brain passage looking like electron microscope photography, that look had to be coupled with the feel of a night dive—wet, scary, and with a low depth of field." The shallow depth of field was accomplished with the process of ray tracing.

Intended themes

Values

The unreliable narrator isn't immediately aware that Tyler Durden is, in fact, himself, Contrarily, the narrator's physical condition worsens while Tyler Durden's appearance improves. Although Tyler initially embarks on a journey with the narrator in desiring the "real experiences" of actual fights, he eventually becomes a Nietzschean model that manifests the nihilistic attitude of rejecting and destroying institutions and value systems. His impulsive nature, representing the id, Nevertheless, Fight Club was originally slated to be released in July 1999, later changed to August 6, 1999. The studio further delayed the film's release, this time to autumn, due to a crowded summer schedule and a hurried post-production process, although outsiders attributed the delays to the Columbine High School massacre earlier in the year.
Marketing executives at Twentieth Century Fox faced difficulties in marketing Fight Club and at one point considered marketing it as an art film. Because of the film's violence, they considered it primarily geared toward male audiences and believed that not even the presence of Brad Pitt would attract female filmgoers. Research testing showed that the film appealed to teenagers. Fincher refused to let the posters and trailers focus on Brad Pitt and encouraged the studio to hire the advertising firm Wieden+Kennedy to devise a marketing plan. The firm came up with a bar of pink soap as the film's main marketing image, which was considered "a bad joke" by Fox executives. Fincher also released two early trailers in the form of faux public service announcements presented by Pitt and Norton which the studio considered as inappropriate introductions to the movie. Instead, the studio financed a $20 million large-scale campaign to provide a press junket, posters, billboards, and trailers for TV that highlighted the film's fight scenes. Fight Club was also advertised on cable during World Wrestling Federation broadcasts, which Fincher protested, believing that the placement created the wrong context for the film. The studio had hired the National Research Group to test screen the film, and the group had indicated that the film would gross between $13 million and $15 million for its opening weekend. Fight Club commercially opened in the United States and Canada on October 15, 1999 and earned $11,035,485 in 1,963 theaters over the opening weekend, placing it at #1 for the weekend and ahead of Double Jeopardy and The Story of Us, a fellow weekend opener. The gender mix of audiences for Fight Club, initially argued to be "the ultimate anti-date flick", was 61% male and 39% female, with 58% of audiences below the age of 21. Despite the top placement, its opening reception had fallen short of the studio's expectations, and over the second weekend, Fight Club dropped 42.6% in revenue, earning $6,335,870. The film, whose production budget was $63 million, went on to gross $37,030,102 during its theatrical run in the United States and Canada and earned $100,853,753 in theaters worldwide.
For the UK release of Fight Club on November 12, 1999, the British Board of Film Classification removed two scenes involving "an indulgence in the excitement of beating a (defenseless) man's face into a pulp" and awarded the film an 18 certificate, limiting the release to adult-only audiences in the UK. The BBFC didn't censor any further, having considered and dismissed claims that Fight Club contained "dangerously instructive information" and could "encourage anti-social [behavior]". As the board noted, "The film as a whole is—quite clearly—critical and sharply parodic of the amateur fascism which in part it portrays. Its central theme of male machismo (and the anti-social behaviour that flows from it) is emphatically rejected by the central character in the concluding reels."

Home media

The DVD for Fight Club was one of the first to be supervised by the film's director and was released in two editions. Working on the DVD for Fight Club was a way for the director to finish his vision for the film. 20th Century Fox's senior vice president of creative development, Julie Markell, explained how the DVD packaging complemented the vision: "The film is meant to make you question. The package, by extension, tries to reflect an experience that you must experience for yourself. The more you look at it, the more you'll get out of it." The packaging was developed for two months by the studio. The single-disc edition included a commentary track, while the two-disc special edition included the commentary track, multiple behind-the-scenes clips, deleted scenes, trailers, public service announcements, the promotional music video "This is Your Life", Internet spots, still galleries, cast biographies, story boards, and publicity materials. When the two-disc special edition DVD was first released, it was uniquely packaged to look covered in brown cardboard wrapper. Markell elaborated, "We wanted the package to be simple on the outside, so that there would be a dichotomy between the simplicity of brown paper wrapping and the intensity and chaos of what's inside." Fight Club won the 2000 Online Film Critics Society Awards for Best DVD, Best DVD Commentary, and Best DVD Special Features, while Entertainment Weekly ranked the film's two-disc edition #1 in its 2001 list of "The 50 Essential DVDs", giving top ratings to the DVD's content and technical picture-and-audio quality. In 2004, after the two-disc edition went out of print, the studio decided to re-release it due to fans' requests. The film grossed $55 million in video and DVD rentals. In March 2007, a two-disc DVD edition was also released in the UK, featuring four audio commentaries and restoring the two scenes previously cut by the British Board of Film Classification.

Reception

Critical reaction

Fight Club was considered one of the most controversial and talked-about films of 1999. The film has been perceived as the forerunner of a new mood in American political life. Like other 1999 films Magnolia, Being John Malkovich, and Three Kings, Fight Club has also been recognized as an innovation in cinematic form and style. Following its initial release, Fight Club grew in popularity via word of mouth, and the positive reception of the DVD established it as a cult film that Newsweek conjectured would enjoy "perennial" fame. The success of the film has also propelled the novel's author Chuck Palahniuk to global renown.
The film has spawned several actual fight clubs in America since its release. A "Gentleman's Fight Club" was started in Menlo Park, California in 2000 and has members mostly from the high tech industry. Teens and preteens in Texas, New Jersey, Washington state, and Alaska also initiated fight clubs and posted videos of their fights online, leading authorities to break up the clubs. In 2006, an unwilling participant from a local high school was injured at a fight club in Arlington, Texas, and the DVD sales of the fight led to the arrest of six teenagers. An unsanctioned fight club was also started at Princeton University, and matches were held on campus. The film has also been suspected of influencing Luke Helder, a college student who planted pipe bombs in mailboxes in 2002. Helder's goal was to create a smiley pattern on the map of the United States, similar to the scene in Fight Club in which a building is vandalized to have a smiley on its exterior.
According to actor Edward Norton, his old professor from Yale University has reported being inundated with dissertations about Fight Club. In addition, the film has been parodied in a re-cut trailer that converted the storyline into a "quirky love story" between Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter's characters. The Wall Street Journal noted that this parody trailer was "dominated by a distinctly nonprofessional voiceover".

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