Fight Club and Auteur Theory

The following is an essay I wrote for a film class in my freshman year of college. It is not a review or analysis of the 1999 film Fight Club, but rather an analysis of director David Fincher's method of visual storytelling. SPOILERS ABOUND!

To hell with Rules #1 and #2.

Tyler Durden, (Brad Pitt), a physical embodiment of anarchy and hyper-masculinity, is standing in the scummy basement of a local bar. He is surrounded by men, ages ranging from early 20s to mid 40s. All of them are shirtless and barefoot. Their faces are covered in open cuts, swollen bruises, and scars. Many of them have black eyes.

“I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived,” Tyler tells his disciples. “I see all this potential, and I see squandering. An entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war, our Great Depression is our lives. 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. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

This quote from the film’s gradual antagonist reveals the heart of David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club. At first glace, the film may seem like a movie about an underground boxing organization that grows out of control, but when one watches the movie what they are actually seeing is a cathartic expression of frustration against American consumerist culture. It is also an excellent example of David Fincher’s ability as an auteur.

Andrew Sarris states that a director must include interior meaning in his film. Fight Club is a film packed with meaning. It appears in the settings, the surroundings, and the actions of the characters. At the start of the film, the unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) is an identity-less and unsatisfied insomniac who tried to fill the void in his life by purchasing new material goods to furnish his apartment with. He is literally trying to purchase his identity. In one shot he looks at an Ikea catalogue sideways, as if he had reached the centerfold of a pornographic magazine. He is fetishizing his comforts, and this leaves him feeling empty. As his voice-over narration says, “I had a house full of condiments, but no food." When the narrator, Tyler, and the rest of the fight club meet in the bar basement every Saturday night to beat each other up, they are reaffirming their humanity – and masculinity - through the most visceral way possible: pain.

In another scene, Tyler marks his followers by kissing their hands, and pouring lye on the wet spot, chemically burning his kiss into their flesh. The scar left behind resembles a vagina.

In this way, Tyler is offering rebirth through pain. With this rebirth comes new, invigorated life. With this new life, the men begin Project Mayhem, a mission to corrupt the false comforts of consumerist society. They start off small, doing such things as urinating in the soup at fancy restaurants and splicing single frames of pornography into family friendly films, but eventually escalate into pulling off acts of terrorism, threatening to castrate – and therefore emasculate - anyone who stands in their way. At the end of the film, several major banking buildings are destroyed. The men of Project Mayhem, who represent the frustrated everyday American, get what they want, but this moment of catharsis is undermined by a single frame shot of a man’s penis as the film ends. The film being a product of consumerist culture, it is corrupted as well.

Sarris states an auteur must show technical competence and prove they can create something beyond “elementary flair for the cinema." David Fincher is competent in his ability as a director to pull excellent performances out of the actors in this film, but he also shows great technique in his presentation of the film’s narrative. The opening scene – the narrator bound to a chair while Tyler holds a gun in his mouth in a building rigged with explosives - takes place at the end of the film. Already Fincher has the viewer’s attention. The viewer now knows that Tyler will be the antagonist, and wonders what series of events led to this moment. The film flashes back to the start of the narrative, but the flashbacks do not end there.

There is a scene that flashes back to the previous night to explain how Marla Singer ended up at the narrator’s house that he shares with Tyler, and another to explain why he wound up in group therapy lying about having testicular cancer.

There is a huge plot twist in the third act of the film: Tyler Durden and the narrator are the same person, Tyler merely being a split personality. Fincher built to this twist excellently with subtle foreshadowing, but employed just enough restraint so that it was not obvious. When they meet on an airplane, Tyler and the narrator have the same briefcase. Later, Tyler speaks to the narrator through a payphone that does not accept incoming calls. When Tyler is punched in the stomach in one scene, the narrator – who is clearly visible but not in the focal point of the shot - reacts as though he was punched as well. (Pay close attention at the (0:46) mark in the clip below.)

Finally, in keeping with Sarris’ take on auteur theory, David Fincher’s unique cinematic voice shines through in this film. Like most directors, Fincher has trademarks that he slips into almost every one of his films. In Fight Club, Fincher employs an excessive fluid tracking shot in the opening scene. The camera pans down from an office where Tyler Durden is looking out a window down to a parking garage, through a van, and then through another building, revealing to us the explosives at the building’s foundation, and revealing to the audience that the movie is going to be about more than an underground boxing club.

Fincher’s films often heavily employ grimy environments and dark color palattes. His color palatte normally consists of black and another base color. In Fight Club, he often employs blues, reds, and golds. As for the grimy settings, they typically show up in scenes where Tyler is present, or in the places fight club and Project Mayhem members convene. These areas are dimly lit and radiate a feeling of uncleanliness, as though if you walked in with an open wound, it would almost certainly become infected. This is in stark contrast to the clean, orderly, well-lit environments of the narrator’s office and apartment, environments the narrator rejects when he meets Tyler Durden. This is because in Tyler’s world, things are not clean and orderly. “In the world I see,” he tells the narrator, “you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway."

Fincher expertly fills Sarris’ three concentric circles of auteur their with Fight Club, an excellent piece of filmmaking and a modern classic.