Fight Club: Challenging Reality

What makes "Fight Club" such a rewarding movie-going experience? To me the film's success stems from its ability to engage the audience in an artificial reality while reinforcing our "natural distance" from the character's story; the film simultaneously blurs and defines the line between artificiality and reality(Benjamin, 678). Like a snail's unique movement, the viewers both invest in the film and retract into the comfortable boundary between what  is  and what seems. Direct David Fincher achieves this dynamic through subtle and clever shifts in the camera's perspective, rapid splices of the lead character's alter-ego at seemingly arbitrary times, and the "disruption" of the film loop in a later scene that re-affirms its artificiality. 

The medium of film expands our  limited perspective to include a world that explores richer nuances of  human experience and emotion. Walter Benjamin, in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," calls film a mode of reception in which the public stands as an "absent-minded examiner" (683). While this is often the case, "Fight Club" breaks the norm by forcing the audience to explore  the same questions of reality that plague the lead character, and therefore invest themselves more completely into the film. Fincher's insertion of single-frame images of Tyler Durden initiate this exploration. Suddenly we, like the narrator, are no longer absent-minder examiners of the film and its presentation of reality; we now are subjects of it. You see the fleeting image of something in the corner of the screen, and you ask yourself: did I really just see that? Perhaps you turn to a companion to verify that they also noticed the blip. In this way you begin to question what is real and what is illusion, and your anxieties and questions mirror those of the narrator. The genius of this effect is that while the audience engages more actively in the film and its theme of actual reality vs. artificial reality, they are simultaneously reminded that "Fight Club" is in fact a constructed reproduction subject to hiccups in the reel, thus reinforcing our distance and objectivity from the film. 

The film operates on two levels; one based on the storyline, and a subtextual level questioning the nature of film itself. Film portrays reality in a context of artificiality, drawing the audience into a world where situations and perception that seem real are in fact a carefully planned fabrication that selectively presents the nuances of the human experience. According to Benjamin, "the cameraman penetrates deeply into [reality's] web" (678). The images we see on screen are the shadows on the cave---selective representations of what truly is. The strategic use of colours in the mis-en-scene, for example, visually represents two worlds and the characteristics that saturate each one. The reality of the narrator is one of bland, washed-out whites and mint greens, mirroring the monotony of his quotidian life. In his alternative reality, he becomes Tyler Durden, a colorful character who wears vibrant reds and yellows. Durden's world is one of lurid grittiness, and the colours in these scenes are brighter, the lights and darks contrasted more dramatically. This heightened contrast awakens our visual sense in the same way the alternate reality awakens the narrator from his mediocrity. 

Benjamin, who wrote his essay during the nascence of film culture in 1936, states that with the medium of film, "the audience takes the position of the camera," identifying with it instead of the actors (674). This dynamic is true of my experience when viewing "Fight Club." As the story climbs towards its climax, the narrator converges with his alter-ego who claims that Tyler was "starting to make sense." He changes from a passive observer into an active participant, and so do we through the strategic set-up of camera shots. The camera, originally a passive observer of the fights, becomes a participant, mirroring the narrator's descent into his dystopian alternate reality.  Fincher, by shifting the point of view of the camera, commits the audience to Fight Club just as the narrator has committed himself. 

When the narrator begins to lose his intimacy with his other world, he stars to question his place in it. To bring us to this similar place of detachment ,Fincher returns us to the position of spectator in the pivotal scene where Tyler addresses an unseen audience on film, stating "You are not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet." you're not you're fucking khakis. You are the all-singing all-dancing crap of the world." These lines are first delivered as if the camera were a passive bystander, yet when he delivers the final line, he looks directly into the camera. As he looks directly into the lens, or our eyes, the film frames shake, exposing the bright white of the projector light and  presenting the effect of a corrupted loop.  By addressing us, Durden breaks the natural spacial plane between film and audience, and we temporarily lose our place in between reality and artificiality. The exposure of the film's side perforations and the white projector light, however, ultimately  ground us in the reality that we are mere observers of something artificially constructed. 

The paradoxical dynamic of "Fight Club" alters how we perceive reality within and outside the movie theater. What is real, and what seems real? Through strategic shifts in camera perspective, we related closely to the anxieties of the narrator and engaged in the story line, to the point of becoming the character. At the same time, the blips and discrepancies in the film re-enforced our role as passive observers occupying the "real" world. In this way, we further invest ourselves  in the character and his anxieties  that explore this convoluted line between "real" reality and "artificial" reality.