Insanity In Fight Club

In the 1994 movie Fight Club director David Fincher tells the story of a mans descent into insanity, through his creation of an underground fight scene, as well as a criminal organization tasked with disrupting the world’s consumer culture. Fincher deals with these topics of insanity and consumer culture through editing techniques, such as the use of film shake when Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) addresses the audience, or the splicing in of Tyler’s image in the beginning of the film when The Narrator (Edward Norton) begins to lose his sanity due to his insomnia. Fincher also employs distinct uses of color and lighting throughout the movie; such as the use between the yellows and oranges of incandescent lights to that of the bight white high key

As well as strategic placement of lighting that symbolize the difference between the consumer culture and that of the counterculture Tyler promotes. This ultimately culminates with a fourth wall break that is meant to attack the audience on their assumed complacency in life; it conveys that despite our efforts, our material items do not build us an identity nor are they tied with true happiness. We are as Tyler Durden says, “The all singing all dancing crap of the world”. As the scene begins we see Typer pull the convenience store clerk, who we come to know as Raymond K Hessel, into an alley behind his store and proceeds to hold him at gun point while hes asks questions about his life. What we learn is that Raymond dropped out of school, pursuing a degree in biology to become a vet, because it cost too much money. Shot lengths during this interaction are never more than two seconds long, the only exception here is when Tyler tells Raymond that he will die where the shot length is 5 seconds. By keeping the shot length shot and using jump cuts between every shot a tension is built. This culminates with Tyler telling Raymond that if he doesn't go pursue his goals,

David Fincher represents this fall through a few subtle editing techniques as well as a diegetic reference in the film. To start, early in the film we learn Tyler Durden is a film projectionist who takes pleasure in inserting single frames of pornography throughout various filmstrips. The connection here being, that Tyler or in particular The Narrator’s insomnia is essentially splicing in objects that do not exist or do not belong, similar to Tyler’s profession as film projectionist. This use of splicing is seen early on when The Narrator is discussing his insomnia, or the effects of his insomnia. It is at these times that we see images of Tyler spliced into the film for only a frame or two. This happens four or five times, before we are officially introduced to Tyler, at the point in which we can assume The Narrator’s insomnia has fully taken