23 years after Fight Club: why is it a classic?

American director David Fincher is known for his critically acclaimed films. One of his most famous movies, Fight Club, has just turned 23 years old.

Although the psychological thriller was first received by critics for being shocking following its theatrical release, it became a classic due to the astonishing directing and the complexity of the main characters.

Fight Club is about an unreliable narrator with a split personality disorder.

The Narrator, an automobile recall specialist, is unfulfilled by his job and possessions and suffers from chronic insomnia.

To cure this, he attends support groups, posing as a sufferer of diseases. His newly found bliss is disturbed when another impostor, Marla Singer, begins attending the same groups. The two agree to split which groups they attend.

The narrator forms an underground fight club with Taylor Durden that evolves into much more.

At the end of the movie, held at gunpoint, the nameless narrator discovers that he and his beloved friend, the co-founder of the fight club, are the same person.

The movie roots for ‘anti conformist’ and stands against prevailing ideas and practices.

Fincher attempted to show two contrasting worldviews throughout different sets to define the characters by their environment.

Fight Club went from being hated, unappreciated, and heavily criticized when it first came out to gaining the correct credentials and worth over time.

Being a dark comedy narrated by a very unreliable narrator (which was hinted at throughout the whole movie yet the spectators only knew it for sure at the end of the movie), it tells a very twisted love story that kept the audience engaged.

Each and every single shot offers crucial details which makes the plot resolution very satisfying.

The pace was fast considering how long the movie is.

One of the streets talked about in the movie is called Paper Street, which in America’s pop culture refers to non-existing places. Inn the movie this translates into the work of the unreliable narrator’s imagination.

The main character, the narrator, often broke the fourth wall. (The fourth wall is an imaginary wall separating the actors from the audience; they break it when they engage directly in conversations with the camera to seek sympathy from the viewers).

This wall is used as an integral part of Fight Club’s plot to demonstrate that the character is building a relationship with the audience to grant certain transparency and observation of what’s happening to him.

Fight Club has a lot of famous scenes, among them a fight scene that was a very important event in the film. It’s a fight between our nameless character played by Edward NORTON and Tyler DURDEN played by Brad PITT.

What makes this scene iconic is the fact that Fincher didn’t tell Pitt that Norton was going to punch his ear.

He sought a real reaction which made the scene run smoothly from the very first take.

He achieved great realism by keeping an element of surprise by not telling Brad where to expect the punch.

Considering the fact that the movie had many fight scenes, (predictable considering the title), Fincher used another filming technique called the matching motion, a very traditional technique that shows two opponents facing each other and throwing punches straight to the face.

To avoid the trap of falling into a boring Deja Vu, Fincher was inventive in his framing and camera position in a way that kept the audience engaged with who was winning and who was losing. He allowed the actor’s movements to dictate the camera’s movements to show the characters’ struggle to win.

Fincher is known for using sound to embody certain feelings.

He used Pixie’s Where’s my mind for the climax scene of the movie. The lyrics conveyed the character’s feelings about not knowing where his mind is and echoed the theme of the movie as a whole.

Buildings crashing down accompanied by gentle acoustic guitar? Not your typical combination. It created a unique juxtaposition. Now most people who have watched that classic when it first came out, associate the song with the movie. That’s what FINCHER does when he uses music, he seeks a long-term response, and he wants the song to stay carved in your memory.

Another great inclusion of music in Fight Club was Tom Waits’ Goin out west. It was used to introduce us to a cult with repressed masculinity in an underground basement. The lyrics perfectly mirrored everything that we saw and got us more immersed in the following scenes.

Fincher pushes his sound design to new extremes, to get a specific reaction from the audience and to achieve unmatched storytelling.

He designs the sound of his movies in accordance with the stories.

Fight Club has exaggerated sound effects because of the nature of the main character’s mental illness: dissociative identity disorder.

In Fight Club, specifically the first scene, we get to hear what’s happening before taking it in and seeing it well.

The sound design clues us in about the locations. There are deep echoes and reverberation to everything: the dialogue, the click of the gun against the Narrator’s teeth, and the creak of the chair.

The fight scenes in this film have a visceral realism that we hardly ever get to notice in other movies. These scenes are of an extremely harsh brutal nature.

The most creative use of sound design was in the narrator’s first encounter with the character that will shake his universe: Marla SINGER.

Her disruptive nature in the narrator’s universe was first hinted at when he heard a loud click: her lighter.

The flicker sound was exaggerated, almost like a flame thrower. This translates to Martha being a threat to the narrator, she has invaded his peace.

Not every director has the chance to pick a story he’d love to tell, some directors make movies because they can, and some because they have to.

FINCHER made Alien 3 when he was young, naive, and still paving his way. He had no control over the production process and no privilege to make choices. But later on in his career, his movies were called independent even though they were made by huge studios.

Why? Because of how unique the screenplays are and because of how raw and unfiltered the emotions are.

His implication in the whole process of perfectly directing a movie starts with picking the right story to tell.

David FINCHER gets often called obsessed, nihilistic, brutal, and perfectionist, and all these names show up through his choice of subject matter and how he decides to deal with certain themes and stories.