My favorite movie of all time is Fight Club directed by David Fincher. The acting by Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter is excellent as they portray grimy, white collar Americans. The movie’s secretive character of Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), keeps the audience constantly captivated as he starts as a simple soap salesman but evolves into a much more elaborate character, setting up Fight Clubs and Project Mayhem chapters around the country. The strange Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) actually acts as a point of sanity in the whole movie. Now I really have not given away too much but if you have not seen the movie and do not want it ruined for you, stop reading now as I am about to drop some serious spoilers, and plot holes.
While Fight Club is an excellent movie due to the nature of the twist ending there are some questions raised. The fight clubs that are set up have very strict rules. There really are not any loopholes to the rules, and all the members are pretty loyal followers of the rules. The main character and leader of the club Ed Norton is even attacked when he breaks one of the rules. So why then when Bob fights Ed Norton does he keep his shirt on? One of the rules of fight club is no shirts, belts or shoes. Is it simply because Bob is fat that he keeps his shirt on? For a movie that focuses a lot on following the strict rules of a cult they let this one slide. But that is probably because the actor playing Bob was not really fat, but wearing a fat suit for the movie. Still when rule following is a huge emphasis of the movie it would make more sense to at least explain why one of the rules of fight club is broken.
It is revealed that Ed Norton’s character has dissociated personalities, and that Tyler Durden is just a figment of his mind. While this explains many of the questions between Ed Norton’s character and Marla, why people keep mistaking him for Tyler Durden, and how it came to be that his apartment exploded; the revealing of the dissociative personalities also leaves some questions. In one scene where Tyler is driving the car and Ed Norton is in the passenger seat who is really driving the car? When Ed Norton gets beat up it can be explained that he simply hit himself, but when it was himself really driving the car he was also in the passenger seat too? Additionally when Ed Norton goes on long rants about Tyler, why does no one question who this Tyler is? Many of the situations are explained or if just thought back upon make sense, but the driving of the car scene and rants to other club members about Tyler seem to beckon a lack of thinking in some places. All together though, Fight Club is a fantastic movie, with the surprise twist ending of dissociative personality, that Tyler is really just a part of Ed Norton’s mind capping off an already incredibly mysterious, entertaining movie.
Cool idea for a blog!! I’m a big movie buff too so I’ll be looking forward to your new movies every week. What might be cool to add is a famous quote from the movie like “you do not talk about Fight Club,” or something like that:)