
Then I had the strangest feeling I was talking to myself... (Photo: 20th Century Fox)
WARNING: This Movie Minutiae contains spoilers!
Last year I asked Movie Minutiae readers what films did they consider better than their book versions. There were a few responses, but the only consensus was for Fight Club.
Indeed, the word is that author Chuck Palahniuk considered the ending of Fight Club to be better than that of his debut novel.
In an interview with website DVD Talk, Palahniuk even said he was "embarrassed" by how well the film was able to streamline the plot.
"Now that I see the movie, especially when I sat down with Jim Uhls [the screenwriter] and record a commentary track for the DVD, I was sort of embarrassed of the book, because the movie had streamlined the plot and made it so much more effective and made connections that I had never thought to make. There is a line about "fathers setting up franchises with other families," and I never thought about connecting that with the fact that Fight Club was being franchised and the movie made that connection. I was just beating myself in the head for not having made that connection myself."
In all honesty, there are so many bits of trivia floating around about this film, it's hard to know what to include here. And the beauty is in a way you have to really 'consume' this film for you to notice all this stuff - exactly what film/book is preaching against...
So in the spirit of Tyler's (Brad Pitt) part-time occupation as a projectionist, next time you watch Fight Club, there are a number of times Tyler appears on screen before he is introduced as a character.
It's the "splicing frames into a film" idea and the "nobody knows that they saw it, but they did." There are four instances where Tyler appears as instantaneous flashes on screen.
(The ability to slow DVDs down to a frame-by-frame speed can help you spot these.)
According to the film's Wikipedia entry, director David Fincher regarded these flashes as: "Our hero is creating Tyler Durden in his own mind, so at his point he exists only on the periphery of the narrator's consciousness."
The "narrator" (Edward Norton) sees flashes of Tyler standing at the photocopier at work, at the doctor's office being told about the testicular cancer support group, at the testicular cancer support group meeting (Tyler has an arm around the group leader's shoulders) and as he sees Marla (Helena Bonham-Carter) leaving a support group meeting.
Of course, the narrator also passes Tyler on an airport's moving walkway as he says the line, "if you wake up in a different place, at a different time, do you wake up a different person?"
Finally, he can also be spotted among service staff in the 'welcome' video of a hotel the narrator is staying at.
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