Movies - Fight Club

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	Movies - Fight Club

Fight Club (1999) is a film based on the novel Fight Club (1995) by Chuck Palahniuk. It was directed by David Fincher and starred Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter. It also featured an original soundtrack by the Dust Brothers. As of June 23, 2004, Fight Club is in development as a musical, developed by Palahniuk, Fincher, and Trent Reznor. A Fight Club video game was released in October of 2004, but it was mostly dismissed by hardcore fans of the book and film as milking it for commercial worth.

Plot

The plot revolves around a nameless narrator (Norton; referred to as "Jack" by many of the film's fans), an actuary for a major car company. During a severe bout of insomnia he starts attending support group meetings (one of which is a group for testicular cancer survivors). He begins to use the meetings as a vicarious source of emotional release and soon finds that he can sleep again. But when a strange young woman named Marla (Bonham-Carter) starts disrupting his enjoyment of these meetings by showing up to them for fun, the narrator finds that his insomnia returns.

While returning from a business trip, the narrator meets Tyler Durden (Pitt), a fellow frequent business traveler and independent soap salesperson, on a plane. Arriving at his apartment, he finds that it has exploded and has nowhere to live. He eventually finds the business card that Tyler Durden gave him in his pocket, and phones him. They meet at a bar and discuss materialism and the modern male. As they leave the bar, before going to Tyler's home, Tyler asks him to hit him as hard as he can. After trading a few punches, the two begin to brawl in the bar's parking lot. The narrator realizes that he enjoys fighting and, after moving in with Tyler, they start fighting every week. Thus, "fight club" was born.

As the club grows, Tyler uses it to spread ideas of anti-materialism. Soon, Tyler is distributing "homework" to the members of the club, which grows into "Project Mayhem", an anti-corporate destruction squad led by Tyler. As the project continues to expand, the narrator becomes increasingly disturbed by their actions and tries to stop it as one of the co-founders of fight club. He slowly uncovers their plan and soon discovers the real identity of Tyler Durden; he is a split-personality construct that exists only in the narrator's head and the actions that Tyler undertakes are actions that the narrator himself is really performing; the narrator's perpetual state of insomnia is truly caused by the "Tyler" personality taking over during the night when the narrator thinks he's asleep, then leading a double life until the narrator "wakes up" in the morning.

The film climaxes with the narrator arguing with Tyler over control of his body. The narrator, in a violent act of desperation, shoots himself in the mouth. The audience sees the narrator slump in the chair, and Tyler fall, with a bullet hole in the back of his head. The injury is not fatal, however. Members of Project Mayhem arrive, with Marla forcibly in tow, and the narrator calls for gauze. The film ends with the narrator and Marla startled by a spectacular view of highrise offices exploding - the successful completion of Project Mayhem's most ambitious project, almost forgotten amidst the drama.

Differences between novel and film

Though the plot is mostly similar to the novel and much of the dialog is used verbatim, some significant changes have been made in the film.

Many of the lines taken from the novel for the film are given to different characters than they were originally said by. It is likely this was done because the narrator has more lines in the novel than the other characters, though other characters lines are also switched around (for instance, Tyler gives a speech that was originally given by a mechanic in the novel).
Tyler's involvement in the storyline is often in the foreground of the film, while he is often unseen in the novel, his involvement being mentioned by the narrator in retrospect.
Tyler Durden is a soap salesman instead of a beach artist as in the novel.
The narrator meets Tyler on a plane instead of on a nude beach as in the novel.
The first two rules of fight club, "You don't talk about fight club", have "don't" changed to "do not".
The third rule of fight club, "If someone says stop, goes limp, even if he's just faking it, the fight is over.", was changed to "If someone says stop, goes limp, taps out, the fight is over".
The narrator reads stories about "Jack" in the film, who was named "Joe" in the novel. This was changed to avoid conflicts with Reader's Digest over the use of the name (the articles read by the narrator were featured in the magazine).
Marla's line after having sex with Tyler was "I want to have your abortion" in the novel. The film changed this line to "I haven't been fucked like that since grade school." However, the original line was filmed and can be seen in the DVD's deleted scenes section (the reason for the change is that the director was told the original line was 'too offensive', so he changed it to something even more offensive and then refused to change it back).
The first batch of soap made by the narrator and Tyler is made from fat from a liposuction clinic, rather than from liposuctioned fat from Marla's mother as in the book. The Paper Street Soap Company isn't formed until after this first soap making project, which was simply to get some soap to clean the Narrator's clothes.
The scene where Tyler fights Lou is based on a scene in the novel where Tyler blackmails the Projectionist Union's president. Lou (or any other angry bar owner) didn't appear in the book.
A flashback scene in the novel in which the narrator urinates on the Blarney Stone does not appear in the film.
A scene in which Tyler is telling a story in which he caused a woman to nearly lose her mind after he leaves an anonymous note stating that he peed in one of the woman's perfume bottles is omitted from the movie.
The narrator's fight with himself to blackmail his boss is at the car company in the film; in the novel, it was done to threaten his boss at the hotel where Tyler had gotten him a job as a waiter.
The narrator is not entirely aware of what Tyler is doing with Project Mayhem and is more uncomfortable with the increasing destructiveness of their activities, rather than being partially in control of it as in the book.
The confrontation with Raymond K. Hessel is handled by the narrator alone in the novel; in the film, Tyler takes control while the narrator witnesses the event.
Robert Paulson is by himself when he is killed in the novel; he was using an electric drill to drill a hole in an ATM and pump it full of glue, pudding or grease (they never mention which), and a cop spots him and thinks the drill is a gun.
A scene from the novel in which Tyler murders the narrator's boss does not appear in the film, although the method of his murder is used in the film (drilling out a computer monitor and filling it with gasoline).
In the film, the ultimate objective of Project Mayhem is never revealed, but the narrator tells a police officer that he believes their goal is to blow up all the credit card companies and send the national debt record back to zero. In the novel, Project Mayhem was to slow down humanity's technological advancement by artificially causing another Dark Age. This is referred to in the film, however, in the bedroom scene after the car crash. Part of Project Mayhem's goals included erasing history, and the real purpose of blowing up the building in the book was to have it fall on the National Art Gallery next door.
Project Mayhem's bombs are successful in exploding in the film, while they were duds in the novel.
The narrator shoots himself to kill Tyler, rather than to make a decision on his own as in the novel.
Tyler's gun had a home-made silencer in the novel. The gun makes a loud sound in the film, suggesting that it did not have a silencer.
The film ends with the narrator and Marla watching buildings explode, while the novel ends with the narrator talking about a mental institution (which he believes is heaven) to which he has been confined.

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Movies - Fight Club

Plot

Differences between novel and film

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