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Fight Club has an unconventional opening scene as it starts with the end. The narrator quickly establishes this through the use of the dialogue "let me go back to the start".

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City: In the first scene it is clearly established that it is set in the city due to all of the other skyscraper buildings surrounding. What's more is that it also establishes the violent nature that is associated with the city due to the gun being held to the narrator's face.

Violence: similarly with the city, the violence is established as one of the first things that is shown is the gun.

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Lighting is low key and often likes to cause characters to be in darkness so that their facial expressions are obscured, causing the audience to pay a lot of attention and focus in on the characters.

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There is a distinct contrast between the reviews from 1999, and the Collider review from 2014. The film in 1999, was often described as 'misogynistic', yet in the Collider review it was said to be a

cult classic

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Matt Goldberg, 2014

A rallying cry against consumer culture.  It can be a commentary on a lost generation.  It can be about a primal reduction to our base instincts.  It can be a celebration of anarchy.

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[ With Mindhunter set to premiere next week, we're reposting our deep dives into the work of director David Fincher. These articles contain spoilers.]

The first rule of Fight Club is to talk about Fight Club. The movie underperformed at the box office, and found life on DVD where it became a cult classic. Within the context of the film, Tyler Durden's famous rule is a brilliant and ironic bit of marketing for a group of men trying to reject advertising and find human connection. "Jack" (for clarity purposes, I'll use this name to refer to the Narrator) may be our storyteller, but Tyler is our lens, and through that lens, the story of Fight Club has been greatly misinterpreted by any audience member who saw the movie and thought, "I should start a fight club!" The movie isn't preaching. It isn't an angry screed by David Fincher or worshiping at the Church of Tyler Durden. It's not even wholly about male bonding. Fight Club is a romantic comedy as only David Fincher could tell it.

More than any of Fincher's other movies Fight Club offers itself to the widest amount of interpretations because it covers so much. It's a bit of a paradox that a director who's known for his precision should cast his thematic net so wide, but screenwriter Jim Uhls (with an uncredited assist from Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker) did a masterful job of translating the breadth of Chuck Palahunik 's rich novel into a workable script.

Fight Club can be taken as a rallying cry against consumer culture. It can be a commentary on a lost generation. It can be about a primal reduction to our base instincts. It can be a celebration of anarchy. It can be all of these things and more because the movie is specific enough to provide this information but not so broad as to invite any interpretation. But on my latest viewing, I've become convinced that more than anything, Fight Club is one of the most twisted, funny, deceptive, and perverse love stories ever seen on screen.

Jack ( Edward Norton) may be our protagonist, Tyler ( Brad Pitt) may be our seducer, but the key to the entire movie is Marla ( Helena Bonham Carter). Before we even reach Marla, Tyler is briefly cut into single frames of the movie. He's already in Jack's mind, but only in a flash. Before they truly meet, Jack thinks he's found peace in the artificial connection of support groups. These groups don't represent a real relationship for Jack; they fill an empty hole that's keeping him awake at night. He has absolutely no sympathy for anyone else, and if that's not abundantly clear by the fact that he's crashing support groups, it's hammered home by his comment about Chloe, a terminally ill cancer patient: "Chloe looked the way Meryl Streep's skeleton would look if you made it smile and walk around the party being extra nice to everybody." Then Marla enters the picture and, "She. Ruined. Everything."

She ruins everything because he has a crush on her. "Her lie reflected my lie," Jack says. She's a kindred spirit for someone who is still too self-involved to make any kind of real connection. He fills his apartment with stuff, but his refrigerator is only filled with condiments. Jack can't create a meal, and he certainly doesn't have anyone with whom to share it. Marla reflects his emptiness back at him, and like any grade-school boy who likes a girl, he kicks her in the shins and pushes her away. He can't have intimacy with a real person.

Enter Tyler Durden. Marla is leading Jack down the path to needing someone real, but when his artificial connections at support groups begin to weaken, a wholly fake connection is even better. When Tyler and Jack meet, Jack has "woken up as a different person," and it's a person who starts calling Jack on his bullshit from the get go. Tyler knows Jack's mind, which makes him alluring from the start. Jack may not be able to explain to us why he decided to call Tyler, but it was clearly a subconscious decision to call forth a subconscious friend: Someone to get Jack to reevaluate his life rather than sell him something like a yin-yang table or a shoulder to cry on.

Their first fight is a consummation of their relationship. It's the mix of self-love and self-hatred that Jack feels bottled up inside. But before we even get the first punch, Jack reveals a few important tidbits about the movie, and lets Fincher briefly pop his head in as he alerts us to the anarchic spirit that's about to explode (not that it wasn't already threatening to overflow already with the impressive VFX work, dark humor, and sliding penguins). We're told that Tyler works as a projectionist, (i.e he works in film), and he likes inserting shots of pornography into movies. Aside from the fact that "No one knows they saw it, but they did," also refers to Tyler's earlier appearances, it's an announcement of how Fincher is going to keep providing clues that Jack and Tyler are the same person.

Yes, there are overt moments where Jack is on the phone with the detective, and when asked about a possible suspect, Tyler whispers, "Tell him the liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perceptions," and when asked about enemies, and Jack responds, "Enemies?", Tyler quickly proclaims "who reject the basic assumption of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions!" Again and again, we're given these clues. When Jack beats himself up in front of his boss, he tells us he's reminded of his first fight with Tyler. These moments add up, especially when Tyler and Jack talk about their lives.

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'Fight Club' Revisited: The Films of David Fincher

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With Mindhunter set to premiere next week, we're reposting our deep dives into the work of director David Fincher. These articles contain spoilers. ] The first rule of Fight Club is to talk about Fight Club. The movie underperformed at the box office, and found life on DVD where it became a cult classic.

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Rolling Stone, 1999

It's Tyler, master of many twisted trades, who puts flesh on Jack's anarchic fantasies.

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Guaranteed: Fight Club will blow your skirt up. It's not just the rush of seeing Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and director David Fincher hit career peaks in a groundbreaking film. And it's not the sick kick of watching Gen X amateurs bare-knuckling each other in seedy basements; that'd get old fast. The film's bold, bruising humor leaves marks on a wide range of hot-button issues: It's about being young, male and powerless against the pacifying drug of consumerism. It's about solitude, despair and bottled-up rage. It's about how not to feel dead as Y2K approaches. It's about daring to imagine the disenfranchised reducing the world to rubble and starting over.

For daring to imagine, Fight Club will take a few hits. Fincher's film of Chuck Palahniuk's 1996 novel - with a high-voltage script by newcomer Jim Uhls - is already being misinterpreted as an "apology for fascism." One critic wondered whether Rupert Murdoch's Fox 2000, the company releasing Fight Club, "knew what it was doing" in spending $70 million on a movie that is "not only anti-capitalism but anti-society and, indeed, anti-God." My take is that Fight Club is pro-thinking, no matter what deities are offended. Is that threatening? You bet.

Fincher (), superbly served by cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth and editor James Haygood, makes brilliant use of film language to take us inside the head of the story's narrator (Norton) - a yuppie drone whose mind is on fire with revolutionary ideas. This wired insomniac refers to himself as Jack, after a series of magazine articles in which organs of the human body talk about themselves in the first person ("I Am Jack's Brain"). Fittingly, the striking first image of Fight Club puts us literally inside Jack's brain. Driven by turbocharged music from the Dust Brothers, the camera swoops and dives around a vast network of nerve cells, emerging only to catch Jack sucking on a gun barrel thrust down his throat by Pitt's Tyler Durden: "I Am Jack's Kinky Libido."

It's Tyler, master of many twisted trades, who puts flesh on Jack's anarchic fantasies. Tyler the waiter serves no soup he hasn't whizzed in. Tyler the entrepreneur sells soap that he makes out of fat stolen from liposuction dump sites. Tyler the film projectionist shows family flicks spliced with frames of a lunging red penis or a yawning wet vagina.

You can't blame Jack for thinking, "I Am Jack's Raging Envy" as he compares Tyler's night jobs with his own workaday routine as an auto-safety checker. Lack of sleep has left Jack a frazzled mess. His doctor recommends a visit to a church basement where people with real pain hook up. At a meeting for testicular cancer, Jack is bearhugged by Big Bob (Meat Loaf Aday), a patient whose hormone therapy has given him "bitch tits." Big Bob - just wait till you see the raw wit and emotion that Loaf invests in the role - doesn't know that Jack is just a tourist. And Jack is too addicted to the "undivided attention you get when people think you're dying" to feel guilty.

Jack is soon a support-group junkie - melanomas, blood parasites, you name it. Then another faker, chain-smoking Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), invades his space. Marla figures the groups are "cheaper than a movie, and there's free coffee." Bonham Carter, looking like the waif from hell,has never been this tough or terrific. Jack is turned on, but it's Tyler who nails her ("I Am Jack's Inflamed Sense of Rejection").

Tyler moves Jack past support groups by devising fight clubs, where emasculated men bond by punching one another until numbness gives way to feeling. Tyler says a fight club is for guys "who work at jobs they hate to buy things they don't need;" in a scene of gleeful malice, he destroys Jack's "Ikea nesting instinct" by bombing his apartment.

Norton catches lightning in a revelatory performance that keeps delivering miracles of character nuance. He may be the best actor of his generation. Watching Jack beat himself bloody in front of his boss is a high-wire act that belongs in a time capsule. And Pitt, in his riskiest role to date, uses his sexual swagger to subversive comic effect; he's freer, funnier and freakier than you've ever seen him. It's Tyler who shows Jack how to add nitric acid to soap and make nitro-glycerin. It's Tyler who turns fight clubs into militias and then bomb squads ready to blast the foundations of the planet's power base: banks and credit-card companies.

Fincher is a visionary who keeps Fight Club firing on all cylinders, raising hallucinatory hell in ways too satisfying toi spoil here. As for the dissenters, "I Am Jack's Complete Lack of Surprise". Fincher's refusal to moralize and reassure has possed off the watchdogs of virtue. Let 'em bark. They think anything alive is dangerous. Fight Club pulld you in, challenges your prejudices, rocks your world and leaves you laughing in the face of an abyss. It's alive, all right. It's also an uncompromising American classic.

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Guaranteed: Fight Club will blow your skirt up. It's not just the rush of seeing Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and director David Fincher hit career peaks in a groundbreaking film. And it's not the sick kick of watching Gen X amateurs bare-knuckling each other in seedy basements; that'd get old fast.

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Fight Club can be seen as an experimental film in the use of visual style and narrative structure. Does it conform to the conventions of Hollywood Cinema?

Subliminal messages of Tyler in the beginning

Shot through objects ie the bin

Hollywood has become predictable, and Fight Club isn't.

US society represented as fake and superficial

People no longer have authentic emotions but artificial ones created through buying products.

Desensitised state is symbolised through the representation of life and death:

- Serious illness is packaged into support groups which can't deal with real and difficult emotions
- Narrator's job as a risk assessor for a car company, who has reduced life and death to a formula

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Feminism - Equality of the sexes.

Theory of the Male Gaze
Laura Mulvey & Claire Johnstons suggest that women were there only to be viewed. According to Mulvey, pleasure watching Hollywood film was heterosexual with images of women displayed or objectified.

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The extreme close-up may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of David Fincher's unique visual aesthetic. That's because Fincher's extreme close-ups don't call attention to themselves. The filmmaker stitches the shots into his pictures in a way that is subtle and fluid, yet impactful and abrasive.

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Uses body language to show emotions and intentions rather than telling the audience

Avoids hand-held cameras, prefers stationary shots

Only uses close ups when absolutely necessary, this is for the audience to then subconsciously know that it is a very important piece of information.

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the rejection of all religious and moral principles (& the world), in the belief that life is meaningless

The film suggests that the meaning to life is found via sensory experiences with other males (ie fighting and crying in support groups) rather than just sensory experiences with females. The males feel important and valued through the contact with other males.
The fight scenes show it's not about the winning but rather the pain and the sense of release that they feel from it.
The support groups also show an easy way to release their emotions.
As is with other males it suggests that there is a mutual understanding of the struggle that society forces them to be emotionless, otherwise they are seen as weak and unmanly. In this case, it is not a misogynistic film as the emotional release and purpose is through men, not objectifying women.

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The thriller genre has many genre conventions that can be applied to Fight Club.

City setting (suggests crime and alienation)

Violence

Enigmas

Red Herrings

Main character being an 'outsider'

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Roger Ebert, 1999

Whatever Fincher thinks the message is, that's not what most audiences will get.

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Fight Club Movie Review & Film Summary (1999) | Roger Ebert

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"Fight Club" is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since "Death Wish," a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up.