The Changeover
If you have never heard of Fight Club then good, that means that people haven’t been talking about it. And that’s the first rule. But in reality Fight Club is one of the greatest movies of all time. Yes you read that correctly ALL TIME. Matter of fact it currently sits 10th on IMDb’s Top 250 movies, right below a (somewhat recognizable) film.
But the great Bill Belichick once said, “Stats are for loser” so I am going to tell you why its one of the greatest movies ever. It all breaks down to ‘the changeover’. So if you haven’t seen Fight Club go, go watch it immediately and thank me later.
Let me start first with a quick recap of Fight Club for those of us who have forgotten. A nameless first person narrator/insomniac and a unique soap salesman named Tyler Durden channel primal male aggression into a shocking new form of therapy… beating the shit out of each other! Their concept catches on, with underground "fight clubs" forming in every town. Together the two of them spiral out of control and engage in competitive rivalry for love and power. When the narrator is exposed to the hidden agenda of Tyler's fight club, Project Mayhem, he starts to question what Tyler’s end goals are. (How could he be suspicious with a project name like that?) Once the narrator starts questioning Tyler he vanishes, leaving the narrator to try and answer the question of Project Mayhem himself. He figures out the Tyler is planning to blow up all the major credit card company buildings so that all debt is erased, (Sign me up!) in turn creating absolute mayhem. Once the narrator knows this, he is on a race to try and stop Project Mayhem. But everyone he encounters, Tyler has gotten to first even the police are in on it. He goes on the hunt to try and find Tyler. This brings him to the realization that Tyler Durden might not be who he thinks he is. He ends up calling Marla one of the narrators “friends” and Tyler’s sex partner. They start arguing and Marla calls the narrator Tyler Durden at which Tyler appears in the room explaining to the narrator that he is not real and that the narrator made him up because he was a crazy insomniac. (This is important. We’ll come back to this.) After learning all this the narrator is still hell bent on stopping the bombings but it is to late. The narrator and Tyler sit on the top floor of a building waiting to watch the bombs go off when the narrator puts a gun to his head in an attempt to kill the Tyler Durden part of his mind. He shoots himself in the head and kills Tyler but the narrator lives just as Marla is coming up the stairs and they watch together as the buildings explode and Project Mayhem takes effect. Fun fact about the ending of the movie, the reason the bullet goes through Tyler’s head but comes out of the cheek of the narrator is because during a scene in the middle of the movie the narrator looses a tooth, which Tyler responses with “Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.” Well this ends up saving the narrator at the end because the bullet bounces off of Tyler’s tooth, which is still there unlike the narrator, whereas for him the bullet goes out his cheek.
Fight Club is an adaptation by Joe Uhls base of the book of the same title by Chuck Palahniuk. The film was directed by one of my favorite directors, David Fincher. Jeff Cronenweth did the cinematography and it stars Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, and Helena Bonham Carter.
Fight Club was not as well loved when it first release as much as it is today. It did moderately well in the theaters grossing around $35million. Fight Club grew in popularity through word of mouth and the positive reviews of the DVD set Fincher helped develop. Unfortunately, not only did the movie itself become popular but so did some of the ideas within the film. Real fight clubs started popping up around America. One college student in 2002 planted pipe bombs in mailboxes with the goal to create a smiley pattern on the map of the United States, similar to the scene in which a corporate building is set ablaze revealing a smiley face on the exterior. (web.archive.org) A similar incident happened in 2009 when a 17-year-old who had formed his own fight club in Manhattan was charged with detonating a homemade bomb outside a Starbucks Coffee shop. Clearly trying to do his part in “Project Mayhem.” The list goes on from there; there is a whole “Cultural Impact” section on Wikipedia if you are more curious. But all these people were missing the real point to the movie.
David Fincher maybe the king of directing twist-endings. Some of his finest include Gone Girl, (Ben Affleck) Se7en, (Brad Pitt) and The Game (Michael Douglas). What makes Fight Club stand out from the rest is how Fincher builds up your confusion right up until the climax when it is revealed that the Narrator, (Edward Norton) is actually Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) and who he thought was Tyler Durden is actually just a figment of his own imagination. This is the sequence I will be analyzing as the Narrator describes, “It’s called a changeover. The movie goes on and no one in the audience has any idea.” The scene starts off with the Narrator entering a dimly lit bar where he asks the bartender, who’s talking to him, whom he thinks he is. He informs the Narrator that he is Mr. Durden, “you’re the one who gave me this.” Upon saying this he shows the Narrator the same chemical burn that Tyler had given him earlier in the film. There is a match on action cut right after this of the Narrator running into his hotel room in a panic grabbing the telephone and calling Marla. She answers off screen and comes up from the bottom of the frame into picture. There is only a backlight behind her, she is just a silhouette. The music increases as does the cuts between each other talking until Marla explodes and walks to toward the camera into a close up coming into the light as she says, “Is that a pretty accurate description of our relationship Tyler!” Then it cuts to the Narrator’s blank face. Marla hangs up the phone and Tyler, (Brad Pitt) is immediately in the room with the Narrator where he yells at him for talking to Marla about him. The Narrator start to freak out asking Tyler why people think that he’s him. This is where Fincher nails it, he cuts back and forth between Tyler and the Narrator as the Narrator starts to realize the truth. Flashbacks of things Tyler had done start racing through his mind only this time it is he who is committing these crimes and Tyler is nowhere. Tyler explains that the Narrator is crazy and his mind created Tyler to do things that he could never do on his own. Tyler justifies that, “People do it everyday. They talk to themselves; they see themselves how they want to be. They don’t have the courage like you to just run with it.” As he says this it cuts to a long shot of the Narrator sitting on the edge of the bed as if he is talking to Tyler but no one is there. This is the first time we see what it is like from an outsiders prospective. The scene ends with the Narrator fainting, the screen fading to black, and him saying, “It’s called a changeover. The movie goes on and no one in the audience has any idea.” And David Fincher does exactly what he was trying to do, which was giving us the biggest mind-f*** of the decade. But that’s not the first time you hear this quote in the film it actually is said toward the beginning of the movie when we first meet Tyler and his many occupations. This is where my conspiracy theory starts.
Another part of this theory is when we see Tyler working the projectors at the “movie theater" this is actually the Narrator’s mind and Tyler is messing with his perception. This is where the Narrator first explains a changeover. He's actually explaining what Tyler is doing to the Narrator’s personality. That's when we see the splices. The changeover is what occurs when Tyler steps in and takes over the Narrator. “Someone has to be there to switch the projectors at the exact moment that one reel ends and the next one begins… a changeover. He flips the projectors, the movie keeps right on going, and nobody in the audience has any idea.” That’s Tyler. But if you have watched this movie as many times as me you’ll notices Tyler has been splicing himself into the Narrators mind since the very beginning of the movie. I’m serious go re-watch the film and look for it before the Narrator ever meets Tyler on the plane we get single frames of Tyler popping up everywhere. The first time watching the film you probably just think you’re seeing things. But they’re there. Believe me. There’s a Starbucks Coffee cup in almost every scene in the movie. So there are some more reasons to go back and watch Fight Club again, not that you needed them. If only that doc. had just given him some damn Valium.
