Modern Take on the Film Noir

Rating: 8/10 (27 September 2017)

Fight Club is one of those movies that has to be watched several times to see all of the small allusions to the twist that comes at the end of the second act of the movie. While I have only seen the movie once so far, I think I will make it my mission at some in the future to find more of these small hints left by the director David Fincher. I had caught a few after the plot twist was revealed by remembering key details, but I feel there are more that I have missed.
Fight Club revolves around an unnamed narrator played by Edward Norton whose insomnia is affecting his life tremendously, to the point that he goes to different random support groups just to cry it out and get some much-needed sleep. However, after a woman named Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) starts going to the support groups too, the narrator is unable to get the sleep he needs again, to which point he meets a man named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) on an airplane. After the narrator's condo is blown up, he moves in with Tyler, eventually starting a "Fight Club" in the basement of a local bar where men emasculated by modern society can vent through beating each other up. After a while, the Club starts to commit acts of vandalism against capitalist and materialistic objects throughout the city. Eventually, the Club is taken over by Tyler, who turns it into Project Mayhem, which the narrator does not approve of. Tyler disappears, leading the narrator to follow him around the world where he keeps bumping into people part of Fight Club/Project Mayhem, where he realizes he is Tyler Durden, an alter ego created when he falls asleep from insomnia. Trying to stop "Tyler," who is going to blow up all of the financial institutions in the city, the narrator is unsuccessful and the movie ends with Marla (who plays a minor role as "Tyler's" love interest) and the narrator, now Tyler watching the explosions of the skyscrapers from a construction site.
One of the most interesting aspects about Fight Club is its relationship to much older "film noirs" of the 1940s. The lighting in the movie is an obvious example, with most of the movie in a high contrast state of the bright characters against a dark background. Most of the film takes place at night or indoors with minimal lighting coming from natural sources, the film is very expressionist in this regard. Fincher wants us, the audience, to see how the light looks, the contrasts, the rich blacks and grays, the muted colors of most of the cast, except for Tyler. The film is like this for the entire film, a dark, seedy underworld only exposed once the sun goes down and the artificial lighting humanity has created turns on. Shadows are engulfing, threatening to steal some of the characters from the scenes, disappearing from the film. Colors stand out in the film, Tyler's flamboyant clothing sticking out the most in the frame, almost popping out of the otherwise dark and muted movie. Every scene without Tyler is much drabber, the narrator's work is a good example of this, the extreme amount of white, gray, and brown in these scenes show how boring and mundane the narrator's life is without Tyler, the man who keeps the narrator entertained and on his toes.
Another aspect of Fight Club, also connected to film noirs is the anti-materialistic view the film has, along with the air of mystery connected to Tyler and Project Mayhem. Throughout the second and third acts, Fight Club/Project Mayhem has a very clear anti- materialist and capitalist stance, showing continued vandalism against expensive neighborhoods, billboards, store displays, commercial art, chain stores and restaurants, and financial institutions. The film ends with the destruction of several credit card and banking companies to drive this stance home. Film noirs of the 40's also took this stance most of the time, the victims and perpetrators almost always rich, trying to become rich, powerful, trying to become powerful, married, cheated, jealous, or some combination thereof. The acts of violence in those films always had some ulterior or revenge motive, they were not random. The detectives or protagonists of these films were disillusioned by these problems, immune to the trials and tribulations of the cases they were working. Additionally, the mystery aspect of both also is important to both Fight Club and film noirs. Fight Club's mystery is almost hidden from the audience until the end of the second act when Tyler disappears, the fact their is a mystery at all is not totally apparent, but there is one, with a multitude of clues along the way that lead to that conclusion. Film noirs also have mysteries, but they are usually much more straightforward and obvious in existence, most film noirs, if not all, are crime-based, the mystery of "whodunnit" the driving force behind the plot. Fight Club and film noirs are very similar movie types, with Fight Club being a more modern film noir.
Fight Club's mystery may not be apparent for a lot of the film, but when the movie is rewatched, a lot of elements early on clue into what the solution to the mystery is. Fight Club, a modern- day film noir brings the decades-old genre to a new generation of moviegoers, exposing them to the lighting style and ideas that the original film noirs had, with a more modern message and style.