Abstract
“You are not your job.” Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) looks around, angrily but re-strained, from side to side. ‘You’re not how much money you have in the bank, not the car you drive… you’re not the contents of your wallet.” His voice is steady, his jaws strained. The camera slowly moves towards Tyler, close up until his face fills the movie screen. “You’re not your fucking khakis. You are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.” As he utters these words, looking straight into the camera, at us, the picture on screen starts to vibrate, more violently by the second, until the perforations on both sides of the film become visible on screen — creating “the illusion of the celluloid itself jumping off track as it move[s] through the projector”1 (cf. fig. 1). Then Tyler turns away and leaves, as the movie’s narrative cuts to another scene. Was this the end of the reel (real) world?
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Martin, Kevin H. 2000. A world of hurt. Cinefex 80: 115–131, 117.
i.e. Juhasz, Alexandra. 2001. The phallus unfetished: the end of masculinity as we know it in late-1990s “feminist” cinema. In: The end of cinema as we know it. American film in the nineties, ed. Jon Lewis, 210–221. New York: New York University Press; Brookey, Robert Alan and Robert Westerfelhaus. 2002. Hiding homoeroticism in plain view: the Fight Club DVD as digital closet. Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (1): 21–43.
Girourx, Henry A. and Imre Szeman. 2001. Ikea boys fight back. Fight Club, consumerism, and the political limits of nineties cinema. In: The end of cinema as we know it. American film in the nineties, ed. Jon Lewis, 95–104. New York: New York University Press, 102.
O’Hehir, Andrew. 1999. ‘Fight Club’. The late-90s crisis of masculinity has arrived in pop culture with a vengeance. Salon, October 15.
i.e. McClean, Shilo T. 2007. Digital storytelling: the narrative of visual effects in film. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press; latest publications in German: Richter, Sebastian. 2008. Digitaler Realismus: zwischen Computeranimation und Live-Action. Die neue Bildästhetik in Spielfilmen. Bielefeld: transcript; Flückiger, Barbara. 2008. Visual Effects: Filmbilder aus dem Computer. Marburg: Schüren.
McClean, 47.
McClean, 47. The audience was thus not able to ‘read’ the narrative implications of this digital visual imagery: namely that it presents the first clue to the overall understanding of the film’s narrative logic.
cf. Martin, 117 and 126. The scene was nicknamed “Jittercam” by the director and his visual artists because a handheld camera shot of Brad Pitt, which was taken as the operator was rocking the camera from side to side, was digitally manipulated by adding motion blur.
David Fincher, as quoted in Martin, 126.
Lev Manovich speaks of “the ‘crisis’ of cinema’s identity”: Manovich, Lev. 1999. What is digital cinema? In The digital dialectic. New essays on new media, ed. Peter Lunenfeld, 172–192. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press, 173; cf. also the collection of essays that trace the effects of digitization on cinema in: Kloock, Daniela (ed.). 2008. Zukunft Kino: the end of the reel world. Marburg: Schüren.
cf. Freyermuth, Gundolf S. 2009. Digitale Lektionen: Medien(r)evolution in Film und Kino. Film-Dienst 02: 6–9.
Belton, John. 2002. Digital Cinema: A False Revolution. October 100: 98–114, 103.
Lunenfeld, Peter. 1999. The real and the ideal. In The digital dialectic. New essays on new media, ed. Peter Lunenfeld, 2–5. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press, 3.
Bukatman, Scott. 1998. Zooming out: the end of offscreen space. In The new American cinema, ed. Jon Lewis, 248–272. Durhan & London: Duke University Press, 249. This is the case in most cyberpunk films of the 1990s, i.e. the early Tron (USA 1982), The Lawnmower Man (USA 1992) or Johnny Mnemonic (USA 1992) and The Matrix (USA 1999).
The term was introduced by Lunenfeld, Peter. 2000. Digital photography: the dubitative image. In Snap to grid. A user’s guide to digital arts, media, and cultures, ed. Peter Lunenfeld, 55–69. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press.
Chesher, Chris. 1997. The ontology of digital domains. In Virtual politics. Identity and community in cyberspace, ed. David Holmes, 79–92. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 86.
Cf. Tholen, Georg Christoph. 2005. Einleitung. In SchnittStellen, ed. Sigrid Schade, Thomas Sieber & Georg Christoph Tholen, 15–25. Basel: Schwabe, 20.
Manovich, 50.
Belton, 103.
Lessard, Bruno. 2005. Digital technologies and the poetics of performance. In New punk cinema, ed. Nicholas Rombes, 102–112. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 102.
Manovich, 301.
cf. Ochsner, Beate. 2009 (forthcoming). Zur Frage der Grenze zwischen Intermedialität und Hybridisierung. In Intermediale Inszenierungen im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung, ed. Andreas Blättler, Doris Gassert, Susanna Parikka-Hug & Miriam Ronsdorf. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Chesher, 86.
cf. Tholen, Georg Christoph. 2003. Dazwischen. Zeit, Raum und Bild in der intermedialen Performance. In Medien und Ästhetik. Festschrift für Burkhardt Lindner, ed. Harald Hillgärtner & Thomas Küpper, 275–291. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Digitaler Realismus: zwischen Computeranimation und Live-Action. Die neue Bildästhetik in Spielfilmen. Bielefeld: transcript cf. Richter.
cf. Belton.
Martin, 121.
Elsaesser, Thomas. 2009. The mind-game film. In Puzzle films: complex story telling in contemporary cinema, ed. Warren Bucklan, 13–41. Oxford: Blackwell, 35.
Elsaesser, 35ff., esp. 37.
Contrarily, the scenes with Tyler Durden are “more hyper-real in a torn-down, deconstructed sense”; cf. Probst, Christopher. 1999. Anarchy in the U.S.A. http://www.theasc.com/magazine/nov99/anarchy/index.htm/. Accessed 1 August 2009.
Jameson, Frederic. 1992. Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 6.
Connor, Steven. 1990. Postmodernist culture: an introduction to theories of the contemporary. Oxford; Cambridge (Mass.): Blackwell, 46.
Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present pasts: urban palimpsets and the politics of memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 10.
Sobchack, Vivian. 1994. The scene of the screen: envisioning cinematic and electronic “presence”. In Theories of the new media: a historical perspective (2000), ed. John Thornton Caldwell, 137–155. London: The Athlone Press, 137.
Ibid.
Martin, 121.
Sobchack, 151.
Short, Sue. 2005. Cyborg cinema and contemporary subjectivity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 174.
Assmann, Aleida. 1996. Texts, traces, trash: the changing media of cultural memory. Representations 56: 123–134, 132.
Sobchack, Vivian. 1991. In response to Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard’s obscenity. Science Fiction Studies, http://www.depauw.edu/SFs/backissues/55/forum55.htm/. Accessed 1 August 2009.
cf. N. Katherine Hayles. 1991. In response to Jean Baudrillard. The borders of madness. Science Fiction Studies, http://www.depauw.edu/SFs/backissues/55/forum55.htm/. Accessed 1 August 2009.
cf. Trifonova, Temenuga. 2002. Time and point of view in contemporary cinema. CineAction: 11–21.
cf. Martin, 126ff.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 6.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 1964.
Martin, 129. It took fourteen entire months to digitally create the final shot.
Michel Foucault, The order of things (Les mots et les choses, 1966).
Davies, Char. 1991. Natural artifice. In Virtual seminar on the bioapparatus, ed. Mary Ann Moser. The Banff Centre for the Arts, http://www.immersence. com/publications/char/1991-CD-Bioapparatus.html/. Accessed 1 August 2009.
Kevin Tod Haug, Hollywood visual effects designer, speaking about his work as an artistic director for Quantum of Solace (USA 2008) at fmx/09, 14th International Conference on Animation, Effects, Games and Digital Media, on 7 May 2009.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag/Wien
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gassert, D. (2010). “You met me at a very strange time in my life.” Fight Club and the Moving Image on the Verge of ‘Going Digital’. In: Sonvilla-Weiss, S. (eds) Mashup Cultures. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-0096-7_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-0096-7_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Vienna
Print ISBN: 978-3-7091-0095-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-7091-0096-7