- Title
- A copy of a copy of a copy: framing the double in Fight Club
- Creator
- Kinder, Elizabeth; Pender, Patricia
- Relation
- Literature Film Quarterly Vol. 42, Issue 3, p. 541-556
- Relation
- http://faculty.salisbury.edu/~dtjohnson/default.htm
- Publisher
- Salisbury State University
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2014
- Description
- David Fincher's 1999 adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s 1995 novel Fight Club provides a spectacular solution, in several senses of that term, to the challenge of depicting the narrators split self. Brad Pitts riveting, physically visceral portrayal of Tyler Durden, the narrators pathological projection or alter ego, offers a bald, bold contrast to Edward Nortons nondescript, nameless narrator, rendering literal (or more accurately visual) the ur-metaphor of Palahniuk’s novel: the conceit of the double. Compelling performances by Pitt and Norton make this potentially risky directorial decision deliver, with both actors earning Gen X cult status for their portrayals of different aspects of the same character. As with all literalizations of metaphor, however, something is lost in the translation: in this case the very unheimlich, or uncanny, nature of the double as narrative strategy. In Fincher's Fight Club the double emerges primarily as a revelation of plot, while Palahniuk’s Fight Club plays with character and narrative voice to make the contours and purported integrity of hts subject(s) blur and bleed. As a literary adaptation, Finchers film is, in Palahniuk's words, "a copy of a copy of a copy,” but it is also undeniably a discrete text in its own right. In this essay we consider the operations and effects of Fight Club’s narrative frames and doubles as represented via the distinct media resources of prose fiction and film.
- Subject
- film critisicm; Fight Club; David Fincher; novel adaptation; double; narrative voice
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1302376
- Identifier
- uon:20469
- Identifier
- ISSN:0090-4260
- Language
- eng
- Reviewed
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