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“You met me at a very strange time in my life.” Fight Club and the Moving Image on the Verge of ‘Going Digital’

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Mashup Cultures

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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?

The Jittercam. Screenshot from Fight Club (USA 1999).

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Notes

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  1. Doris Gassert MA
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  1. ePedagogy Design — Visual Knowledge Building, Aalto University Helsinki / School of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland

    Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss

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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

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-0096-7_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Vienna

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-7091-0095-0

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