Fight Club Analysis

I have decided to analyse both a modern thriller, and a classic thriller, 'Fight Club' and 'Psycho' respectively.

Fight Club is considered one of the greatest thrillers in modern cinema, with Brad Pitt's character 'Tyler Durden' being considered one of the most absorbing and influential characters created. A brief synopsis of Fight Club is that an insomniac office worker (Edward Norton) meets a soap salesman (Brad Pitt), and together they create a fight club, which soon spreads to many other cities. Pitt's character then uses this club to wreak havok across the city.

As you would expect from a film of this name, there are many fight scenes. The pure brutality of these scenes is enthralling to watch, as we see men who willingly go into fights wanting to hurt people and also to be hurt. It is this that makes the fight scenes stand out from fight scenes in other films, as in Fight Club they have an added psychological factor. In most films a fight would occur because a character was angry at another one, however in this film it is merely because the men are bored with their lives. This makes them much more interesting, because it adds a factor of human psychology, something which helps to make a thriller gripping, as I pointed out in my essay about 'Taking Lives'.

What really makes Fight Club stand out as an incredible film then, is not its fight scenes, but it's take on human psychology. It gives us a view of the mentally unstable from their perspective. However it does not reveal it's doing this until near the very end, and this massive twist in the plot is what has helped make many people see this film as a modern classic.

At the start of the film, it looks at human psychology through Norton's characters insomnia. It shows us how it affects his life and his work. It then goes on to show us how he eventually finds his own cure for it - going to support groups for the terminally ill. This gives us an interesting look at how someone can pretend to have a terrible illness around those who actually do.

Towards the end of the film, it looks at how someone deals with discovering they have a serious mental disorder that not only threatens themselves, but many others across the whole city.

Alongside its gripping, realistic fight scenes, it is this look at human psychology that really makes Fight Club stand out as an landmark thriller, that can stand alongside films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.