Fight Club Essay

Submitted By DeanFites1
Words: 793
Pages: 4

Dean Fites
Reasons for Fight Club “The first and second rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club” (Palahniuk 48-50). Fight Club is the perfect definition of what a film adaptation is. David Fincher’s Fight Club did a great job translating Chuck Palahniuk’s writing style to the screen. The book and the film are a perfect and there is little difference between the two. Although the similarities are clear, there are still some small differences. The ending of the film is the main difference from the novel. It is clear that there is a difference, but why did the filmmaker change it. First off, one difference between the novel and the film is how Tyler Durden and the narrator of the story met. In the book, the narrator meets Tyler on a nude beach while Tyler is constructing a sundial-like watch out of logs (Palahniuk 19). But in the movie they meet while they’re on a plane coming back from vacation when the narrator sees that they have the same briefcase (Fight Club). The filmmakers might’ve done this change because they wanted the film to be more of a family movie and not have them meet on a nude beach. Despite the movie having many lines that came right out of the book, the lines go to different characters than they did in the book. Many people probably didn’t see this difference but it is there. It is likely this was done because the narrator has the majority of the lines in the novel than any other character, though other character’s lines are also given to different people in the film (Radcliffe). For example, in the movie Tyler Durden gave a speech that was originally given by a mechanic in the book. One difference is that after the fight clubs are already underway Tyler and the narrator create something that they call Project Mayhem. The rules of Project Mayhem are much like the rules of Fight Club. In the film the ultimate objective of Project Mayhem is never revealed, but the narrator tells a police officer that he believes their goal is to blow up all the credit card companies (Fight Club). In the novel, Project Mayhem was to slow down humanity's advancement with technology and try to cause another Dark Age (Palahniuk 137). The filmmakers probably didn’t want to reveal the objective of Project Mayhem because they wanted to keep the audience guessing what the real objective was (Rurouni). The main difference between the novel and the film that everyone saw was the different endings. At the end of both the book and the movie the narrator shoots himself in order to get rid of Tyler Durden. At the end of the book, the narrator is found to be a patient in a mental hospital after shooting himself (Palahniuk 154). In the movie, the narrator simply watches as all of the major credit card buildings collapse (Fight Club). The movie entirely removes the scene in the mental hospital (Fight Club). The deletion of this