Movie adaptation

Special effects

There are several scenes where Fight Club makes use of various special effects. These effects are typically used to give the audience a more direct view of the narrator’s perception of the world around him.

We see an early use of special effects when the movie visualizes the narrator going into a mental cave to meet his ‘power animal’, which turns out to be an animated penguin (10:58). The movie later twists this scene, replacing the penguin with Marla to highlight how Marla’s presence distracts the narrator from the support group meetings (14:45). 

We also see special effects in a scene where the narrator is looking around his apartment and images from a furniture catalog are placed around his field of vision (05:03). This scene is meant to show how the narrator has been trapped in a consumerist lifestyle where he is constantly thinking about which piece of designer furniture he should get next.

Another use of special effects (which may be a little difficult to spot) is that the image of Tyler Durden appears for a split second in some of the early scenes of the movie. These subliminal images may be a way to show that Tyler is beginning to be formed in the narrator’s mind at these points in the story, since the images of Tyler tend to appear in situations when the narrator is under some kind of pressure (for example during his visit to the doctor, where he is desperate to find a cure for his insomnia, 06:19). At the same time, the images can also be viewed as a reference to Tyler’s own habit of inserting disturbing split-second images into movies.