You are quite right, I may have been confusing that with the book where, I think, he mentions that he has come back from the office with a load of flight coupons - although that may be out of thin air as well!
Do you not believe that the flashback when he realizes is true? That is where we see him handing the beer bottle over and it smashing, hitting himself in the face and having sex with Marla. I always thought that was supposed to be the real version of events and have never heard anyone contradict that before.
The car crash is always one that bugged me but I imagine it was just him driving and crashing the car. Like Squirrel Killer has already said, the man has a pretty strong cult of personality surrounding him and I think they are used to and tolerant of his obvious insanity - even to being willing to die with him in a car crash.
Much though I am trying to come up with reasonable explanations I have a feeling you may be right and I am just being pushed towards suspension of disbelief.
Replacing Pitt with Norton makes sense if you are willing to push it a bit and let it. Many apologies for the total copout but I really am beginning to run out of places to go with this!
I still don’t think Fight Club necessarily ‘cheats’, not on the level of say,
SPOILER (as if there aren’t enough in this thread anyway)
Danny Aiello in Hudson Hawk - which only came about because he refused to have his character die.
Event Horizon broke its own rules? How does a spaceship that’s been to hell and picked up a living essence break its own rules by turning Neil into some sort of demon? It was a supernatural movie.
Because Neill never went over. For the first N% of the movie they play coy about whether the whole thing is just them going crazy. Then they just say fuck it and make Neill a demon.
Okay, you got me on Fight Club but I call foul here.
I think it is entirely plausible that after the ship has gone over it could bring back something that takes over Sam Neill.
I think Fight Club may have been a better example of cheating as I don’t think what you are talking about in Event Horizon actually is. Perhaps a better way of looking at it would be as a reveal. They don’t know if it is in their heads until Neill is revealed to have been taken over.
I don’t think Fight Club is cheating. It’s got a big reveal that changes your perspective of what you just watched, but it doesn’t introduce any doubt that what you’re now seeing is to be accepted as The Truth Revealed. If anything, it’s the fact that, plot aside, it’s still a very conventional movie, unlike something like Memento–more on that in a moment–that makes it obvious it wasn’t a cheat. They establish your perspective only to change it, but that being the point, they go on to quickly help it sink in with the quick “revised” flashbacks, establishing this as something that seemed to come out of left field but was planned all along, and of course spelling things out for the dunces in the audience. They left no ambiguity as to what happened, other than trivial things like leaving you to imagine how a few of the less consequential scenes not covered in the flashbacks must have actually played out, and they introduce no ambiguity to anything else (Like OMG what if Marla was imaginary?!).
Memento comes closer to cheating, but I think it’s accidental if at all. Anyone remember those long Salon articles where that guy really gets into every single detail and breaks it all down, coming up with some inconsistencies? If I remember correctly, he comes to some meta-conclusion about how memory is presented, and interprets things to point to a message about how we can’t trust anything we just saw in the movie, and that really would be a big cheat, robbing the whole thing of meaning. I think it just came down to a few minor goofs from editing or whatever, but if you want to take the Salon guy’s view, that would amount to more of a cheat.
What’s frustrating is that I can’t think of a good example of a real cheat movie. I feel like I’ve seen one fairly recently, but I just can’t remember what it was. It’s on the tip of my tongue, or whatever, but I’m drawing a blank.
Edit: The 2nd and 3rd Matrix movies are the best I can come up with for cheat examples, starting with the end of the 2nd. Ok, so suddenly Neo has powers in the real world, no explanation given, and as I recall, no satisfactory explanation ever given in the 3rd. They just turn the whole thing on its ear and laugh all the way to the bank because they didn’t have any good ideas of what they should actually do with the sequels. My memory’s bad on those two movies though, and the cheat is hardly the worst of their offenses.
I think there’s a pretty significant difference between a reveal that casts a new light on previous events(Sixth Sense tremendous dinner scene) and Fight Club, where the reveal is that some percentage of the movie never happened even though it was presented as a traditional omniscient viewer(rather than a frame story as in The Usual Suspects). That doesn’t change your perspective, it invalidates it. Rewatching Fight Club is not a different experience now that you know Pitt doesn’t exist, because he’s out there hitting golf balls and fucking Marla while Norton walks around and bleeding on people while Norton watches.
I’d say the Matrix thing was just garden variety terrible storytelling. If there’s a cheat in the Matrix it’s that the 2nd movie completely negates the ending of the first.
The Matrix:
“Wow, Neo beat an agent handily(which nobody had EVER DONE BEFORE) and is The One with unlimited power”
Matrix Reloaded:
“Agents are faster so now Neo struggles with fighting them, and also now Morpheus can beat an agent, and instead of unlimited power Neo can fly and stop bullets”
One movie that sticks out in my mind for cheating was “The Frighteners”. It was directed by Peter Jackson, starred Michael J. Fox, and through most of the movie, it was actually fairly entertaining.
It established its own rules for what happened to people when they died. When they became ghosts, what happened to ghosts, what ghosts could do, how ghosts could permanently die, etc.
And then at the end of the movie, when Michael J. Fox’s character died, the movie broke its own rules for what happens. It felt like such a LOUSY cheat. They’d just spent two hours making you understand the rules, and then in the end of the movie they threw them out the window so that we’d get a happy ending.
So stupid. I’m still bitter at wasting money on seeing that one in the theater.
I don’t see how Fight Club is a cheat. I’ve watched the movie many times. Clearly, when Pitt is bleeding on someone, it’s actually Norton’s character’s aggressive personality in control, while the passive one waits in the wings. When he’s fucking Marla, it’s Norton crazy side doing the fucking while the passive side is bothered by the noise.
Something we see a lot in 80’s movies is the cheat of “dorky, uncoordinated and unpopular person is suddenly the hit of the school” Whenever a movie ends with the infamous “slow clap” as the peers come around and embrace a pariah, I roll my eyes. In trying to tell an “ugly duckling” or a “loser makes good” story, often the writers decide that the reality of a High School social structure no longer applies.
I don’t see invalidating your perspective is a cheat at all. You are lead to make judgements based on an unreliable narrator who doesn’t even know he is unreliable. Of course, as it is the only information source you have, you trust him, although you may have some inkling that he is perhaps not totally on the level.
The next thing you know, you are shown, along with the character, exactly what has been happening and are forced to reevaluate your position in exactly the same way the narrator is.
In Fight Club, your perspective is Norton’s plus your own opinions as a viewer. Just like him, you have no idea that what you are seeing and experiencing is wrong until the reveal, which is when the Pitt persona also gains a measure of independence and fights for control.
This is not a cheat, it was planned all along in the film and there are allusions to it all through the movie. That is good storytelling, forcing you to challenge what is in front of your eyes, similar to the Sixth Sense.
A cheat is when someone survives something they couldn’t possibly survive to further the plot or someone suddenly is able to do something they couldn’t or should be unable to do just because the writers need them to do it to get out of a hole.
For literary cheats, read Sherlock Holmes. Often he will analyze something quite incorrectly because Conan Doyle needs that particular piece of evidence to solve the case.
That awful book about Jack the Ripper by Cornwell features a spectacular cheat to make her case work. She basically states that: the wounds from JtR attacks are consistent with those inflicted by right handed people. Sickert was right handed therefore he must be the killer.
Sixth Sense never, ever shows us something false. Pitt physically interacts with Norton multiple times. Norton stands around unhurt while Pitt does the bleeding thing.
The point I am trying to make is that the Sixth Sense treats you as an audience and shows you more.
Fight Club asks you to look at things as Norton. You find out about the story and characters as Norton does. Those things that you are talking about are not false to Norton, he thinks they are real and so do we.
Only later do we find out he was wrong and they weren’t.
I have no internet access at the weekends but I will gladly take this up with you again on Monday.
I always screw this up and end up looking stupid, but I’m really close to sure you’re doing the strawman thing here. Right? I’m smart, right guys? Cause we’re not saying that The Sixth Sense and Fight Club are the same type of twists, but that’s all you keep arguing. You’re right, they’re different, but we’re right, neither is a cheat.
But yeah, Merva’s post two before this one sums up well what I was trying to explain about Fight Club. Your perspective changes, your perspective is invalidated, tomato, to-mah-toe. The rest of the movie isn’t invalidated, it’s illuminated. And as for your Usual Suspects comparison, I don’t get it. The whole of Fight Club save the last 5 minutes or so was a narrative flashback. You might get lost in the movie and think you’re a traditional omniscient viewer, or whatever, but that’s your fault (and not a bad thing necessarily).
As I point out, almost the whole of Fight Club is a flashback, so that’s a get-out-of-false free card right there, but additionally, it’s not showing us anything false in the “that couldn’t happen” kind of way. Sure, we’re party to the narrator’s hallucinations, but there’s never a time that Pitt and Norton are separately doing anything that couldn’t be accomplished with just one of them, and maybe some slightly confused onlookers. We never see them in different places at the same time actually interacting with people. I’m not sure which “bleeding thing” specifically you keep referring to, but if you mean any of their fights with other people, like where Pitt’s bleeding on Fucking Lou, it’s not like Norton’s going around slapping the other guys on the back and cheering. When one’s doing something in a crowd, the other is generally silent, in the background, or otherwise uninvolved.
