Mise-En-Scene - Fight Club

Mise-en-scene is a tricky topic in that the term often refers to many things at once within the frame. Fight Club offers a good example of how stylization is a form of mise-en-scene.

In Fight Club there is basically one character acting as both the protagonist and antagonist. The audience does not realize this until the end, but once the revelation is made, numerous clues can be found throughout the film. For example, the protagonist, played by Edward Norton, is a jaded insomniac who has become disillusioned with his job, his daily routine, and basically his life in general. A fine example of this can be seen in the beginning of the film when Norton recounts how he has a hobby of buying furniture and appliances that he never uses from Ikea. The scene shows his apartment with price tags and descriptions floating above all of his furniture, ala a page setup from a retail catalog. Norton plays on the fact that this is what his life has become, a mundane existence of shopping and never putting to use any of the goods. While away on a business trip, his apartment, along with all of his possessions, are destroyed in a fire caused by gas emitting from a faulty stove and then igniting when his refrigerator clicks on. Everything Nortons character had been aimlessly clinging to is gone, and essentially his life his torched in the fire as well.

This is just one example of mise-en-scene in this film, but other examples can include the use of the house Norton moves into, which is a run down dump very contrasting to what he had previously been living in, and the books that he finds in there, detailing in the first person how certain organs in the human body think for themselves.