Editing in Fight Club

When it comes to the movie Fight Club [David Fincher], editing plays a key role in embodying The Narrator’s [Edward Norton] state of mind. The serious case of Insomnia that The Narrator is fighting through causes his mind to decay. He begins a decline into a complex tangle of hallucinations that border the characteristics of Paranoid Schizophrenia. David Fincher chooses to represent this transition with simple editing techniques and one simple in movie reference.
The point is made early on in the movie that Tyler Durden [Brad Pitt], The Narrator’s mind-governing hallucination, is a projectionist. Naturally, Tyler Durden cuts filmstrips, editing in single frames of pornography. So, the importance of the editing style is communicated with the audience upfront. The point of this is that it parallels the effects of The Narrator’s Insomnia to that of editing film. It as though the Insomnia is cutting the “filmstrip of The Narrator’s mind” and inserting foreign footage into it, which changes the identity of The Narrator and the world around him. This is similar to how editing choices can effect what a movie accomplishes with the same footage.
To push this tactic another step, single frames of Tyler Durden, before The Narrator knows him, are spliced into the movie at times where The Narrator is discussing his Insomnia and the problems that come with it. Also, when you look at the movie as a whole rather than through a microscope, the movie begins with the ending, and The Narrator rewinds in order to talk about Marla Singer [Helena Bonham Carter] destroying him. However, he pauses, rewinds again and starts with how his Insomnia caused him to run into Marla Singer. Then, he is on the subject of Marla for a while then sort of skips over her importance in order to discuss Tyler Durden. By the last 30 or so minutes of the movie, The Narrator rewinds yet again to expose what actually went on as he sorts through his psychosis. And to shove the idea of the editing reflecting The Narrator’s mind, and vice-versa, down our throats, a single frame of pornography is added to the end of the movie. This breaks Tyler Durden’s effect on the audiences watching movies within the movie and his effect on The Narrator and switches it to him directly affecting the movie himself. A bit of a parting shot at typical editing.
Essentially, the editing reflects the state of mind of The Narrator and tries to place the audience in a similar state in order to communicate the high-degree of mental psychosis he is going through. Changing this to typical editing would make Fight Club a much less interesting and active film. Simple choices in editing having a massive effect on outcome.