The use of subliminal images in "Fight Club" (1999) and how I have used them in my film

(All subliminal images of Tyler)

      In David Fincher’s “Fight Club” (1999), there is the use of subliminal images. In “Fight Club”, there are four instances of subliminal images of Tyler Durden before he is actually shown as a character on screen. The four images occur in everyday places of the Narrator; His work (03:50-03:59), at the doctors (06:00-06:-05), his support group (07:10-07:15) and after his first meeting with Marla after she walks away in the street (12:00-12:07). The use of these subliminal images that the character of Tyler Durden is in the head of The Narrator, but also that the audience do not really know that they saw these images but in the back of their head they noticed something out of place. The first actual sighting of Tyler Durden occurs at 18:56, as the Narrator quotes the line, ‘If you wake up at a different time in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?’, as the Narrator says this, the camera pans to Tyler, as he says ‘different person’, this could be representative of the Narrator becoming Tyler, and could be seen as subliminal, because the audience may not pick up on the fact that Tyler and the Narrator are the same person, also, when the Narrator wakes up on a plane, coming home after one of his business trips, he has his first meeting with Tyler, echoes the line. In “Fight Club”, the characters even reference the use of subliminal images in everyday life, and Tyler Durden even splices images of pornography into family films, the audience in the cinema he works in also realises that they have seen something and know it’s there but haven’t been able to process what they have seen (31:08-32:15) and continuously in every single fight that the Narrator and Tyler are in, in the fight club, the two are never in the shot together, this could be picked upon that they are the same person, because people in the fight club, never seem them fight each other. For my short film, I have also decided to use subliminal images. The subliminal images will be of the main antagonist, because the protagonist actually imagines that he is being stalked by the antagonist, which in the end turns out to be himself, there is also references of becoming someone you are not, who is completely different from who the protagonist actually is, and it is the antagonist who embodies these different traits.