Movies

The Brutal Beauty of the Sound Design of ‘Fight Club’

We explore how sound design elevates the impact of the most violent scenes in David Fincher’s Fight Club.
Fight Club Plane
By  · Published on February 20th, 2017

Part of the reason David Fincher’s Fight Club has become one of the most talked-about films of the last 20 years is because it is a full-on assault to your senses. It doesn’t just tell its story, it makes you feel it through frenetic and highly-stylized visuals teamed with innovative, unexpected, and equally-powerful sound design. The movie affects you like a drug, it gets your heart racing, your skin tingling, it alters your perceptions of reality in a way that is simultaneously disorienting and captivating. Visuals can do this on their own to a degree, but if a film really wants to get inside a person, if it really wants to leave a lasting impression, the sound has to be there too, creating its own complementary but distinct reality to layer upon that created by the visuals, resulting in a multi-dimensional sensory experience that resonates much longer in our memories.

In Fight Club especially these facets create a filmic universe that like the mind of our protagonist can’t be trusted, but won’t be ignored, either, and in the following video from Film Radar, the importance and influence of sound design – specifically in regards to the film’s copious fight scenes – are explored and examined to reveal a film equally dependent on the engagement of all the senses, not just your eyes.

Sound design doesn’t get a lot of the glory doled out to great films, but this video is excellent at giving credit where it is overdue. In addition to its impact, the video furthermore explains how the film’s sound design was created, some of it straight from the mouths of the men responsible, Ren Klyce and Richard Hymns. And beyond just Fight Club, it proves how David Fincher, a director we think of as one of the most inventively visual of his generation, is equally adept at conveying his tones, themes, and emotional atmosphere without using a single flickering frame.

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