Adapting Fight Club: Point of View From Page To Screen

Narrative Analysis: Second Assessed Essay
Candidate 316773
Module Title Narrative Analysis
Module Tutor Michael Toolan
Question Select a written narrative which has been adapted for the cinema
or for television. In two or three key scenes, show how point of
view is indicated in the written text and in the film version. Are
the effects the same or different in each case?
Title Translating Point of View in Fight Club Across Different Media
MHRA Citation
3351 Words ( + attached extracts from Fight Club novel and screenplay)
Candidate 316773 Second Narrative Analysis Assessed Essay: ‘Translating Point of View Across
Different Media in Fight Club’
April 2003
Translating Point of View in Fight Club across

Different Media
introduction
This essay investigates disparities in the presentation of point of view between Chuck
Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club and its movie translation. Two extracts1 will be
examined (reproduced here as appendixes). Three points about the nature of text to
film translations will be identified:
1) The shift from first person (novel) to third person narration (film)
fundamentally alters the relationship between ‘story’ and audience.
2) The film translates its textual source so that it becomes more presentational
than assertive.
3) Film narrative is actually better suited than the original text to demonstrate the
way in which the central protagonist is intertextually constructed.
1 from first-person text to third person film

1.1 point of view in the novel
Simpson’s typology of narrative modes classifies the novel version of Fight Club as
positively modalised ‘A’ form (1993, 56); it is reported exclusively in the first person
by an (unnamed) intradiegetic narrator. The mode is signalled by a preponderance of
verba sentiendi: ‘I know . . . we watch . . . I know . . . I don’t want . . . Tyler doesn’t
want’ and boulomaic modality: ‘I’d be more than happy to be dead and in Heaven
right now’ (68). Deontic modality demonstrates that events are reported strongly
according to this character’s opinions: ‘This should be my favorite part’ (141). It is ‘a
highly “subjective” mode of narration as it is located entirely within a participating
character’s consciousness, manifesting [his] judgements on other characters, and [his]
opinions on both realised and unrealised events of a story’ (Simpson 1993, 39).
The reader is tied extremely closely to the narrator’s perspective. He gives the
impression that he is describing events as he experiences them, that he is really there
and telling us what is happening2. As though we were in the scene ourselves, the
narrator implores us: ‘Would you just look at his sculpted hair’ (258). Deictic items
demonstrate that the reader’s vantage point is exclusively that of the narrator. The
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combination of temporal and spatial deixis make the extracts highly ‘proximal’
stylistically. The ‘close’ deictic adverb here (12 instances3) is used far more
commonly than the more remote adverbial there (3 instances4). The ‘closer’
demonstrative pronoun/adjective this is used rather than that (43 5 to 12, most of the
latter of which are in analeptic traces as markers of the past tense). The ‘distal’ point
of view elements, therefore, suggest directionality orientated from the position of the
narrator. Constant use of the pure deictic adverb now also heightens the impression of
immediate experience (five instances6). An ‘instantaneous’ present tense is used
predominantly, even in analeptic traces such as the narrator’s explanations of his first
coming to self-help groups: ‘this is when I’d cry because right now, your life comes
down to nothing, and not even nothing, oblivion’ (116). The overall effect is one of
simultaneity.
Positive modality creates the impression that the narrator is entirely in control of
what is being reported. Confidence in any expressed proposition is rarely questioned
by epistemic modality, and when this does occur it is usually safely inside the Direct
Speech of another character7. The narrator’s control over the nature of the universe is
demonstrated by his constant use of generic sentences: ‘That old saying, how you
always kill the one you love, well, look, it works both ways’ (38), ‘everyone you love
will reject you or die’ (118). This control is heightened by the reporting of most other
character’s speech in an indirect form. For instance, in the report, ‘My doctor told me
to chew valerian root and get more exercise. Eventually I’d fall asleep’ (153-4) an
ironising distance is formed between the Doctor and the reader, in which we share the
narrator’s incredulity towards this advice.
Interestingly however, when Simpson describes Type A as a form of
‘psychological’ focalisation, he notes that it ‘extends from authorial omniscience to a
single character’s perhaps restricted version of ‘reality’ (1993, 12). In Fight Club the
reader is increasingly encouraged to ‘read against’ the narrator’s discourse on the
basis that his ‘version of reality’ is particularly ‘restricted’. This effect is created
because he uses relatively little deontic and boulomaic modality for Type A, despite
the exceptional events unfolding around him. Particularly alarming events are
reported in a style more akin to neutrally modalised Narratorial Mode Category B
(third person, unfocalised)8. This ‘restricted’ view of reality culminates in a general
absence of verbs of speculative cognition to hide the fact that the narrator has
constructed his companion and oppressor, Tyler Durden, in his own mind as part of ‘a
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split personality’ (p.172). The rest of the novel, from Chapter 2 onwards, can be seen
as ‘completing analepsis’9 to explain how the characters arrive at this scene, and once
the journey has been completed, revealing that this second major character does not
‘really’ exist10.
Liddel’s relations of setting to plot and character classifies the novel as
‘kaleidoscopic’; the narrator ‘lives in several worlds at once’, shifting rapidly between
the physical world and the world of the imagination (1947, 124-5). Character is
related to setting subjectively, through the view of this central protagonist. His
associative chains of ideas intersect with the external world, sparking new reflections.
Hence having a gun pushed in his mouth makes him imagine the process of making
silencers, or being sat atop an exploding building makes him imagine the time-lapse
photo series of the event in a History book. The novel relies on an indeterminacy that
is inherent to this form of narration: the boundary between these two worlds is blurred
so that the reader cannot interpret what derives from an ‘external’ world and what
derives from the protagonists’ own mind11.
1.2 point of view in the movie

In order to interpret the movie of Fight Club as an ‘adaptation’ of the novel, it is
necessary to accept Chatman’s assertion that ‘narrative itself is a deep structure quite
independent of its medium’ (1980, 403). This is problematic, as it relies on the age-old
story/discourse divide which has never overcome the difficulty of ascertaining where
one ends and the other begins. After all, there can be no form without content and no
content without form. However, as this essay is primarily concerned with the
translation of point of view, it will accept Chatman’s assertion as a pragmatic
necessity for grounding the translation of one ‘story’12 into different ‘discourses’. On
this basis, I have located the opening ten minutes of the movie as constituting the
‘equivalent’ sections to the extracts from the novel.
The order of events is slightly different in the two versions; in the movie the
IKEA catalogue scene is inserted inside reflections on the narrator’s self-help group
lifestyle, even though the scene occurs later in the novel13. However, the movie
actually sticks fairly closely to the ‘discourse time’ by which the novel conveys ‘story’
events (defined in Chatman 1980, 404). For instance, in the novel there is an
unmarked, massive analeptic shift at the beginning of Chapter 2, from the skyscraper
to when ‘Bob’s big arms . . . closed around’ (89) the narrator at a self-help group. In
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the movie this is achieved by a graphic match (defined in Bordwell and Thompson
2001, 155). An abrupt spatial and temporal shift becomes a smooth continuity because
David Fincher, the director, cuts together two shots in which the composition of the
face of the central character (Edward Norton) is dynamically ‘matched’ across
different backgrounds:
Shot Shot
11 12
(Zoom
s
in)
The 180˚ line is maintained as the narrator is yanked to the right once shot 11 has
zoomed in, cutting to shot 12 as though Bob (Meatloaf) has literally grabbed him
from one frame and pulled him into the next. The action is accompanied by a
rumbling sound effect. This is a particularly sophisticated form of editing based upon
a ‘match on action’ (defined in Bordwell and Thompson 2001, 168). The primacy of
the narrative flow, and the shot’s sheer stylishness, ride this explicit cheat cut.
The greatest change in translating the movie is a shift from the novel’s first
person narration to a form of heavily focalised third-person narration. James Monaco
has noted the general disinclination of film to use first-person narration, in which the
eye of the camera becomes the eye of a character, from whose viewpoint we never
deviate14. Instead, returning to Simpson’s typology of narrative modes, the most
common form of presenting a piece of ‘subjective narration’ in film is by positively
modalised Category B in Reflector mode (a character is focalised). So although the
movie reports events through the omniscient lens of an extradiegetic camera, this view
is ‘restricted’ by an alignment with the central protagonist15. This technique transcends
film’s ‘natural’ modes of ‘zero’ or ‘external’ focalisation by giving us some
impression of the central protagonists’ internal feelings.
The extracts are not interweaved with stories that break the central
protagonists’ narrative; there is no crosscutting, he is always the centre of attention.
Indeed, he is rarely out of the frame, apart from in scenes where his alter-ego, Tyler
Durden (Brad Pitt) plays his role (none of which occur in my extracts). Psychological
point of view is, in this fashion, preserved. The narrator also leaves the frame
whenever he shifts from focalised (the central object of our attention) to focaliser, in
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eye-line matches, such as the diachrony of shots 114, 115 and 116 when he notices
Marla:
Shot Shot
114 115
Shot
116
The movie can produce a precise visual representation of the intensity of his gaze,
which would be impossible in the novel. Nine of the twelve obvious point of view
shots in the movie are from his perspective16. However, the extracts contain several
p.o.v. shots orientated to other characters, such as Bob. The camera imitates the
perspective of both characters when they first meet:
Shot Shot
72 73
Shot
74
More notably, there is little sense that either the syntagm of shots or shot composition
reflect the central protagonist17.
Point of view is not established primarily on visual grounds, then, but in the far more
subtle form of psychological orientation18. For instance, though the narrator is a
character in the frame, the setting that surrounds him can still be seen as orientated
from his point of view as its washed out, bleak colours reflect the misery of his
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insomniac state. The movie attempts to replicate the style of his verbal narration: short
sentences are replaced with short shots19. The strongest stylistic match to the novel is
the translation of much of the narrator’s PN into an intermittent, first-person voice
over (V.O.). Chatman’s definition of V.O. is apt:
It is not cinematic description but merely description by literary assertion

transferred to film. Filmmakers and critics traditionally show disdain for verbal
commentary because it explicates what, they feel, should be implicated visually
(1980, 41)
This transference of ‘literary assertion’ from written words to spoken ones is,
therefore, the most direct element of translation, as it presents the narrator’s words
exactly as they are set down in the original. It presents the closeness of first person
narration in a third person visual frame. Sentences are often ‘lifted’ directly20. Most
importantly, the narrator’s style in the novel: perverse, sardonic, and dry, is preserved.
The voice-over replicates the stylish verbal aesthetic of the narrator’s language. Hence
some of the most inventive idiomatic descriptions appear in the voice over though
they are superfluous to the narrative itself, such as descriptions of Bob as ‘the big
moosie’ and ‘huge, sweating tits that hung enormous, the way we think of God’s as
big’.
The deictic adverbs in the voice-over are more distancing than those found in
the novel. The constant ‘here’s have been replaced with ‘there’s’, indicating that the
voice over is not necessarily being reported as interior monologue, as it seems too
distanced a form of reporting:
JACK (V.O.)
Bob loved me because he thought my
testicles were removed too. Being
there, my face against his tits,
ready to cry -- this was my vacation.
However, the voice over does contain the ‘closer’ indicator of directionality and
location ‘this’ rather than ‘that’, which is found in the novel21. As with the ‘immediate
report’ first person narration of the novel, the actual status of this V.O. is ambiguous.
It appears to be both intra- and extradiegetic, as it reports from the perspective of a
character in the frame, yet this character cannot possibly be addressing us from this
spatio-temporal setting, and it is too structured (there is too much sense of an
addressee) for it to be stream of consciousness. Describing the V.O. as that of a
‘narrator’ is in itself problematic. The ‘narration’ is the unbroken visual presentation
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of ‘story’ events, inside the frame. This is often expanded upon by the voice over, or
an attitude is expressed towards it, but it constitutes a secondary level to the main
narrative. As such, ‘opinionator’ might serve as a better expression than ‘narrator’ to
express the central character’s voice over role.
2 adapting the assertive (text) to the presentational (film)
As James Monaco has noted, ‘the driving tension of the novel is the relationship
between the materials of the story (plot, character, setting, theme etc.) and its
narration in language; between the tale and the teller. The driving tension of film, on
the other hand, is between the materials of the story and the objective nature of the
image’ (2000, 23). Chatman explains that in written narrative an author can correctly
attribute something by simply naming the attribute, meaning that it is foremost an
assertive medium. Film narrative cannot rely on verbal elaborations in the viewer’s
mind, however. The ‘dominant mode is presentational, not assertive’; a film does not
assert the state of affairs, it simply shows them to us (1980, 411). There is,
consequently a tendency in the Fight Club movie to visually present what was
originally asserted in the novel.
Previously narrated events are simply acted out visually, such as the
appearance of the narrator’s face wet face on Bob’s chest, which is described in the
novel but enacted in the movie on the basis of a stage direction. The narrator’s
commentary of his situation in the novel often has to be acted out. His comment that:
With a gun stuck in your mouth and the barrel of the gun between your teeth, you can
only talk in vowels’ (39) is presented in the movie as dialogue:
TYLER
Maybe you should say a few words, to mark the occasion.
JACK
... i... ann....iinn.. ff....nnyin...
Similarly, the presentational nature of film means that Tyler Durden becomes less
ambiguous. As Chatman has noted, the camera lens cannot be ambiguous; something
cannot be shown without showing it (1980, 41). So in film it is difficult to describe a
character’s interior world when it effects their perception of the ‘objective’ exterior
world. As such, and in order to replicate the novel’s central conceit, Tyler is presented
simply as another character. The viewer therefore shares the central protagonist’s
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hallucination even though the overall mode of reporting in the movie is that of the
third person.
The movie makes use of its strong visual mode to translate the original (novel)
narrator’s abstract reflections, such as his description of the names of the support
groups that he attends: ‘When you look for these support groups, they all have vague
up-beat names. My Thursday evening group for blood parasites, it’s called Free and
Clear. The group I go to for brain parasites is called Above and Beyond’ (137). Instead
of translating this information to the V.O, visual signs are used as contextualising
shots:
Shot Shot
71 72
Shot
76
The absence of the narrator’s diegesis means that the irony of these ‘vague up-beat
names’ is not explained directly (verbally). However, as this is less clearly ‘spelt out’
in the movie the reader is given a greater interpretive role. For once information in a
film is, to use Iser’s term, less concretised22 than that found in a novel. The reader
must gather the irony from the context. The power of mise-en-scène (a much more
developed concept in film than in the novel) to create irony through juxtaposed
images is demonstrated in Shot 76. Foreground, a distraught, dying woman embraces
the narrator. In the background but still in focus, the sign ‘Onwards and Upward’ is
ironically inappropriate. This visual representation also raises questions over whether
naming, in itself, in the novel, is a form of Direct Writing (see Toolan 2001, 137)23.
The more abstract concepts of the novel, such as the central protagonist’s idea
that ‘the people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they
sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue’ (273), are translated directly,
but in reference to the central protagonist himself. Hence, in the screenplay ‘Jack sits
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on the toilet, CORDLESS PHONE to his ear, flicks through an IKEA catalogue.
There’s a stack of old Playboy magazines and other catalogues nearby’. Mise-en-
scène is again used to establish the novel’s ideas, the presence of pornographic
magazines in the frame insinuates that they have been abandoned in favour of the
furniture catalogue.
3 demonstrating the intertextual construction of character in

different media
Fight Club is much concerned with the artificiality of ‘postmodern’ discourses such as
advertising, big business and self-help rhetoric. The New Age discourse of meditation,
for instance, is satirised using bathos: ‘The heart chakra. The head chakra. Chloe
talked us into caves where we met our power animal. Mine was a penguin’ (170-173).
In the novel, the narrator appears to have internalised several ‘external’ discourses 24,
thinking in the lexis of external discourses that he has encountered25. The film
demonstrates a greater aptitude to demonstrating this type of ‘intertextual’
construction of character in Extract 2. In the novel, the narrator describes his home
using the register of the ‘IKEA furniture catalogue’ that has replaced pornography in
his life. He does this by using Free Direct Writing, where he describes his possessions
as they were identified in the catalogue, along with ridiculous details of colour and
quirks:
We all have the same Rislampa/Har paper lamps made from wire and
environmentally friendly unbleached paper. Mine are confetti . . .
. . . The Alle cutlery service. Stainless steel. Dishwasher safe.
The Vild hall clock made of galvanized steel, oh, I had to have that.
The Klipsk shelving unit, oh, yeah.
Hemlig hat boxes. Yes.
The street outside my high-rise was sparkling and scattered with all this.
The Mommala quilt-cover set. Design by Tomas Harila and available in the
following:
Orchid.
Fuschia.
Cobalt.
Ebony.
Jet.
Eggshell or heather.
It took my whole life to buy this stuff.
The easy-care textured lacquer of my Kalix occasional tables.
My Steg nesting tables (276-97)
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The humour of the episode lies in the juxtaposition of this discourse with a far more
sexual one: ‘oh yeah . . . oh . . .Yes’.
The movie can create a better pastiche for the IKEA catalogue as both film and
catalogues have a visual mode. In the movie, while the narrator speaks catalogue
numbers are gradually mapped on top of all of his possessions, a logo appears in the
bottom right-hand corner of the frame. CGI effects are combined with mis en scene to
transform the frame into the open spread of a catalogue page. It appears, as the camera
slowly pans, that the narrator is no longer walking across his living room but is on a
double page spread:
Shot Shot
25 26
Shot
27
Shot
28
11
12
13
The camera focuses on items, such as the ‘clever coffee table in the shape of a yin and
yang’ as it appears. Text duration has been condensed, abstractly mapping a lifelong
project of material acquisitions. The dialogue with the catalogue company on the
phone offsets the preponderance of the V.O, to address the need for constant action ‘in
the frame’. Two of the filmic modes identified by Toolan (2001, 104) are used
simultaneously: ‘visual representation’ and ‘writing’.
conclusion
Detailed analysis proves my opening three assertions. Lothe states that to ‘transfer a
work of art from one medium to another is, in a sense, impossible’ (2000, 86) and,
accepting that the story/discourse distinction is a false one, the first person narrative
of the novel leads to a very different relationship between ‘story’ and audience than
the more distanced third person reporting of the film. This does not imply, however,
that film narrative is in some way ‘inferior’ to the more established form of written
narrative. Indeed, as this essay demonstrates, film’s orientation towards presenting an
objective visual image actually makes it more effective for several types of reporting.
14
15
Appendixes
EXTRACT ONE: equivalent scenes from novel and screenplay
Extract One is the opening scene, which demonstrates the way in which the
narrator’s disillusionment with the postmodern condition has led him to adopt
schizophrenia and fraudulently attend self-help groups for the terminally ill.
Novel extract (numbered by sentence)
Chapter 1
1. TYLER GETS ME a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my
mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. 2. For a long
time though, Tyler and I were best friends. 3. People are always asking, did I
know about Tyler Durden.
4. The barrel of the gun pressed against the back of my throat, Tyler
says, “We really won’t die.”
5. With my tongue I can feel the silencer holes we drilled into the barrel
of the gun. 6. Most of the noise a gunshot makes is expanding gases, and
there’s the tiny sonic boom a bullet makes because it travels so fast. 7. To
make a silencer, you just drill holes in the barrel of the gun, a lot of holes. 8.
This lets the gas escape and slows the bullet to below the speed of sound.
9. You drill the holes wrong and the gun will blow off your hand.
10. “This isn’t really death,” Tyler says. “We’ll be legend. We won’t
grow old.”
11. I tongue the barrel into my cheek and say, Tyler, you’re thinking of
vampires.
12. The building we’re standing on won’t be here in ten minutes. 13.
You take a 98-percent concentration of fuming nitric acid and add the acid to
three times that amount of sulfuric acid. 14. Do this in an ice bath. 15. Then
add glycerin drop-by-drop with an eye dropper. 16. You have nitroglycerin.
17. I know this because Tyler knows this.
18. Mix the nitro with sawdust, and you have a nice plastic explosive.
19. A lot of folks mix their nitro with cotton and add Epsom salts as a sulfate.
16
20. This works too. 23. Some folks, they use paraffin mixed with nitro. 24.
Paraffin has never, ever worked for me.
25. So Tyler and I are on top of the Parker-Morris Building with the
gun stuck in my mouth, and we hear glass breaking. 26. Look over the edge.
27. It’s a cloudy day, even this high up. 28. This is the world’s tallest building,
and this high up the wind is always cold. 29. It’s so quiet this high up, the
feeling you get is that you’re one of those space monkeys.
30. You do the little job you’re trained to do.
31. Pull a lever.
32. Push a button.
33. You don’t understand any of it, and then you just die.
34. One hundred and ninety-one floors up, you look over the edge of
the roof and the street below is mottled with a shag carpet of people,
standing, looking up. 35. The breaking glass is a window right below us. 36. A
window blows out the side of the building, and then comes a file cabinet big
as a black refrigerator, right below us a six-drawer filing cabinet drops right
out of the cliff face of the building, and drops turning slowly, and drops
getting smaller, and drops disappearing into the packed crowd.
37. Somewhere in the one hundred and ninety-one floors under us, the
space monkeys in the Mischief Committee of Project Mayhem are running
wild, destroying every scrap of history.
38. That old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, look, it
works both ways.
39. With a gun stuck in your mouth and the barrel of the gun between
your teeth, you can only talk in vowels.
40. We’re down to our last ten minutes.
41. Another window blows out of the building, and glass sprays out,
sparkling flock-of-pigeons style, and then a dark wooden desk pushed by the
Mischief Committee emerges inch by inch from the side of the building until
the desk tilts and slides and turns end-over-end into a magic flying thing lost
in the crowd.
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42. The Parker-Morris Building won’t be here in nine minutes. 43. You
take enough blasting gelatin and wrap the foundation columns of anything,
you can topple any building in the world. 44. You have to tamp it good and
tight with sandbags so the blast goes against the column and not out into the
parking garage around the column.
45. This how-to stuff isn’t in any history book.
46. The three ways to make napalm: One, you can mix equal parts of
gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate. 47. Two, you can mix equal
parts of gasoline and diet cola. 48. Three, you can dissolve crumbled cat litter
in gasoline until the mixture is thick.
49. Ask me how to make nerve gas. 50. Oh, all those crazy car bombs.
51. Nine minutes.
52. The Parker-Morris Building will go over, all one hundred and
ninety-one floors, slow as a tree falling in the forest. Timber. 53. You can
topple anything. 54. It’s weird to think the place where we’re standing will
only be a point in the sky.
55. Tyler and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I’m
wondering how clean this gun is.
56. We just totally forget about Tyler’s whole murder-suicide thing
while we watch another file cabinet slip out the side of the building and the
drawers roll open midair, reams of white paper caught in the updraft and
carried off on the wind.
57. Eight minutes.
58. Then the smoke, smoke starts out of the broken windows. 59. The
demolition team will hit the primary charge in maybe eight minutes. 60. The
primary charge will blow the base charge, the foundation columns will
crumble, and the photo series of the Parker-Morris Building will go into all
the history books.
61. The five-picture time-lapse series. 62. Here, the building’s standing.
63. Second picture, the building will be at an eighty-degree angle. 64. Then a
seventy-degree angle. 65. The building’s at a forty-five-degree angle in the
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fourth picture when the skeleton starts to give and the tower gets a slight arch
to it. 66. The last shot, the tower, all one hundred and ninety-one floors, will
slam down on the national museum which is Tyler’s real target.
67. “This is our world, now, our world,” Tyler says, “and those ancient
people are dead.”
68. If I knew how this would all turn out, I’d be more than happy to be
dead and in Heaven right now.
69. Seven minutes.
70. Up on top of the Parker-Morris Building with Tyler’s gun in my
mouth. 71. While desks and filing cabinets and computers meteor down on
the crowd around the building and smoke funnels up from the broken
windows and three blocks down the street the demolition team watches the
clock, I know all of this: the gun, the anarchy, the explosion is really about
Marla Singer.
72. Six minutes.
73. We have sort of a triangle thing going here. I want Tyler. 74. Tyler
wants Marla. 75. Marla wants me.
76. I don’t want Marla, and Tyler doesn’t want me around, not
anymore. 77. This isn’t about love as in caring. 78. This is about property as in
ownership.
79. Without Marla, Tyler would have nothing.
80. Five minutes.
81. Maybe we would become a legend, maybe not. 82. No, I say, but
wait. 83. Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?
84. Four minutes.
85. I tongue the gun barrel into my cheek and say, you want to be a
legend, Tyler, man, I’ll make you a legend. 86. I’ve been here from the
beginning.
87. I remember everything.
88. Three minutes.
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Chapter 2
89. BOB’S BIG ARMS were closed around to hold me inside, and I was
squeezed in the dark between Bob’s new sweating tits that hang enormous,
the way we think of God’s as big. 90. Going around the church basement full
of men, each night we met: this is Art, this is Paul, this is Bob; Bob’s big
shoulders made me think of the horizon. 91. Bob’s thick blond hair was what
you get when hair cream calls itself sculpting mousse, so thick and blond and
the pan is so straight.
92. His arms wrapped around me, Bob’s hand palms my head against
the new tits sprouted on his barrel chest.
93. “It will be alright,” Bob says. 94. “You cry now.”
95. From my knees to my forehead, I feel chemical reactions within Bob
burning food and oxygen.
96. “Maybe they got it all early enough,” Bob says. “ 97. Maybe it’s just
seminoma. 98. With seminoma, you have almost a hundred percent survival
rate.”
99. Bob’s shoulders inhale themselves up in a long draw, then drop,
drop, drop in jerking sobs. 100. Draw themselves up. 101. Drop, drop, drop.
102. I’ve been coming here every week for two years, and every week
Bob wraps his arms around me, and I cry.
103. “You cry,” Bob says and inhales and sob, sob, sobs. 104. “Go on
now and cry.”
105. The big wet face settles down on top of my head, and I am lost
inside. 106. This is when I’d cry. 107. Crying is right at hand in the smothering
dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever
accomplish will end up as trash.
108. Anything you’re ever proud of will be thrown away.
109. And I’m lost inside.
110. This is as close as I’ve been to sleeping in almost a week.
111. This is how I met Marla Singer.
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112. Bob cries because six months ago, his testicles were removed. 113.
Then hormone support therapy. 114. Bob has tits because his testosterone
ration is too high. 115. Raise the testosterone level too much, your body ups
the estrogen to seek a balance.
116. This is when I’d cry because right now, your life comes down to
nothing, and not even nothing, oblivion.
117. Too much estrogen, and you get bitch tits.
118. It’s easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject
you or die. 119. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone
will drop to zero.
120. Bob loves me because he thinks my testicles were removed too.
121. Around us in the Trinity Episcopal basement with the thrift store
plaid sofas are maybe twenty men and only one woman, all of them clung
together in pairs, most of them crying. 122. Some pairs lean forward, heads
pressed ear-to-ear, the way wrestlers stand, locked. 123. The man with the
only woman plants his elbows on her shoulders, one elbow on either side of
her head, her head between his hands, and his face crying against her neck.
124. The woman’s face twists off to one side and her hand brings up a
cigarette.
125. I peek out from under the armpit of Big Bob.
126. “All my life,” Bob cries. 127. “Why I do anything, I don’t know.”
128. The only woman here at Remaining Men Together, the testicular
cancer support group, this woman smokes her cigarette under the burden of a
stranger, and her eyes come together with mine.
129. Faker.
130. Faker.
131. Faker.
132. Short matte black hair, big eyes the way they are in Japanese
animation, skim milk thin, buttermilk sallow in her dress with a wallpaper
pattern of dark roses, this woman was also in my tuberculosis support group
Friday night. 133. She was in my melanoma round table Wednesday night.
21
Monday night she was in my Firm Believers leukemia rap group. 134. The
part down the center of her hair is a crooked lightning bolt of white scalp.
135. When you look for these support groups, they all have vague up-
beat names. 136. My Thursday evening group for blood parasites, it’s called
Free and Clear.
137. The group I go to for brain parasites is called Above and Beyond.
138. And Sunday aftemoon at Remaining Men Together in the
basement of Trinity Episcopal, this woman is here, again.
139. Worse than that, I can’t cry with her watching.
140. This should be my favorite part, being held and crying with Big
Bob without hope. 141. We all work so hard all the time. 142. This is the only
place I ever really relax and giveup.
143. This is my vacation.
144. I went to my first support group two years ago, after I’d gone to
my doctor about my insomnia, again.
145. Three weeks and I hadn’t slept. 146. Three weeks without sleep,
and everything becomes an out-of-body experience. 147. My doctor said,
“Insomnia is just the symptom of something larger. 148. Find out what’s
actually wrong. 149. Listen to your body.”
150. I just wanted to sleep. 151. I wanted little blue Amytal Sodium
capsules,
200-milligram-sized. 152. I wanted red-and-blue Tuinal bullet capsules,
lipstick-red Seconals.
153. My doctor told me to chew valerian root and get more exercise.
154. Eventually I’d fall asleep.
155. The bruised, old fruit way my face had collapsed, you would’ve
thought I was dead.
156. My doctor said, if I wanted to see real pain, I should swing by First
Eucharist on a Tuesday night. 157. See the brain parasites. 158. See the
22
degenerative bone diseases. 159. The organic brain dysfunctions. 160. See the
cancer patients getting by.
161. So I went.
162. The first group I went to, there were introductions: this is Alice,
this is Brenda, this is Dover. 163. Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to
their head.
164. I never give my real name at support groups […]
165. This was Chloe’s turn to lead us in guided meditation, and she
talked us into the garden of serenity. 166. Chloe talked us up the hill to the
palace of seven doors. 167. Inside the palace were the seven doors, the green
door, the yellow door, the orange door, and Chloe talked us through opening
each door, the blue door, the red door, the white door, and finding what was
there.
168. Eyes closed, we imagined our pain as a ball of white healing light
floating around our feet and rising to our knees, our waist, our chest. 169. Our
chakras opening. 170. The heart chakra. 171. The head chakra. 172. Chloe
talked us into caves where we met our power animal. 173. Mine was a
penguin.
174. Ice covered the floor of the cave, and the penguin said, slide. 175.
Without any effort, we slid through tunnels and galleries.
176. Then it was time to hug.
177. Open your eyes.
178. This was therapeutic physical contact, Chloe said. 179. We should
all choose a partner. 180. Chloe threw herself around my head and cried.
[…]
181. So I didn’t cry at my first support group, two years ago. 182. I
didn’t cry at my second or my third support group, either. 183. I didn’t cry at
blood parasites or bowel cancers or organic brain dementia.
23
184. This is how it is with insomnia. 185. Everything is so far away, a

copy of a copy of a copy. 186. The insomnia distance of everything, you can’t
touch anything and nothing can touch you.
187. Then there was Bob. 188. The first time I went to testicular
cancer, Bob the big moosie, the big cheesebread moved in on top of me in
Remaining Men Together and started crying. 189. The big moosie treed right
across the room when it was hug time, his arms at his sides, his shoulders
rounded. 190. His big moosie chin on his chest, his eyes already shrink-
wrapped in tears. 191. Shuffling his feet, knees-together invisible steps, 192.
Bob slid across the basement floor to heave himself on me.
193. Bob pancaked down on me.
194. Bob’s big arms wrapped around me.
195. Big Bob was a juicer, he said. 196. All those salad days on Dianabol
and then the racehorse steroid, Wistrol. 197. His own gym, Big Bob owned a
gym. 198. He’d been married three times. 199. He’d done product
endorsements, and had I seen him on television, ever? 200. The whole how-to
program about expanding your chest was practically his invention.
201. Strangers with this kind of honesty make me go a big rubbery one,
if you know what I mean.
202. Bob didn’t know. 203. Maybe only one of his huevos had ever
descended, and he knew this was a risk factor. 204.Bob told me about post-
operarive hormone therapy.
205. A lot of bodybuilders shooting too much testosterone would get what
they called bitch tits.
206. I had to ask what Bob meant by huevos.
207. Huevos, Bob said. 208. Gonads. 209. Nuts. 210. Jewels. 211. Testes.
212. Ball. 213. In Mexico, where you buy your steroids, they call them “eggs.”
214. Divorce, divorce, divorce, Bob said and showed me a wallet photo
of himself huge and naked at first glance, in a posing strap at some contest.
215. It’s a stupid way to live, Bob said, but when you’re pumped and shaved
on stage, totally shredded with body fat down to around two percent and the
24
diuretics leave you cold and hard as concrete to touch, you’re blind from the
lights, and deaf from the feedback rush of the sound system until the judge
orders: “Extend your right quad, flex and hold.”
216. “Extend your left arm, flex the bicep and hold.”
217. This is better than real life.
218. Fast-forward, Bob said, to the cancer. 219. Then he was bankrupt.
220. He had two grown kids who wouldn’t return his calls. 221. The cure for
bitch tits was for the doctor to cut up under the pectorals and drain any fluid.
222. This was all I remember because then Bob was closing in around me with
his arms, and his head was folding down to cover me. 223. Then I was lost
inside oblivion, dark and silent and complete, and when I finally stepped
away from his soft chest, the front of Bob’s shirt was a wet mask of how I
looked crying.
224. That was two years ago, at my first night with Remaining Men
Together.
225. At almost every meeting since then, Big Bob has made me cry.
226. I never went back to the doctor. 227. I never chewed the valerian
root.
228. This was freedom. 229. Losing all hope was freedom. 230. If I
didn’t say anything, people in a group assumed the worst. 231. They cried
harder. 232. I cried harder. 233. Look up into the stars and you’re gone.
234. Walking home after a support group, I felt more alive than I’d ever
felt. 235. I wasn’t host to cancer or blood parasites; I was the little warm center
that the life of the world crowded around.
236. And I slept. Babies don’t sleep this well.
237. Every evening, I died, and every evening, I was born.
238. Resurrected.
239. Until tonight, two years of success until tonight, because I can’t cry
with this woman watching me. 240. Because I can’t hit bottom, I can’t be
saved. 241. My tongue thinks it has flocked wallpaper, I’m biting the inside of
my mouth so much. 242. I haven’t slept in four days.
25
243. With her watching, I’m a liar. 244. She’s a fake. 245. She’s the liar.
246. At the introducdons, tonight, we introduced ourselves: I’m Bob, I’m Paul,
I’m Terry, I’m David.
247. I never give my real name.
248. “This is cancer, right?” she said.
249. Then she said, “Well, hi, I’m Marla Singer.”
250. Nobody ever told Marla what kind of cancer. 251. Then we were
all busy cradling our inner child.
252. The man still crying against her neck, Maria takes another drag on
her cigarette.
253. I watch her from between Bob’s shuddering tits.
254. To Marla I’m a fake. 255. Since the second night I saw her, I can’t
sleep. 256. Still, I was the first fake, unless, maybe all these people are faking
with their lesions and their coughs and tumors, even Big Bob, the big moosie.
257. The big cheesebread.
258. Would you just look at his sculpted hair.
259. Marla smokes and rolls her eyes now.
260. In this one moment, Maria’s lie reflects my lie, and all I can see are
lies. 261. In the middle of all their truth. 262. Everyone clinging and risking to
share their worst fear, that their death is coming head-on and the barrel of a
gun is pressed against the back of their throats. 263. Well, Marla is smoldng
and rolling her eyes, and me, I’m buried under a sobbing carpet, and all of a
sudden even death and dying rank right down there with plastic flowers on
video as a non-event.
264. “Bob,” I say, “you’re crushing me.” 265. I try to whisper, then I
don’t. 266. “Bob.” 267. I try to keep my voice down, then I’m yelling. 268.
“Bob, I have to go to the can.”
Extracts from Screenplay for equivalent scenes:
SCREEN BLACK
26
JACK (V.O.)
People were always asking me, did I
know Tyler Durden.
FADE IN:
INT. SOCIAL ROOM - TOP FLOOR OF HIGH RISE -- NIGHT
TYLER has one arm around Jack's shoulder; the other hand
holds a HANDGUN with the barrel lodged in JACK'S MOUTH.
Tyler is sitting in Jack's lap.
They are both sweating and disheveled, both around 30; Tyler
is blond, handsome; and Jack, brunette, is appealing in a
dry sort of way. Tyler looks at his watch.
TYLER
One minute.
(looking out window)
This is the beginning. We're at
ground zero. Maybe you should say a
few words, to mark the occasion.
JACK
... i... ann....iinn.. ff....nnyin...
JACK (V.O.)
With a gun barrel between your teeth,
you only speak in vowels.
Jack tongues the barrel to the side of his mouth.
JACK
(still distorted)
I can't think of anything.
JACK (V.O.)
With my tongue, I can feel the
rifling in the barrel. For a second,
I totally forgot about Tyler's whole
controlled demolition thing and I
wondered how clean this gun is.
Tyler checks his watch.
TYLER
It's getting exciting now.
JACK (V.O.)
That old saying, how you always hurt
the one you love, well, it works both
way.
Jack turns so that he can see down -- 31 STORIES.
JACK (V.O.)
We have front row seats for this
Theater of Mass Destruction. The
Demolitions Committee of Project
Mayhem wrapped the foundation columns
of ten buildings with blasting
27
gelatin. In two minutes, primary

charges will blow base charges, and
those buildings will be reduced to
smoldering rubble. I know this
because Tyler knows this.
TYLER
Look what we've accomplised.
(checks watch)
Thirty seconds.
JACK (V.O.)
Somehow, I realize all of this -- the
gun, the bombs, the revolution -- is
really about Marla Singer.
PULL BACK from Jack's face. It's pressed against TWO LARGE
BREASTS that belong to...BOB, 45, a moose of a man. Jack is
engulfed by Bob in an intense embrace. Bob weeps openly.
JACK (V.O.)
Bob had bitch tits.
PULL BACK to wide on...
INT. CHURCH MEETING ROOM - NIGHT
Men are paired off, hugging, talking in emotional tones.

Near the door, a SIGN on a stand: "REMAINING MEN TOGETHER."
JACK (V.O.)
This was a support group for men with
testicular cancer. The big moosie
slobbering all over me was Bob.
BOB
We're still men.
JACK
Yes. We're men. Men is what we are.
JACK (V.O.)
Six months ago, Bob's testicles were
removed. Then hormone therapy. He
developed bitch tits because his
testosterone was too high and his
body upped the estrogen. That was
where my head fit -- into his huge,
sweating tits that hung enormous, the
way we think of God's as big.
BOB
They're gonna have to open my pec's
again to drain the fluid.
Bob hugs tighter; then looks with empathy into Jack's eyes.
BOB
Okay. You cry now.
Jack looks at Bob.
28
JACK (V.O.)
Wait. Back up. Let me start earlier.
INT. JACK'S BEDROOM - NIGHT
Jack lies in bed, staring at the ceiling.
JACK (V.O.)
For six months. I could not sleep.
[…]
INT. DOCTOR'S OFFICE - DAY
Jack, eyes puffy, face pale, sits before an INTERN, who

studies him with bemusement.
INTERN
No, you can't die of insomnia.
JACK
Maybe I died already. Look at my
face.
INTERN
You need to lighten up.
JACK
Can't you give me something?
JACK (V.O.)
Red-and-blue Tuinal, lipstick-red
Seconals.
INTERN
(overlapping w/ above)
You need healthy, natural sleep.
Chew valerian root and get some more
exercise.
The Intern ushes Jack to the door. They step into the...
INT. HALLWAY
The Intern walks away from Jack, picks up a chart.
JACK
I'm in pain.
INTERN
(facetious)
You want to see pain? Swing by First
Methodist Tuesday nights. See the
guys with testicular cancer. That's
pain.
The Intern moves into the other room. Jack stares after him.
EXT. FIRST METHODIST CHURCH - NIGHT
29
Jack heads for the front door.
INT. FIRST METHODIST CHURCH MEETING ROOM - NIGHT
Jack stares at a group of men, including Bob, who are all

listening to a group member speak at a lectern. The SPEAKER
has pale skin and sunken eyes -- he's clearly dying.
SPEAKER
I... wanted three kids. Two boys and
a girl. Mindy wanted two girls and
one boy. We never could agree on
anything.
The Speaker cracks a sad smile. Some men chuckle, happy to

lighten the mood.
SPEAKER
Well, she had her first child a month
ago, a girl, with her new husband...
And, Thank God. I'm glad for her,
because she deserves...
The speaker breaks down, WEEPS UNCONTROLLABLY.
Jack watches. A couple of the men go up to the speaker,

comforting him, leading him away. A LEADER takes the stand.
LEADER
Everyone, let's thank Thomas for
sharing himself with us.
Jack, uncomfortable, joins EVERYONE ELSE:
EVERYONE
(in unison)
Thank you, Thomas.
LEADER
I look around this room and I see a
lot of courage. And it gives me
strength. We give each other
strength.
Jack looks around. Many of the men are sniffling, sobbing.

Jack squirms in his seat.
LEADER
It's time for the one-on-one. Let's
follow Thomas's example and open
ourselves.
Everyone gets out of their chairs and begins pairing-off.

Jack stands, uncomfortable.
LEADER
Can everyone find a partner?
Bob, his chin down on his chest, starts toward Jack,

shuffling his feet.
30
JACK (V.O.)
The big moosie, his eyes already
shrink-wrapped in tears. Knees
together, invisible steps.
Bob takes Jack into an embrace.
JACK (V.O.)
Bob was a champion bodybuilder. You
know that chest expansion program you
see on TV? That was his idea.
BOB
...using steroids. I was a juicer.
Diabonol, then, Wisterol -- it's for
racehorses, for Christsake. Now I'm
bankrupt, divorced, my two grown kids
won't return my calls...
JACK (V.O.)
Strangers with this kind of honesty
make me go a big rubbery one.
Bob breaks into sobbing, putting his head on Jack's shoulder

and completely covering Jack's face. After a long beat of
crying, Bob raises up his head, looks at Jack's NAMETAG.
BOB
Go ahead, Cornelius. You can cry.
They look at each other. Slowly, Jack's eyes grow wet.
JACK (V.O.)
Then... something happened. I was
lost in oblivion -- dark and silent
and complete.
Bob pulls Jack's head back into his chest. Jack tightens
his arms around Bob.
JACK (V.O.)
I found freedom. Losing all hope was
freedom.
Jack pulls away from Bob. On Bob's chest, there's a WET

MASK of Jack's face from how he looks weeping.
JACK (V.O.)
Babies don't sleep this well.
INT. JACK'S BEDROOM - NIGHT
Jack lies sound asleep.
JACK (V.O.)
I became addicted.
INT. SMALL PROTESTANT CHURCH - NIGHT
Jack moves into a "group hug" of sickly people, men and

women. In view is a sign by the door "Free and Clear."
31
INT. OFFICE BUILDING BASEMENT - NIGHT
Jack stands with a weeping middle-aged WOMAN. He begins to

cry along with her. A sign by the door: "Onward and Upward."
JACK (V.O.)
If I didn't say anything, people
assumed the worst. They cried
harder. I cried harder.
INT. PUBLIC BUILDING CONFERENCE ROOM - NIGHT
Everyone, including Jack, sits back in their seats, EYES

CLOSED. The Leader speaks into a microphone.
LEADER
Tonight, we're going to open the
green door -- the heart chakra...
JACK (V.O.)
I wasn't really dying, I wasn't host
to cancer or parasites; I was the
warm little center that the life of
this world crowded around.
LEADER
...And you open the door and you
step inside. We're inside our
hearts. Now, imaging your pain as a
white ball of healing light. That's
right, the pain itself is a ball of
healing light.
Jack, eyes closed, is silent...
LEADER
It moves over your body, healing you.
Keep this going and step forward,
through the back door of the room.
Where does it lead? To your cave.
Step forward into your cave.
INT. CAVE - JACK'S IMAGINATION
Jack walks along, moving through an ICE CAVERN...
LEADER'S VOICE
That's right. You're going deeper
into your cave. And you're going to
find your power animal...
Jack comes upon a PENGUIN. The penguin looks at him, cocks

his head to signal Jack forward.
PENGUIN
Slide.
The penguin jumps onto a patch of ICE and slides away.
EXT. STREET - NIGHT
32
Jack walks out a doorway, saying goodbye to people. He

walks down the sidewalk, shining with peace.
JACK (V.O.)
Every evening I died and every
evening I was born again. Resurrected.
CUT BACK TO:
INT. FIRST METHODIST CHURCH MEETING ROOM - RESUMING
Jack's still in an embrace with Bob.
JACK (V.O.)
Bob loved me because he thought my
testicles were removed too. Being
there, my face against his tits,
ready to cry -- this was my vacation.
MARLA SINGER enters. She has short matte black hair and
big, dark eyes like a character from japanese animation.
JACK (V.O.)
And, she ruined everything.
Marla looks around, raises a cigarette to her lips.
MARLA
This is cancer, right?
Bob and Jack stare, dumbfounded.
33
EXTRACT TWO
Extract Two examines the relationship between consumer capitalist society and the
narrator more precisely. Here he reflects on the centrality of the IKEA catalogue in
his life after his apartment has exploded, destroying all of his material possessions.
Novel
[from Chapter 5]
269. Something which was a bomb, a big bomb, had blasted my clever
Njurunda coffee tables in the shape of a lime green yin and an orange yang
that fit together to make a circle. 270. Well they were splinters, now.
271. My Haparanda sofa group with the orange slip covers, design
by Erika Pekkari, it was trash, now.
272. And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. 273. The
people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they
sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.
274. We all have the same Johanneshov armchair in the Strinne green
stripe pattern. 275. Mine fell fifteen stories, burning, into a fountain.
276. We all have the same Rislampa/Har paper lamps made from
wire and environmentally friendly unbleached paper. 277. Mine are confetti.
278. All that sitting in the bathroom.
279. The Alle cutlery service. 280. Stainless steel. 281. Dishwasher
safe.
282. The Vild hall clock made ofgalvanized steel, oh, I had to have that.
283. The Klipsk shelving unit, oh, yeah.
284. Hemlig hat boxes. 285. Yes.
286. The street outside my high-rise was sparkling and scattered with
all this.
287. The Mommala quilt-cover set. 288. Design by Tomas Harila and
available in the following:
289. Orchid.
290. Fuschia.
291. Cobalt.
34
292. Ebony.
293. Jet.
294. Eggshell or heather.
295. It took my whole life to buy this stuff.
296. The easy-care textured lacquer of my Kalix occasional tables.
297. My Steg nesting tables.
298. You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever
need in my life. 299. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that
no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. 300.
Then the right set of dishes. 301. Then the perfect bed. 302. The drapes. 303.
The rug.
304. Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used
to own, now they own you.
305. Until I got home from the airport.
306. The doorman steps out of the shadows to say, there’s been an
accident. 307. The police, they were here and asked a lot of questions.
308. The police think maybe it was the gas. 309. Maybe the pilot light
on the stove went out or a burner was left on, leaking gas, and the gas rose to
the ceiling, and the gas filled the condo from ceiling to floor in every room.
310. The condo was seventeen hundred square feet with high ceilings and for
days and days, the gas must’ve leaked until every room was full. 311. When
the rooms were filled to the floor the compressor at the base of the refrigerator
clicked on.
312. Detonation.
313. The floor-to-ceiling windows in their aluminum frames went out
and the sofas and the lamps and dishes and sheet sets in flames, and the high
school annuals and the diplomas and telephone. 314. Everything blasting out
from the fifteenth floor in a sort of solar flare.
315. Oh, not my refrigerator. 316. I’d collected shelves full of different
mustards, some stone-ground, some English pub style. 317. There were
fourteen different flavors of fat-free salad dressing, and seven kinds of capers.
35
318. I know, I know, a house full of condiments and no real food.

319. The doorman blew his nose and something went into his
handkerchief with the good slap of a pitch into a catcher’s mitt.
320. You could go up to the fifteen floor, the doorman said, but nobody
could go into the unit. 321. Police orders. 322. The police had been asking, did
I have an old girifriend who’d want to do this or did I make an enemy of
somebody who had access to dynamite.
323. “It wasn’t worth going up,” the doorman said. 324. “All that’s left
is the concrete shell.”
325. The police hadn’t ruled out arson. 326. No one had smelled gas.
327. The doorman raises an eyebrow. 328. This guy spent his time flirting with
the day maids and nurses who worked in the big units on the top floor and
waited in the lobby chairs for their rides after work. 329. Three years I lived
here, and the doorman still sat reading his Ellery Queen magazine every night
while I shifted packages and bags to unlock the front door and let myself in.
330. The doorman raises an eyebrow and says how some people will
go on a long trip and leave a candle, a long, long candle burning in a big
puddle of gasoline. 331. People with financial difficulties do this stuff. 332.
People who want out from under.
333. I asked to use the lobby phone.
334. “A lot of young people try to impress the world and buy too many
things,” the doorman said.
Equivalent scene from screenplay:

INT. BATHROOM - JACK'S CONDO - NIGHT
Jack sits on the toilet, CORDLESS PHONE to his ear, flips

through an IKEA catalog. There's a stack of old Playboy
magazines and other catalogs nearby.
JACK (V.O.)
Like everyone else, I had become a
slave to the IKEA nesting instinct.
JACK
(into phone)
Yes. I'd like to order the Erika
Pekkari slip covers.
36
Jack drops the open catalog on the floor.
MOVE IN ON CATALOG -- ON PHOTO of COFFEETABLE SET...
JACK (V.O.)
If I saw something like clever coffee
table sin the shape of a yin and
yang, I had to have it.
PAN TO PHOTO of ARMCHAIR...
JACK (V.O.)
Like the Johanneshov armchair in the
Strinne green stripe pattern...
INT. LIVING ROOM/DINING AREA/KITCHEN
The armchair APPEARS. PAN OVER next to armchair...
JACK (V.O.)
Or the Rislampa wire lamps of
environmentally-friendly unbleached
paper.
The lamps APPEAR. PAN OVER to wall...
JACK (V.O.)
Even the Vild hall clock of
galvanized steel, resting on the
Klipsk shelving unit.
The clock APPEARS as the shelving unit APPEARS on the wall.
JACK (V.O.)
I would flip through catalogs and
wonder, "What kind of dining set
defines me as a person?" We used to
read pornography. Now it was the
Horchow Collection.
A dining room set APPEARS. Jack, the cordless phone still

glued to his ear, walks INTO FRAME and continues.
JACK
No, I don't want Cobalt. Oh, that
sounds nice. Apricot.
Jack opens a cabinet, takes out a plate.
JACK (V.O.)
I had it all. Even the glass dishes
with tiny bubbles and imperfections,
proof they were crafted by the
honest, simple, hard-working
indigenous peoples of wherever.
He rummages through the refrigerator. It's practically

empty. Jack takes out a jar of mustard, opens it and uses
a butter knife to eat it.
37
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Fight Club [DVD] 2000 (1999) directed by Fincher, David: UK : Twentieth Century
Fox
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Literature London: Routeledge
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Toronto Press: Canada
Monaco, James 2000 How To Read A Film: Movies, Media, Multimedia (3rd edn) New
York: Oxford Univ. Press
Palahunik, Chuck 1997 Fight Club (1996 USA: Norton) London: Vintage
Simpson 1993 Language, Ideology & Point of View London: Routledge
Toolan, M R 2001 Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction (2nd ed) London:

Routledge
Uhls, Jim 1998 ‘Fight Club Shooting Script’

www.hunderland.com/scripts/Fight-Club-third.com (31 March 2002)
38
1
Notes
These are ‘key scenes’ not because they are vital to the plot. Chuck Palahniuk himself insists, in the
DVD liner notes to the movie version, that plot is not the central function of Fight Club: ‘almost all the
book was based on stories my friends told me and stunts we pulled together. The rest was just a matter
of looking for the themes’. The extracts, then, are ‘key scenes’ because they are most heavily indicial of
the text’s main theme: disillusionment with postmodern existence. They are, therefore, two crucial
pieces of character development and, as Liddel notes, ‘with a little thought anyone could realise that
characters and plot are only artificially separable’ (1947, 72)
2
It should be noted that immediate-report first person narration is an artifice. It is normally impossible
to reconcile the simultaneous reporting of events with events themselves. The narrator cannot be
addressing us as he experiences things, though this is implied by the form of narration. So, the much
derided voice-over of film is no more ‘artificial’ than this extremely common form of first person
narration. As Leech and Short note: ‘the representation of the thoughts of character, even in an
extremely indirect form . . . is ultimately an artifice. We cannot see inside the minds of other people,
but if the motivation for the actions and attitudes of characters is to be made clear to the reader, the
representation of their thoughts, like the use of soliloquy on stage, is a necessary licence’ (cited in
Simpson 1999, 23-24).
3
Usage of the proximal deictic marker here:
12. The building we're standing on won't be here in ten minutes.

42. The Parker-Morris Building won't be here in nine minutes.
73. We have sort of a triangle thing going here
86. I’ve been here from the beginning
102. I’ve been coming here every week for two years, and every week Bob wraps his arms
around me, and I cry
128. The only woman here at Remaining Men Together, the testicular cancer support group
138. And Sunday aftemoon at Remaining Men Together in the basement of Trinity Episcopal, this
woman is here, again.
307. The police, they were here and asked a lot of questions.
329. Three years I lived here, and the doorman still sat reading his Ellery Queen magazine every
night
This proximal-deixis extends to obviously imagined events, such as the narrator’s ‘five-picture time-
lapse series’. He declares ‘Here, the building's standing’ (62) as though he were literally demonstrating
a physical object, even though it is a mental construct.
4
Usage of There as a deictic marker (rather than as part of an existential process):
6. there's the tiny sonic boom a bullet makes because it travels so fast.
165. Chloe talked us through opening each door, the blue door, the red door, the white door, and
finding what was there.
263. even death and dying rank right down there with plastic flowers on video as a non-event.
Every use of there is in a figurative or imagined context: in the hypothetical instance of being shot (6),
or in entering an imagined therapeutic cave (165)
5
Usage of this:
10. "This isn't really death," Tyler says. "We'll be legend. We won't grow old."
14. Do this in an ice bath
17. I know this because Tyler knows this.
20. This works too.
27. It’s a cloudy day, even this high up.
28. This is the world's tallest building, and this high up the wind is always cold
29. It’s so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you're one of those space monkeys.
45. This how-to stuff isn't in any history book.
55. Tyler and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I’m wondering how clean this gun
is.
67. "This is our world, now, our world," Tyler says, "and those ancient people are dead."
68. If I knew how this would all turn out, I’d be more than happy to be dead and in Heaven right
now.
71. I know all of this: the gun, the anarchy, the explosion is really about Marla Singer.
77. This isn't about love as in caring.
78. This is about property as in ownership.
90. this is Art, this is Paul, this is Bob; Bob's big shoulders made me think of the horizon.
106. This is when I’d cry.
110. This is as close as I’ve been to sleeping in almost a week.
111. This is how I met Marla Singer.
116. This is when I’d cry because right now, your life comes down to nothing, and not even
nothing, oblivion.
128. this woman smokes her cigarette under the burden of a stranger, and her eyes come together
with mine.
132. this woman was also in my tuberculosis support group Friday night.
138. And Sunday aftemoon at Remaining Men Together in the basement of Trinity Episcopal, this
woman is here, again.
140. This should be my favorite part, being held and crying with Big Bob without hope.
142. This is the only place I ever really relax and giveup.
143. This is my vacation.
162. this is Alice, this is Brenda, this is Dover.
165. This was Chloe's turn to lead us in guided meditation, and she talked us into the garden of
serenity.
178. This was therapeutic physical contact, Chloe said.
184. This is how it is with insomnia
201. Strangers with this kind of honesty make me go a big rubbery one, if you know what I mean.
203. Maybe only one of his huevos had ever descended, and he knew this was a risk factor.
217. This is better than real life.
222. This was all I remember because then Bob was closing in around me with his arms, and his
head was folding down to cover me.
228. This was freedom.
236. Babies don't sleep this well.
239. I can’t cry with this woman watching me.
248. "This is cancer, right?" she said.
260. In this one moment, Maria's lie reflects my lie, and all I can see are lies.
286. The street outside my high-rise was sparkling and scattered with all this.
295. It took my whole life to buy this stuff.
298. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life.
322. did I have an old girifriend who'd want to do this or did I make an enemy of somebody who
had access to dynamite.
328. This guy spent his time flirting with the day maids and nurses who worked in the big units
on the top floor and waited in the lobby chairs for their rides after work.
331. People with financial difficulties do this stuff.
6
Usage of now:
68. If I knew how this would all turn out, I’d be more than happy to be dead and in Heaven right
now
93. "It will be alright," Bob says. 94. "You cry now."
103. "You cry," Bob says and inhales and sob, sob, sobs. 104. "Go on now and cry."
116. This is when I’d cry because right now, your life comes down to nothing, and not even
nothing, oblivion.
259. Marla smokes and rolls her eyes now.
There are twenty-one instances of then, indicating that events took place at a time anterior to the time
of speaking. However, these do not have an enormous distancing effect, as eight are located inside
Bob’s discourse, explaining his past, while the others are used in analeptic traces that serve foremost to
enhance the ‘narrative present’ of the ‘now’ instances.
7
For example:
‘Maybe they got it all early enough,’ Bob says. ‘Maybe it’s just seminoma’
(96-97).
Here Bob’s repeated probability modality contrasts sharply with the narrator’s certainty, destabilising
any notion that there is any real likelihood to Bob’s self-prognosis, indicating that he is full of false
hope.
8
For example:
The demolition team will hit the primary charge in maybe eight minutes. The primary charge will
blow the base charge, the foundation columns will crumble, and the photo series of the Parker-
Morris Building will go into all the history books (59-60).
A rare piece of epistemic modality, maybe, serves only to emphasise the narrator’s unnaturally breezy
attitude to a major event, and implies that he regards himself as being less responsible than the reader
suspects, judging from his guides to making explosives. The narrator is strangely detached from his
own actions. His perception-modality is incredibly reserved, reflective but emotionally disconnected:
‘It’s weird to think the place where we’re standing will only be a point in the sky’ (54).
9
In terms of Genette's 'duration', ten minutes of screen time summarise an undisclosed number of
months (perhaps even years) in the narrator's life.
10
Dialogue between the narrator and Tyler oscillates between standard DS:
The barrel of the gun pressed against the back of my throat, Tyler says, "We really won't die." (4)
"This isn't really death," Tyler says. "We'll be legend. We won't grow old." (10)
and the mildest form of FDS, which retains the framing clause but ellipts the quotation marks:
Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die (1)
I tongue the barrel into my cheek and say, Tyler, you're thinking of vampires. (11)
I tongue the gun barrel into my cheek and say, you want to be a legend, Tyler, man, I’ll make you
a legend (85).
Note, in the example from sentence one, the way in which FDS is distinct from IS only on the basis that
the lack of a that hints that this is verbatim reporting. The distinction between verbatim report and the
more narrator-controlled paraphrase of IS is thus made ambiguous. This ambiguity hints at Tyler’s
unorthodox status, not as a true character but an element of the narrator’s mind, which is therefore the
site of all dialogue with him. The repetitive frequency of ‘I tongue the (gun) barrel’ into my cheek’ at
the beginning and end of the extract demonstrates that the duration of these superordinate events is
relatively short, despite the longer duration of his mental digressions.
11
This type of first person narration demonstrates inherent problems with Leech and Short’s highly
influential categories of speech and thought presentation. The majority of text in both extracts can be
interpreted as either being PN or the narrator’s FDT. ‘Pure Narrative’ implies some kind of detached,
omniscient presence, or the idea that events can be ‘impartially’ conveyed. Any narrative here,
however, is fundamentally effected by the narrator’s lexis. Sometimes the narrator is clearly making
FDT asides: ‘Oh, all those crazy car bombs’ (50). Generally, however, it is impossible to distinguish
between a report of events and expression of opinion. The narrator’s discourse often describes things
but simultaneously makes modal statements that convey his negative attitude towards postmodern
existence: ‘I wasn't the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the
bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue’ (272-3).
Any type of first-person reporting must, to some extent, derive from cognitive processes so it is
impossible to distinguish between PN and FDT.
12
i.e: ‘the central character sits in a skyscraper and watches the destruction, reflects on his attending self
help groups and his IKEA catalogue lifestyle’.
13
The movie also changes its content in line with what is acceptable for a mass audience rather than an
individual reader. The ‘How to’ style sections on constructing explosives are therefore removed as the
mainstream film-maker, with a much broader audience, is perceived to have a much greater social
influence.
14
The only notable exception is Robert Montgomery's 1946 picture The Lady in the Lake (2000, 28)
15
The central protagonist/narrator is described as 'Jack' in the screenplay, presumably for the sake of
simplicity, but described only as 'narrator' in the end credits. The movie plays with identity more than
the novel. The central protagonist is never addressed by anything other than a false name, or through
his split personality, Tyler Durden. Attention is drawn to identity with the series of false names that
Jack takes on at the self-help groups, as emphasised visually in the movie by his Cornelius name badge.
This ambiguity of identity heightens the sense that he is some kind of late Twentieth Century everyman
figure.
16
However, the orientation of the camera can be as ambiguous than that between PN and FIT in written
narratives. During the narrator's explanation that
JACK (V.O.)
We have front row seats for this
Theater of Mass Destruction. The
smoldering rubble.
an elaborate, uncut sequence darts rapidly down tens of stories of skyscraper to the basement, through
the window of a van to show the explosives inside:
Shot 6 Shot 7… …
… …
… …
Shot 8
The moving camera serves an interesting narrative function here. From these elements (bombs in the
car, car in the basement) we construct a speculative, piecemeal analeptic narrative that explains what
brought these characters here. More importantly, though the central character has not moved with the
camera, it has followed his thoughts, indicating a type of (non-mimetic) psychological point of view
shot.
17
In dialogue, shots are not orientated from behind the other character's shoulder, 'favouring' the narrator
(defined in Bordwell and Thompson 2001, 167). Instead, cutting extends beyond classical continuity
style by incorporating sections where action is not based upon the 180˚ line but 'a point at the centre of
a circle, as if the camera could be placed at any point on the circumference' (2001, 176-7). To
emphasise this, there is plenty of panoramic panning around this circle, enforcing an impression of the
narrator in physical space rather than that of physical space through the perspective of the narrator.
Narration in the movie, then is closer to what Uspensky describes as ‘sequential survey’:
the narrator’s viewpoint moves sequentially from one character to an other and from one detail to
an other, and the reader is given the task of piecing together the separate descriptions into one
coherent picture.
(cited in Simpson 1993, 19)
18
‘Psychological point of view refers to the ways in which narrative events are mediated through the
consciousness of the ‘teller’ of the story (Simpson 1993, 11)
19
The reader of a novel theoretically has infinite control over the processing time of the narrative, over
how long it takes him/her to read it, compared to the absolutely prescribed time it takes to view a
filmed narrative. However, a degree of control over text-pace is exerted in this novel’s use of short,
snappy sentences. Extract One, which is 3470 words long, contains 268 sentences, so the average
sentence length is a mere thirteen words. Extract Two is 806 words long and contains 65 sentences,
making an average sentence length of an even briefer eleven-and-a-half words. Take for instance the
sequence of sentences 30 -33:
You do the little job you're trained to do.

Pull a lever.
Push a button.
You don't understand any of it, and then you just die
Sentences consisting of nine, three, three and eleven words respectively. The film recaptures the style
of the short sentences by using particularly brief shots (Monaco rather simplistically describes the shot
as 'the sentence of film' 2000, 32). The extracts take up 9:15 minutes of screen time, in which there are
128 separate shots. The average shot-length is therefore just over five seconds long.
20
For instance:
JACK (V.O.)
With a gun barrel between your teeth,
you only speak in vowels.
JACK (V.O.)
With my tongue, I can feel the
rifling in the barrel. For a second,
I totally forgot about Tyler's whole
controlled demolition thing
JACK (V.O.)
That old saying, how you always hurt
the one you love, well, it works both
ways.
The voice over is the best mode for presenting background information when it is undesirable to enact
an entire analeptic flashback. The background PN on Bob’s history, originally in the form
Bob cries because six months ago, his testicles were removed. Then hormone support therapy.
Bob has tits because his testosterone ration is too high. Raise the testosterone level too much,
your body ups the estrogen to seek a balance. This is when I’d cry because right now, your life
comes down to nothing, and not even nothing, oblivion.
Too much estrogen, and you get bitch tits.
(112-117)
is thus turned into voice over, with the sentences slightly tightened and a reference to the actual visual
action on screen to keep the viewer grounded in visual plot action:
JACK (V.O.)
Six months ago, Bob's testicles were
removed. Then hormone therapy. He
developed bitch tits because his
` testosterone was too high and his
body upped the estrogen. That was
where my head fit -- into his huge,
sweating tits that hung enormous, the
way we think of God's as big.
The advice on making explosives that the narrator offers in the novel, which the reader needs to
interpret, is rewritten as more straightforward analeptic background information in the movie’s voice-
over, which explains what he has done and is why the building is going to explode. This is combined
with other sentences that were originally imagined Pure Narration: ‘Somewhere in the one hundred and
ninety-one floors under us, the space monkeys in the Mischief Committee of Project Mayhem are
running wild, destroying every scrap of history’ (37) is now presented as pure fact:
The
smoldering rubble. I know this
because Tyler knows this.
‘I know this because Tyler knows this’ is another direct lift, but now occurs in a slightly different
context (previously it referred to his knowledge of how to make explosives, now it refers to his
knowledge over the terrorist scheme). Its psychological implications – that the narrator has learned his
immoral ideas from Tyler is, however, preserved.
The voice over continues to lift dialogue from the novel, translating ‘I know all of this: the gun,
the anarchy, the explosion is really about Marla Singer’ (71) to:
JACK (V.O.)
Somehow, I realize all of this -- the
gun, the bombs, the revolution -- is
really about Marla Singer.
In the novel this intriguing comment, introducing Marla as a deictic item who provides the key to
understanding these spectacular events, is followed by an explanation of his exact relationship to her:
‘We have sort of a triangle thing going here. I want Tyler. Tyler wants Marla. Marla wants me. I don't
want Marla, and Tyler doesn't want me around, not anymore’ (73-76). This explanation is not translated
into the movie. Marla is not mentioned until she walks into the self-help group in the following scene.
The viewer does not realise that she begins a relationship with the narrator/Tyler until it actually
occurs, on screen, in the middle of the film. The hermeneutic puzzle is completed far more slowly,
giving the viewer more time to speculate. Despite obvious leanings towards visual presentation in
films, then, rather than complex wordplay, the form is not necessarily ‘easier’ and ‘simpler’ than that of
the novel.
21
Usage of this in the V.O:
• I wondered how clean this gun is.

• We have front row seats for this Theater of Mass Destruction.
• I know this because Tyler knows this.
• Somehow, I realize all of this – the guns, the bombs, the
revolution – is really about Marla Singer.
• This was a support group for men with testicular cancer.
• Strangers with this kind of honesty make me go a big rubbery one.
• Babies don't sleep this well.
• this was my vacation
22
The necessity of ‘acting out’ things in film is apparent in the translation of the meditation scene.
In the novel, Jack’s internal experience is relatively limited:
Eyes closed, we imagined our pain as a ball of white healing light floating around our feet and
rising to our knees, our waist, our chest. Our chakras opening. The heart chakra. The head chakra.
Chloe talked us into caves where we met our power animal. Mine was a penguin.
Ice covered the floor of the cave, and the penguin said, slide. Without any effort, we slid
through tunnels and galleries (168-175).
This is a brief analeptic trace, ‘slipping inside a character’s head’ as it were, for a brief moment. In the
movie, however, this requires a whole shift of scene: ‘INT. CAVE - JACK'S IMAGINATION’. The
‘Leader’s Voice’ now becomes the voice over in an embedded narrative layer, inside Jack’s
imagination, explaining what would be an entirely bizarre shift of scene otherwise. The movie, then,
actually contains one more narrative level than the novel.
Concretisation refers to ‘the product of our own productive activity; it is the realisation of the text in
the mind of the reader, accomplished by the filling in of blanks or gaps to eliminate indeterminacy’
(Makaryk 1993, 153)
23
There are exceptions, however. The ‘five-picture’ time lapse series that the narrator envisages of the
collapsing building would make for an excellent visual pastiche in film, in the same way that the IKEA
catalogue is visually imitated. After all the novel here appropriates, to extend Leech and Short’s
terminology, a visual translation of Direct Pictures:
The five-picture time-lapse series. Here, the building's standing. Second picture, the building will
be at an eighty-degree angle. Then a seventy-degree angle. The building's at a forty-five-degree
angle in the fourth picture when the skeleton starts to give and the tower gets a slight arch to it.
The last shot, the tower, all one hundred and ninety-one floors, will slam down on the national
museum which is Tyler's real target (60-66).
Presumably, the reason that this is not pastiche is not replicated is to do with the level of anachronies
that classical film style can handle. The ‘time-lapse’ series would be a proleptic trace in an opening
scene which is, as has been established, a piece of prolepsis itself. Novels seem better suited to
situations in which there is a more ambiguous ‘narrative present’. Another such exception is the
absence of Bob showing the narrator a photo of his kids, which occurs in the novel but not the film.
Bob’s life is, of course, not the central focus of the movie and this would appear to indicate that in the
classic Hollywood movie style there is less room for such digressions as would be found in a novel.
24
There is a constant ambiguity over whether sections are PN or FDT re-enactments of Tyler’s orders,
which the narrator has internalised and follows as part of his own thought processes:
You do the little job you're trained to do.

Pull a lever.
Push a button.
You don't understand any of it, and then you just die. (30-33)
Tyler’s discourse is analogous to some kind of Anarchists’ Cookbook. The narrator comments that ‘this
how-to stuff isn’t in any history book’ (45) but presents the information by appropriating some kind of
official, self-help style discourse or bland daytime TV cookery program. It uses the familiar paradigm
of a recipe form, of gradual easy stages with a desirable result: ‘take a ____ add ____ to three times
that amount ____ then add ____ You have _____’. This uses an ambiguous second/third-person ‘you’
(between a general ‘one’-style you or a personal ‘you’-the reader), in order to demonstrate how easy it
is for anybody to powerfully disrupt the prevailing social order. This is emphasised by the
preponderance of ‘household ingredients’ and the way in which the narrator uses a surprisingly casual,
even colloquial register: ‘Paraffin has never, ever worked for me’.
25
For instance, he appears to have intertextually constructed himself and his world view from the
discourse he uses as an Insurance Worker. His job is to determine whether it is cost-effective to recall a
batch of dangerously defective cars by calculating the difference between the cost of a recall and the
cost of settling litigations disputes by those injured. This has fundamentally affected his view of human
life: ‘on a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero’ (119). Or as he will
later note, when his plane encounters turbulence: ‘Life insurance pays off triple if you die on a business
trip’ (p.26).

Adapting Fight Club: Point of View From Page To Screen

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Narrative Analysis: Second Assessed Essay

Module Title Narrative Analysis

Module Tutor Michael Toolan

Title Translating Point of View in Fight Club Across Different Media

Translating Point of View in Fight Club across

1 from first-person text to third person film

1.2 point of view in the movie

It is not cinematic description but merely description by literary assertion

2 adapting the assertive (text) to the presentational (film)

3 demonstrating the intertextual construction of character in

184. This is how it is with insomnia. 185. Everything is so far away, a

Extracts from Screenplay for equivalent scenes:

INT. SOCIAL ROOM - TOP FLOOR OF HIGH RISE -- NIGHT

Jack tongues the barrel to the side of his mouth.

Tyler checks his watch.

Jack turns so that he can see down -- 31 STORIES.

gelatin. In two minutes, primary

PULL BACK to wide on...

INT. CHURCH MEETING ROOM - NIGHT

Men are paired off, hugging, talking in emotional tones.

Jack looks at Bob.

INT. JACK'S BEDROOM - NIGHT

Jack lies in bed, staring at the ceiling.

Jack, eyes puffy, face pale, sits before an INTERN, who

The Intern walks away from Jack, picks up a chart.

EXT. FIRST METHODIST CHURCH - NIGHT

Jack heads for the front door.

INT. FIRST METHODIST CHURCH MEETING ROOM - NIGHT

Jack stares at a group of men, including Bob, who are all

The Speaker cracks a sad smile. Some men chuckle, happy to

The speaker breaks down, WEEPS UNCONTROLLABLY.

Jack watches. A couple of the men go up to the speaker,

Jack, uncomfortable, joins EVERYONE ELSE:

Jack looks around. Many of the men are sniffling, sobbing.

Everyone gets out of their chairs and begins pairing-off.

Bob, his chin down on his chest, starts toward Jack,

Bob takes Jack into an embrace.

Bob breaks into sobbing, putting his head on Jack's shoulder

They look at each other. Slowly, Jack's eyes grow wet.

Jack pulls away from Bob. On Bob's chest, there's a WET

INT. JACK'S BEDROOM - NIGHT

Jack lies sound asleep.

INT. SMALL PROTESTANT CHURCH - NIGHT

Jack moves into a "group hug" of sickly people, men and

INT. OFFICE BUILDING BASEMENT - NIGHT

Jack stands with a weeping middle-aged WOMAN. He begins to

INT. PUBLIC BUILDING CONFERENCE ROOM - NIGHT

Everyone, including Jack, sits back in their seats, EYES

Jack, eyes closed, is silent...

INT. CAVE - JACK'S IMAGINATION

Jack walks along, moving through an ICE CAVERN...

Jack comes upon a PENGUIN. The penguin looks at him, cocks

The penguin jumps onto a patch of ICE and slides away.

EXT. STREET - NIGHT

Jack walks out a doorway, saying goodbye to people. He

CUT BACK TO:

INT. FIRST METHODIST CHURCH MEETING ROOM - RESUMING

Jack's still in an embrace with Bob.

Marla looks around, raises a cigarette to her lips.

Bob and Jack stare, dumbfounded.

318. I know, I know, a house full of condiments and no real food.

Equivalent scene from screenplay:

Jack sits on the toilet, CORDLESS PHONE to his ear, flips