The creepy Brad Pitt-related easter egg in ‘Fight Club’
In the 1980s, when approaching his graduation from the University of Missouri where he studied journalism, Brad Pitt felt unsettled, sensing something more fruitful on the horizon, specifically to the west. As a long-lived film fanatic Pitt regarded the wondrous medium as “a portal into different worlds” during his youth, but it wasn’t until the closing weeks of his tenure at college that he decided to drop the books and set off for the Hollywood Hills.
Such erratic behaviour is often subject to parental derision, but Pitt quickly found traction in his acting exploits. With stand-out performances in Legends of the Fall, Se7ven, Seven Years in Tibet, Meet Joe Black and Fight Club, Pitt established himself as one of Hollywood’s finest leading men over the 1990s.
When David Fincher’s blockbusting psychological thriller Fight Club arrived in 1999, leading man Pitt was already a true pop culture icon. With such a presence at his disposal, Fincher left a little easter egg in the film for audiences to uncover. At this juncture, I issue a spoiler alert for those who haven’t seen Fight Club.
In the movie, Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, doesn’t exist, at least not outside the spiralling mind of Ed Norton’s unnamed character. The easter egg in question suggests that Brad Pitt (not Tyler Durden) exists in the Fight Club universe and presumably fuelled Norton’s imagination when he inadvertently conjured up his ripped and violent alter ego.
Somewhere along the twisted plotline, Norton’s character becomes romantically entwined with Helena Bonham’s unhinged character, Maria Singer. In the easter egg scene, the pair emerge from a building next to a cinema which advertises Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1997 drama Seven Years in Tibet, which cast Pitt in the central role.
During the movie, Tyler shows Norton’s character his nighttime job, where he joins film reels for the cinema. He gets his kicks by “splicing single frames of pornography into family films”. As Norton, the narrator, says, “Nobody knows that they saw it, but they did.”
The explicit image filters through to the audience’s subconscious just as Brad Pitt’s image filters into Norton’s. Eventually, what was a split-second exposure takes over Norton’s ego, with Durden representing the strengths that oppose his every weakness.
