Mis-en-Scene:

 Our group was encouraged to choose a scene from Fight Club. We chose to focus on “Jack’s Smirking Revenge”.  I chose to look at what the Art Director does. The Art Director’s roll is to supervise and unify the vision. This is done by: Overall visual appearance or how it communicates visually, how the mood is stimulated, contrasts features and psychologically appeals to a target audience.

Psychologically the target audience will likely find this scene appealing because the underdog employee gets the best of his boss here. It is also appealing because the frustrated employee is finally confronting this corporation about its liabilities. The humorous part is that he is trying to blackmail his boss with this, in other words; he wants a paycheck for keeping his mouth shut and he plans to not come into the office anymore.

The scene starts out with the protagonist coming to the manager’s office to request some changes. This manager didn’t come to the employee’s cubicle; it is bold on this employee’s part. He is not looking very properly dressed for work, he is wearing an off white dress shirt that is not pressed and he isn’t wearing a tie. The boss is immediately condescending. Jack however has become more confident and isn’t showing any fear by the boss’s threats and intimidation. Even after he said “you’re fired” Jack calmly said “I have a better plan”.

The manager becomes even more upset with the plan and stands to call security. While making the call Jacks hand starts to shake and the audience has time to wonder what he is going to do. Surprisingly Jack starts beating himself up! The boss is very startled by this and drops the phone to walk over to see if Jack is still alive after throwing himself backwards onto a glass coffee table that completely shatters. But Jack gets up with just a little blood from his nose. Then he acts as if someone is grabbing him and looks back at the black shelves with awards, photos of family and other decorations and then throws himself backwards; completely shattering the glass on the middle section of shelves. Blood is now profusely flowing down his face, on his hands and arms. After catching his breath he rolls onto the plush green sofa with contrasting shattered glass and messy blood and then rolls down to crawl over to his boss. Here he grabs the bosses hands, getting blood all over them and pleads for him to send the paychecks as he requested. Then Security opens the door and Jack acts very relieved that they are there and it seems that the boss has done the beating. To end, Jack is whistling with a smirk and blood still on his face pushing a cart with everything he may have wanted from his desk as other employees observe. Then the narration describes that he will get the paychecks he wanted and that he plans to use the money for fight club. I believe the Gestalt Principle,Closure was used here. I find it hard to believe the office kept a shopping cart for employees to move there things out. I have never seen that before in movies anyway, but we as an audience accepted this gap because we liked it, and mostly it was the objects in the cart that were emphasized.

I was curious about the large amount of green in this scene, but had trouble finding commentary from the Art Director Chris Gorak. I did find some meanings behind color used in film that I could only guess what green might imply here. Some ideas are: Inexperience, as the boss was obviously inexperienced in how to deal with an employee beating himself up violently. It also could mean that the boss had a proud and unchanging nature. It also could have been a renewal for the employee. From another site about meanings of color the green could be about finance, material wealth and the business world.

 Contrast-wise green is the opposite color of red as in the red blood that stood out very well on the green carpet. Green also signifies peace, but this seems to contrast with the film as it is a fight movie. The warm cozy lights that were on in the scene that gave a yellow cast made me wonder if this was to contrast the violence going on.The black shelves were quite dark compared to the light green in the room as well.

There were only a few other colors in this scene. A lot of grey and silver were there. Dark films usually use a lot of grey. Silver can signify riches. Black can mean power and no. Yellow can mean deceit. White can mean yes, which is what the protagonist wore. There were little touches of orange on the shelves which can signify humor. There was definitely some humor in this scene.
Other design elements used in the scene were the Rule of Thirds as one third of the shelves got demolished by the protagonist which became a popular image for the film. This setting was also symmetrical as there were even amounts of shelves on each side of the broken section. Other furnishings in the room were also symmetrically placed such as two lamps on the sides of the shelves, two sofas facing each other and a desk across the room facing the shelves.

Though I feel the green color somewhat goes along with ideas in the film, I have since found out that Director David Fincher uses certain color effects as his signature in film.