David Fincher's 1999 film Fight Club is one of those movies that has you questioning the events throughout the duration of the movie, but when we reach the end, leaves us amazed at how seamlessly all of the events came together. Fight Club is one of the most frequently quoted movies of the 90s—think about it... even if you have not seen this movie, you still probably know the first rule of fight club—but the reason these lines became so iconic in the first place is because of their context.
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One day while on a flight for business, the narrator encounters a man called Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) with whom he is immediately intrigued by. Meeting up after the flight, Tyler and the narrator engage in a strange conversation in which Tyler demands the narrator hit him as hard as he can, eventually leading to the two getting into a fight. However, the experience is more about the satisfaction of hitting someone than the pain of being hit back, so the pair begin a fighting group for men to alleviate some of their stress. This eventually grows into Fight Club, a selective, underground group led by Tyler and motivated by his avant garde theories on life.
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So why wait so long to tie everything together?
The beauty of a bookended plot is that it forces us to go back in our minds and recall details from the beginning of the film that seemed negligible at first, but now make sense as to why the director decided to include them. In Fight Club, these details include things like the narrator's insomnia and the coincidences which brought the narrator and Tyler together. When the final scene brings all these details together, the audience is able to have the same epiphany that the narrator has without having been in the loop already. The careful crafting in the plot and the thought-provoking statements often rattled off by Tyler make this film a cult classic that will not get old no matter how many times you have seen it.