That's such a Rip-Off.

"The Machinist" is a total rip-off of "Fight Club." I mean it features a lead character who suffers from insomnia whose subconscious creates a trickster character as a delusion who tries to control the actions of the actual person.

It's just like in comics when they copied that character who was an orphan who through a strange combination of events (possibly involving an animal) gained some phenomenal abilities which he would later go on to use to fight injustice maybe in response to some personal loss. I'm trying to remember whose story that was, Superman, Batman, Spider-man or all of the above.

J. Michael Straczynski, creator of the show Babylon 5 and author of a good run on Amazing Spider-Man, made a point when discussing plagiarism. He gave the basic plot to a story which went like this:

Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Boy runs into opposition to love for girl. Boy Dies.

He then proceeded to ask if this was a summary of Romeo and Juliet or King
Kong, to which he answered yes.


An interesting thing about the progression of human knowledge is how it actually works. Every advance is an accomplishment and an achievement in and of itself, but once it happens it becomes a tool which can be employed by others.

Artist Micheal Newberry made a great point about this:

Innovation is a funny thing in art. An artist could easily lose their way by attempting to be innovative in everything they do and lose sight of what their core belief and soul are. On the other hand there are plenty of artists that remain true to themselves and yet use the tools of art that they were simply taught. I view art history more like a palette of colors to tweak, as one of many means to breath freshness into the work; but the end point always comes out of my soul.

There's also a well known saying that "Good artists borrow, great artists steal." And it's rarely on better display than in examples like the ones I listed above. But this requires further explanation.

A film like "The Machinist" was often dismissed as a simple derivative work of "Fight Club." It used a number of the same narrative tools of "Fight Club" this includes: an unreliable narrator, a trickster character who later turns out to be a product of said narrator's imagination, and insomnia as a plot device.

What made it different was the manner in which those devices were used. In "Fight Club" the plot is driven by the emergence of the lead character's frustrated ego in the form of a separate personality named Tyler Durden who tries to drag the man's behavior deeper into madness, terrorism and nihilism. The insomnia facilitates this development in both stories. In "The Machinist" the events are similar but the motivation is in reverse. The trickster delusion in the Machinist serves the opposite purpose. In the Machinist Trevor Reznik is both trying desperately to discover an underlying mystery that will explain his insomnia, but at the same time he's deathly afraid to discover the secret. His delusion serves the purpose of keeping him focused on reality and facing his metaphorical demons no matter how hard. But it's also fair to mention that "The Machinist" takes at least as much from the Roman Polanski film "Repulsion" (a film which is frequently copied in its own right) as it does from Fight Club.

In the course of using a number of the same story elements something completely new and different was created. This is how great art is supposed to work. You learn to understand what made everything in a story work, and then learn to use it as a tool of your own. Just because something hasn't been done before doesn't mean that it's good, but the real secret is to learn how to use everything that's gone before you and add more than you took.