Fight Club and Benjamin: altering reality

How does film change the way we see things? How does the narrative in a film affect our viewing of it? "Fight Club" starts out by altering perceptions, by moving the narrative not forward, but backward, and this is the signal that this movie is more than just plot, plot might not even matter in the end, that we should use all of our senses to enter the reality of the film.
In his article "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin compares a camera and cameraman to a surgeon, "the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man; rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him." The cameraman does this with his camera, he cuts into the reality surrounding him, and "penetrates deeply into its web." And in turn, is this not what the film does to us? "Fight Club" takes what we know, and cuts into it, bringing a new sense of reality to our lives. The epiphany that one of the main characters is just the figment of the imagination of the other, jolts us from complacency. It makes us question everything we have just watched and every movie we watched previously and every movie we will watch. The camera is able to make us see things that we wouldn't normally see, as Benjamin says, it "intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions," the camera can take time and space and alter it. Details come into sharp focus and things that we have never really looked at before become the most important thing in the world.
"Fight Club" does all this and more. It's reality becomes our reality and we are stunned along with Edward Norton as he learns that the man he has been investing his time in is his "imaginary friend." We are in Tyler Durden's head, so his reality is our reality, even though it becomes very evident that it isn't reality in it's pure form. And yet, the camera is able to make us think it is reality, because we have learned to trust it, to value it, and we are taught to, if nothing else, believe only what we see. At least, before "Fight Club" came around. We don't have to believe what anyone says, but we are supposed to believe at least our own eyes. Film takes that away from us. We have both the ability to see things that we have never seen before and the ability to see things that aren't really there.
Along that vein, I wonder what "Fight Club" would be like to watch it without any sound. Because there are some visual clues, and maybe if we were to watch it without sound and therefore narrative, we would catch them, because after all, film is more than just narrative, it is a visual medium, and as such, should come across just as well without the narrative. In addition, we wouldn't be inside Tyler Durden's head, as we wouldn't be able to hear his thoughts, so maybe we wouldn't be so shocked to find out that Brad Pitt isn't real. We could trust our eyes again.
Benjamin says that film changes our ability to see things, it enhances it and manipulates it, and presents it to us. In turn we trust completely what is being given to us to consume, no questions asked. Films like "Fight Club" exploit that trust, use it not to enhance our perception of reality, but to change it, twist it, and make us question what is real; just as Brad Pitt did to Ed Norton, so does "Fight Club" do to us.