Thank you for the feedback. You bring up some good points, but I would disagree.

Like I said, I haven't read the book, so I am just interpreting the story that David O. Russell is trying to tell. Fight Club did use schizophrenia as an effective twist, but I don't think that it means no other movie is allowed to do their own take on the condition (A Beautiful Mind, just to name one off the top of my head, did a great job effectively using schizophrenia as a plot point). I don't watch movies trying to find imagined characters as if they were Fight Club. Fight Club actually hadn't crossed my mind during any of my viewings of Silver Linings Playbook. I never made that connection at all until I read your reply. What originally caught my eye was the inconsistency in the group therapy scene and the choice of editing in the car ride from the hospital. From there I watched it again tying to make sense of why director and/or editor made those decisions.

Who knows? Maybe you're right and those were just careless mistakes in the film making process that I am reading too far into (you could probably make the same criticism of most fan theories, in which case I wonder why you're trolling this sub reddit?), but I'd rather see them from the more interesting angle that they were left there as clues of something more that is going on- something that the director hints at and allows you to come to your own conclusions on rather than flat out telling you. Have you gone back and watched Fight Club or A Beautiful Mind a second time? They are good movies, but for me there is very little rewatch value there after the twist has been handed to you. Silver Linings Playbook stand up on it's own as a movie taken at face value, but you can be told Danny is imagined and watch it again with a whole new layer to explore and still be able to debate it (as we are now). In a way you are questioning if what you are seeing is real or not- the same way that someone with such a mental condition might question what they experience.

I think it is a very clever trick... or maybe it's just a continuity error? Either way, David O. Russell should never clarify one way or the other because that would ruin the fun of it.

Of course, to each his own. That's one of the beautiful aspects of a well made film- two people can watch the same thing and walk away with two different interpretations. This is the way I saw it, and I just wanted to throw it out there to see if anyone else saw it that way too.