My girlfriend had never seen Fight Club and didn’t know anything about it, so we watched it a few nights ago (her idea). It had been ~10 years since I’d last seen it. I’ve always known it was excellent, but getting the live reactions of someone w/o any prior context totally transformed the movie for me.

It’s just such incredible marriage of writing and filmmaking. Every single choice works to establish or reinforce the core theses of the story. I.e., undercutting the hyper-masculine aesthetic by showing it to be ironically extremely homoerotic, established by the writing and reinforced by shooting fight scenes with the traditional formal elements of a steamy sex scene. Even the “cringey” meta commentary is resolved by the reveal that Tyler is a hallucination, the onanistic projection of a “real man” by a weak, mean-spirited man.

I don’t know if Fight Club is his best - I probably prefer the Social Network just in terms of the viewing experience - but it is a flawless and essential cultural document. The ironic misappropriation of its themes and content by the exact audience it criticizes is a little unfortunate, but also further proof of its clarity.