“Anally retentive” is a cliche but it perfectly describes, as it happens, your average person in middle management at your average corporate hell house. White collar dipsticks don’t get that there exists a world where their pedantic attention to meaningless details won’t get them brownie points with people in charge of taking humanity forward into the unknown yet still able to take heed of the warnings of the great human beings who suffered and died for these selfsame values.

This is the prelude, narrative and historical, to Fight Club, a cult classic that defies genre classification while as a work of art still falls short of “brilliant” and well short of “masterpiece.” That is to say, it’s only about a guy who can’t get enough of his shit together to get a life, but through a miracle of schizophrenic mania and release of anger into freedom, he achieves what his usual self would find impossible. Its aesthetic is light and MTV-implausible: pure fantasy offered as an alternative reality where the revolution is “kick-ass,” but also pretty fucking easy. It’s for children in other words, but what an awesome kid’s movie it is.