I didn’t watch Fight Club until I was about 18 or 19 years old, but I remember its VHS tape sitting among my childhood shelf’s collection of ’80s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon tapes and various Disney movies. I can only assume my dad bought it and quickly disowned it; my parents were never very interested in separating their VHS library from my own. Me, I just liked having a big row of tapes. From whenever that tape appeared to when I watched Fight Club proper, my relationship with the movie was thinking, “that bar of soap looks like it has a very satisfying texture.”

Scratch that; it still looks satisfying. I want to feel the letters on a Fight Club soap bar rub across my flaky flesh. Yes, I know the rigidity will last like, two showers at most, but how jubilant those bathing sessions would be. Please reach out to me if you’d like to donate Fight Club soap bars. Preferably a variant for sensitive skin.

As for the movie… I dunno. I kind of don’t like it very much? I have mixed feelings about it in the truest sense of the phrase. It’s undeniably extremely entertaining—no one can make 139 minutes fly by like David Fincher can. But, like… it’s just so stupid, man. I understand Fight Club is intended to satirize toxic masculinity and the repressed anxieties of the working class (or something to that effect), but it fails to suggest an alternative to its glorification of indulging in one’s destructive angst. Is its satire successful if so many people can watch Fight Club and view it as something to aspire to, rather than a cautionary tale?

In the movie’s final moments, a triumph of accepting one’s own vulnerabilities and self-delusions is upended by a climactic depiction of their aforementioned angst successfully tearing down the system that oppressed them. It’s unambiguously a “cool” moment, which is kind of my problem. Something with Fight Club‘s themes shouldn’t make them look cool. In reality, as we’re observing in the time of this publication, the values possessed by the cast of Fight Club lead to an acceleration of fascism; infighting that only tightens the noose around marginalized people. A victim mentality exploited to make common people forget their common ground and paradoxically, unwittingly support outcomes that only take power away from them.

In the context of the film, the titular Fight Club shouldn’t lead to the catharsis its directionless men are looking for, because they scorn the power within the demographics they myopically don’t identify with. It’s a losing proposition. They aren’t some forgotten race of Übermensches—they’re part of the exploited and manipulated lower class that’s existed for all of human history. Say it with me: they don’t want to stop the oppression—they want to become the oppressors.

Fight Club glamorizes its worldview too much to work as effective satire, and the defense of it as such often comes across as people wanting to justify enjoying a silly (if irresponsible) thriller. If you like Fight Club, that’s fine, provided it’s not for the aforementioned aspirational reasons. But just own it. It doesn’t need to be a work of subversive genius, and I obviously don’t believe it is. What it is, however, is another work from one of the greatest directors of its time. Of course it’s a sensory feast, and there’s no shame in liking a movie for that reason. Beyond that, there’s so much hypocrisy in and about Fight Club that it never makes a potent statement. It’s like if I never left high school, man.

I have no idea if my dad ever enjoyed Fight Club. Hell, he may have not even watched it. We didn’t talk about it. Regardless, I can say he’s embodied some of its worst mentalities, such as never sharing his myriad health problems with family out of some misplaced sense of pride and self-martyrdom.

Rule number one of Fight Club: talk about Fight Club. Please, for the love of God, talk about Fight Club.