Before last week’s grand return to the IFC Center for Fight Club, the last time I’d seen one of my favorite movies on the big screen was a few months ago in October, for the 25th anniversary of Back to the Future. It went poorly. In short, a hipster dufus two seats down talked throughout and ruined the experience almost wholly; I hope his girlfriend broke up with him. On the heels of this, I was ready to throw down as only I know how – with words – if anyone ruined yet another of these rare opportunities.

For everyone’s good, the night went smoothly. Except for that sniffly dude towards the back ahemming his way through the film. Chinese coughing torture. I waited as often for favorite lines as for his involuntary spasms. I’d have whipped a lozenge at him, had one been on me, but I settled down when I realized it was tenfold worse for the poor bastards sitting right in front of him. It’s probably my least favorite way of cheering myself up – realizing other people have it worse – but it was in this case nonetheless effective.

This was my first time seeing Fight Club in a theatre. It was released in October of 1999, when I was a freshman in college. I spent too much time in my dorm room, a bus ride away from civilization, to consider seeing any movie. Unlimited internet access saw to keeping me there. I do wonder what I would have thought then – this hypothetical now and forever useless – but it probably wouldn’t have had the right impact. I felt like an outsider enough as it was, then: There was no pressing need for iconoclasm.

Nearly twelve years later, the film found its true mark. I watched it several times over one week last July, on account of all the commentaries, bookending what has been for me a period of, if not self-destruction, stripping away. Of employment, of friends, of familiar comforts. I was hoping to find inspiration several times over. Instead, I found that with the freedom to do anything is the freedom to do nothing at all. I ignored the metaphorical sense of self-destruction for the literal one. Moving on, progressing, evolving, any of these acts of creation and of self-creation are also in essense acts of self-destruction. Healthy ones. I was surrounded by vivid thoughts of what was, my memory occasionally being unforgiving, and entered a prolonged and early hibernation. Rather than keeping in touch with the physical, I eschewed it. I repeatedly and mindlessly hitched my wagon to a perverted mantra of the film – I’m not gonna play by their rules – rather than focus on a crux of it: Don’t forget to feel something along the way.

So, there I was, a week ago. Eight months after this slow descent began. This viewing wasn’t the transcendent experience I might have been hoping for – but it was helpful. More than anything, it was fun. Funny. That the movie is hilarious is integral to its message, I’ve found, at least integral to the transmission of that message, being the sugar that helps the medicine. The powerful moments were still powerful, in some cases more so: The car scene preceding the accident was more nerve-wracking, the accident itself possibly more cathartic. But it was the jokes that really popped. Tyler Durden, besides looking and fucking better than the Narrator, also gets to be funnier. And not just in the clever way that humorists are often clever. Funny in the popular-kid kind of way, the way that earns admiration and laughs a group of people at a time, not just one-by-one, and belly laughs at that. It’s not lost on me now that plenty of Tyler’s laughs are the result of slapstick: the nunchuks, the bicycle fall. Physical comedy in these cases outweighs the cerebral, and that’s freeing in itself.

The fight scenes, reasonably, came across more strongly. Their sounds and imagery, being more potent, constrasted that much more strongly with the cold brightness of the corporate scenes. Brad Pitt’s “rules” speech seemed even more stately, historic, even. The lye kiss scene was as essential as ever. And I must highlight the scene in the back of the bodega with Raymond K. Hessel. It usually gets me, but this time around, probably got me more than it ever had. Because in a movie full of large ideas and huge targets, that’s a small bit of practicality. The sense of community is one thing, the need to be a part of something larger than oneself certainly valid. But day-to-day, in and of oneself, existentially, it gets no more personal or important than wasting no time and doing exactly what it is that will make you the person you want to be. A lesson well taught.