From Blue Velvet to Rushmore, well respected movies rarely end up as first-date material, and it’s not hard to see why: they frequently tackle difficult subject matter, and that’s seldom a pretty sight. As a movie geek, I have no problem with this. There are plenty of movies that I wouldn’t dream of unleashing on the friends who say they “didn’t get” Magnolia or thought sex, lies, and videotape was “over-hyped.” I just assume that these are the movies I should save for obsessive cinephiles who throw David Lynch parties and dress up like Wes Anderson characters for Halloween. So when David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club came up at a party recently, I was prepared for the non-movie-geeks to express a lack of enthusiasm: it’s got loud sex, painful looking violence, and Meat Loaf with an uncomfortable looking pair of mammaries.

What is surprising is that Fight Club doesn’t earn the respect of many critics either. These are the aficionados, the guys I thought were on my side! I’d have thought Fight Club would be widely regarded as a film that keeps a sly sense of humor about its subject matter without copping out on what it has to say. Plenty of critics agree with me, but many don’t. Most of the elder-statesmen types reacted to Fight Club with such volatility, you’d think that the movie had disparaged their mothers by name.

Among the members of this Old Boys Club is Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, who said that he found it “troubling” that the film “actually thinks it’s saying something of significance,” amid its “whining” and “bone-crunching.” This was the sentiment expressed by some of the nay-sayers at the party: that Fincher made a bid at profundity in the film that he never delivered on. The trouble with this complaint is that even the most unimpressed reviewers still concede to understanding that the film is illustrating the difficulty of trying to find meaning modern life, they just bemoan it for not presenting an answer.

The real tragedy is that these critics who chastise the movie for offering no new epic resolution the ultimate existential question (a near impossible task anyway) miss out on the insight the film does present. Ed Norton’s character describes the members of fight club as a generation “raised by women,” alluding to the way that they were left to be shaped almost entirely by female hands when the women’s movement sent the divorce rate climbing and their fathers packing. On a less literal but equally important note, this points out that while gender equality removed the restrictions placed on women’s roles, it inadvertently removed the significance placed on men’s. The children of these absent dads grew up to find themselves stymied by the lack of fundamental definition in society. So with their culture creating no clear roles for them to follow or even break from, they begin breaking from their culture altogether. This observation is made clearly and literally, from the mouth of the character through his narration, without grandiosity or vagueness.

Some critics did far worse than postulate that Fight Club never says anything; they somehow inferred a point from the film that’s contradictory to the one it actually makes. Roger Ebert’s Chicago Sun Times review insists that while he was able discern that the movie’s message does not advocate brutality, audiences would not be able to do the same. I’d like to say that Mr. Ebert’s assessment grossly underestimates audiences, but Alexander Walker’s absurd Thursday Evening Standard review makes a good case for Ebert’s argument. Walker unequivocally states that the film’s message is “anti-God” and “anti-society,” insisting that the movie endorses nihilism and destruction.

It bothers me quite a bit to hear that venerable Mr. Walker didn’t watch the end of the movie before he reviewed it. I assume that he took a pee break or went home early to catch a rerun of Fawlty Towers during the final act, because there is no other way to possibly explain his interpretation. For Mr. Walker’s sake, I will explain the film’s conclusion. Spoilers follow.

As the film reaches its climax, Ed Norton’s character has discovered his wild, hipster friend Tyler (Brad Pitt) is in fact his own split-personality. Tyler has convinced his team of aspiring revolutionaries to outfit a major credit-card company’s office building with explosives in order to destroy the debt stored within their computers and the establishment they represent. He wants to create a new world, one based on an unrealistic set of post-college ideals. The important thing here, the part that Walker and movie-goers like him seem to have missed, is that the grown-up side of Norton vetoes this plan. He knows that the means are wrong and the end is impossible, so he literally kills the dissatisfied, anarchic side of himself. He can see that no matter how cathartic the impending havoc is, it’s no more likely to create an altogether better world than the washed out consumerist side he started with.

It’s now too late to prevent the detonation, so Norton takes the hand of Helena Bonham Carter’s character–who’s been serving as a whipping-boy for his frustration this whole time-and apologetically says to her “You met me at a very strange time in my life.” He’s conceding that she’s just as lost as he is, not some grand symbol for all that’s confounded his desperate search for substance. As the detonation takes place and the edifice before them is engulfed in flames, they stand together with their hands locked. It’s far from vindication, but the iconic image of the two figures braced against each other does imply that if indeed there is an answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, it most likely lies in each other. Hardly a nihilistic sentiment.

This last moment of the movie is also vitally important because the overtly stylized, slow motion destruction of the buildings is so obviously tarted-up for the impulse buyer in all of us. This is really just a reiteration of the way that the entire film packages its anti-materialistic message in shiny, consumer friendly wrapping. Some critics made the mistake of calling this contradictory, while others misread it as condescension, but it’s really just employing a little good-old-fashioned irony. The smooth, balletic explosion still manages to capture our shallow side, even if that’s contradictory to everything the destruction itself is supposed to stand for. This is when Ed Norton finally gets that, and hopefully the audience does too. Neither selling out nor embracing chaos will get him what he wants. There’s no easy answer so he’s going to have to compromise, which is the realization that cements this film as what it really is: a coming-of-age story.

Western literature has fooled us into thinking that we come of age at puberty, through stories about falling in love with the local teenage badass or stealing cigarettes from somebody’s big brother. The real threshold into adulthood is crossed when we realize that we’ll never be rock stars, never be secret agents, never be better than everyone else. Coming of age happens when we accept boredom, disappointment and compromise. It would be hard to make it any clearer that the character in your film has found this acceptance than to have him shoot his immature self with a nine millimeter Glock. Were the stodgy reviewers who couldn’t swallow this just hung up on the use of guns in this context? I’d bet they didn’t complain about Old Yeller.

These curmudgeonly critics claim that the protagonist in this film is always spouting whiney, self-indulgent philosophizing-and in fact they’re right, because he does exactly that right up until those final few moments. He deals with the freaked out, pissed off disillusionment of the real-life generation he reflects, so that the audience and character can make the journey together. It’s a tough pill to swallow when you realize that there’s no prescribed ideology or plan that will make you into who you were meant to be. Maybe all those critics are just too old to remember that.