The first sign that “Fight Club” might inspire men to do anything other than quote “Fight Club” on their Facebook walls came in the mid-two-thousands, with the rise of the “seduction community.” These were groups of men searching together-sometimes in live seminars, but increasingly via online Listservs-for an objectively reliable set of techniques that would maximize their chances of getting women in bed. The movie has become part of the contemporary mass-cultural canon through which large numbers of men try to think through masculinity. In the debates surrounding the release of Todd Phillips’s “ Joker”-another movie about lost men rising up-“Fight Club” was one of the most reached-for comparisons. Today, men still quote “Fight Club,” still discuss what the movie really means, and still dress like its characters for Halloween. On DVD, however, it found a second life, selling millions. The film, based on a relatively unknown 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk, took the top spot at the box office its opening weekend, but then quickly fizzled. In the course of the film, these men expand into low-grade pranks and vandalism, and eventually form a terrorist cell called Project Mayhem that plants bombs in skyscrapers.

Twenty years ago this fall, David Fincher’s “ Fight Club” went into wide release, drawing moviegoers into a tale of disaffected American men who chase authenticity by pummelling the shit out of one another in poorly lit basements.