"The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club," barks Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) to his minions — men raised by women. Breaking the rule, we're still talking about Fight Club, 15 years after its release this month — both the movie and the radical ideology grafted to the fictional club. In 2014, Fight Club speaks to us more so than in 1999, and that famous catchphrase continues to echo through the annals of pop culture and our political sphere.

Fight Club's very much a movie about men who "are not a beautiful or unique snowflake" (millennials must cringe watching the movie) and who enjoy destroying something beautiful just because they feel like it. David Fincher's masterpiece touches on themes like transitioning from a consumer culture ("Planet Starbucks," "Microsoft Galaxy") to an anti-consumerism culture where your stuff doesn't own you anymore. The underlying themes of rebellion sparked something inside of a generation that wasn't willing to kowtow to the pernicious powers that be.

The figurative demolition of the buildings mirrors both the literal destruction of the Twin Towers and the figurative decimation of our financial system.

In its wake, Fight Club indirectly spawned a lot of Project Mayhem-like behavior. A few weeks after Fight Club was released in theaters — it tanked at the box office but it now ranks number 10 on IMDb's "Top 250" best-movie list — the infamous Battle in Seattle riots, in protest of the WTO Ministerial Conference, broke out. Even back then, protestors fought against globalization, something Fight Club delved deep into with their shenanigans of vandalizing corporate headquarters, the satirical in-flight airplane manuals depicting people catching afire, and Durden and his cronies detonating several buildings housing credit card companies: "Out these windows, we will view the collapse of financial history. One step closer to economic equilibrium. It'll be like pay-per-view," Durden jokes about extirpating the financial institutions.

American protest groups haven't gone so far as to actually blow up anything major since then — we let the real terrorists do that — which makes Fight Club's revolution seem too extreme. The difference between anarchy and fascism is that the latter contains a militant commander, like Durden, who squashes everyone else's input. He oversees his obedient chattel follow through with obliterating everything in sight. Most of Fight Club comes off as a masculine, caustic satire, but the ideas in the movie metastasized into real-life 21st-century America. At the end of 1999, we were two years away from 9/11 and eight years from the immobilizing global financial crisis that would eventually birth Occupy Wall Street.

A decade and a half later, we're still pissed, but what are we doing about it?

Chuck Palahniuk wrote Fight Club the novel in 1996. Did he see the dark nimbus clouds forming over the country? How was he able to foreshadow America's financial disasters? The movie concludes with the injured Narrator (Ed Norton) holding hands with his tourist girlfriend, Marla Singer, watching credit card buildings explode and crumble. Durden utters the words "ground zero," an epithet that would become synonymous with 9/11. The figurative demolition of the buildings mirrors both the literal destruction of the Twin Towers and the figurative decimation of our financial system. "If you erase the debt record, then we all go back to zero. You'll create total chaos," The Narrator explains to the police about Project Mayhem's manifesto. Bedlam and civil unrest resulted from 9/11 and the financial crisis but so did positive protests like Occupy Wall Street, which shined a bright light on corporate influence, income inequality, and lack of accountability. Akin to the Fight Clubs in the film, OWS popped up all over the nation demonstrating its vast sphere of influence and appeal. Like the everymen characters in the film — they are waiters, police officers, "slaves with white collars," "the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world" — they want equality, but they also want revenge on the powers that placed them between the devil and the deep blue sea. "We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't," Durden says. "And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." They're willing to go to excessive measures to have their voices heard, and that's what Fight Club and Occupy Wall Street evolved from — except OWS used mostly peaceful protests to get their points across.

A decade and a half later, we're still pissed, but what are we doing about it? We're still very much immersed in a corporate culture where our things do end up owning us, and we're not willing to live without our Starbucks skinny lattes, our IKEA furniture, and our smartphones. What began as a means to let off some steam and to feel alive, Fight Club quickly spiraled into a lost generation of men seeking something more than nihilism. "When the fight was over, nothing was solved, but nothing mattered. We all felt saved," The Narrator says. Durden discusses how his generation, Gen X, has no Great War but a spiritual war. "Our Great Depression is our lives." Fight Club may be about men coming together for shared experiences, but the themes about experiencing real pain and release are universal.

Violence isn't the answer, but what else is there? "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," Durden advises. He may be right, but will we ever have the balls to chuck it all away and start over again? Tyler Durden exemplifies what happens when you take matters into your own hands and try to change the world, and in the process, the rationale sometimes become "You gotta break some eggs." Or in his case, destroy a Volkswagen Beetle.

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