Mr. Fincher, who crammed the collector’s edition DVD, released in 2000, with a trove of deleted scenes and behind-the-scenes supplements (all are available on the new Blu-ray version), said the movie needed time to be freed from initial preconceptions. “It was sold as, hey come see people beat each other up,” he said recently by phone from Boston, where he was shooting a film about the founding of Facebook called “The Social Network.” To his irritation Fox ran ads during wrestling matches, and many critics described it as a head-banging testosterone fest. But Mr. Fincher has observed that “women maybe get the humor faster,” he said, adding that young female audiences seemed to appreciate the film’s satirical spin on macho posturing. Reached by e-mail, Mr. Palahniuk went further and called the film “the best date flick ever.” “The ‘Fight Club’ generation is the first generation to whom sex and death seem synonymous,” he said, pointing out that the “meet-cute” between the characters played by Mr. Norton and Helena Bonham Carter occurs in a support group for the terminally ill. Having grown up with an awareness of AIDS, younger readers and viewers, he added, “could identify with the implied marriage of sex and death; and once that fear was acknowledged those people could move forward and risk finding romantic love.”

Mr. Fincher, Mr. Norton and Mr. Pitt, who were all in their 30s when they made the film (as was Mr. Palahniuk when he wrote the book), have each talked about being personally struck by the angry-young-man disaffection of “Fight Club.” When Mr. Fincher read the novel, he said, “I thought, Who is this Chuck Palahniuk and how has he been intercepting all my inner monologues?”

The movie’s arrival in the season of pre-millennial anxiety gave it the aura of what Mr. Norton called “an end-of-the-century protest.” A highly personal work made within the studio system, it also seemed like part of a larger cinematic groundswell. “There was a feeling that our crowd was starting to express itself,” Mr. Norton said, referring to a bountiful year for young American filmmakers that also saw revelatory works like Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia,” David O. Russell’s “Three Kings” and Spike Jonze’s “Being John Malkovich.”

But as with all generational touchstones there is the matter of a cultural divide. “People get scared, not just of violence and mortality, but viewers are terrified of how they can no longer relate to the evolving culture,” Mr. Palahniuk said. Some older audiences prefer darker material in conventional forms; they “really truly want nothing more than to watch Hilary Swank strive and suffer and eventually die  beaten to a pulp, riddled with cancer, or smashed in a plane crash.”

The secret to the enduring allure of “Fight Club” may be that it is, as Mr. Norton put it, quoting Mr. Fincher, “a serious film made by deeply unserious people.” In other words, a film as willing to take on profound questions as it is to laugh at and contradict itself: what is “Fight Club” if not the most fashionable commercial imaginable for anti-materialism? A movie of big ideas and abundant ambiguities, it can be read and reread in many ways.

Mr. Fincher said, “Every once in a while someone will send me their thesis and ask, Is this close to the mark?” He sometimes shares the papers with Mr. Palahniuk and the actors but said it’s ultimately not for him to decide.

Mr. Norton agrees. “Joseph Campbell has that great idea about mythologies, that a myth functions best when it’s transparent, when people see through the story to themselves,” he said. “When something gets to the point where it becomes the vehicle for people sorting out their own themes, I think you’ve achieved a kind of holy grail. Maybe the best you can say is that you’ve managed to do something true to your own sensations. But at the same time you realize that this has nothing to do with you.”