Quotes from Jonathan Rosenbaum

But the strength that remains, which is principally destructive, is the film's dialectical relationship to most of the other movies that we see, its capacity to make their most time-honored conventions seem tedious, shopworn, and unnecessary. This originality often seems to be driven by hatred and anger, emotions that are undervalued in more cowardly periods such as the present...

Judging by the the movie's enduring popularity, the message that stupidity is redemption is clearly what a lot of Americans want to hear.