I don't think I ever saw Fight Club as "be more like Tyler Durden by rejecting one type of fashion for another type of fashion with just as many rules." I think I always saw it as "the norm may not be what's best for you and rejecting it in favor of what you actually want is ok." No doubt there were people who bought thrift store jackets and floral shirts and pink tinted sunglasses, but I do think there was a middle ground between "I want to copy Tyler Durden" and "The first rule of talking to me about movies is do not talk to me about Fight Club." What's the tragic misunderstanding of The Virgin Suicides? That's another movie I've enjoyed, though I definitely haven't seen it in years and years.I don’t hold Sofia Coppola responsible for the tragic misunderstanding of The Virgin Suicides that I see on my Tumblr dashboard
Full disclosure: I hate the shit out of both movies The basic gist of Fight Club is "beware the dangers of nihilism" but the general consensus on Fight Club is "fuck yeah nihilism." The argument put forth by the author is that the protagonist's fantasy life wasn't just wild'n'crazy, it was tacky and that while the film itself plays up the tackiness in order to make it more aberrant, the average Fight Club fan instead embraces the tackiness as refinement. Know how I found this essay? I need a new leather jacket. My casual day-to-day is a J Crew from 1996 and the lining is thrashed (and it's a J Crew). While looking for a new jacket I discovered the "car coat" which seems to be a nice compromise between the completely-impractical duster I've always wanted and the basic bullshit "jacket" that everybody wears. I then discovered that Schott makes a car coat; I have a Schott Perfecto (have done since '91) and it's dope. So I'm looking for Schott Perfecto car coats on eBay (they're $900 new) and find one that has the phrase "fight club" in the description. Thinking "please god no" to myself I look up "fight club jacket" and discover that there are an easy two screens' worth of results that are nothing but people selling replicas. Then going "oh god this is awful" I try "what is Brad Pitt's jacket in Fight Club" and find this essay, but also this unholy page in which it is revealed that it was a thrift store find that was then replicated a half-dozen times over by a costume designer but the thread then continues for 2300 posts and eight years. Which is batshit insane. The "tragic" misunderstanding about The Virgin Suicides is that it's a book about society's inaction in the face of individual tragedy but it's a movie about cool girls who angst themselves to death. This is because Sophia Coppola is a shitty filmmaker who managed to make a "sympathetic" movie about Marie Antoinette that was so resoundingly hated by the French that they booed it at Cannes.