Movie: High Fidelity (Stephen Frears, 2000)
I've been rewatching Seinfeld in the past few months, seeing it for the first time when I am around the same age as Jerry and co. It's astounding how much better it is than I remember it, and I already liked it a lot. It's of course ridiculously funny, but I didn't expect it to also be so perceptive about its characters' general way of being, and their fears, insecrurities, hopes and joys. The show is rightly famous for its great use of irony, but through its use of irony it's also a very sincere portrayal of how dumb, exhausting and gloriously ridiculous people can be when they are in pursuit of dates, love, friendship, and all kinds of other good experiences, without knowing exactly what they want, and about the genuine pleasure and happiness they get out of their ability to pursue these things. That makes them neither assholes nor paragons of goodness, but just rather relatable people who are sometimes wonderful and sometimes insufferable. Last year on this blog, I discussed Chungking Express in similar terms, and I think that Seinfeld and Wong Kar Wai's film do share much of the same pleasures.
Contemporary thinkpieces about Seinfeld would do well to take a look at the show from this perspective, and consider that there are elements of it that make it aspirational and hopeful. It's an improvement that these days cultural perspectives have more room to address the racial and class privileges of the Seinfeld characters. But it's absolutely not a sign of progress that they can't imagine a world in which those privileges are expanded to more people. Poor and non-white people in America/'the west' have huge barriers to overcome, and it's positive that pop culture is increasingly addressing those barriers, but instead of just reflecting the real world, pop culture can also imagine a better and more fun world. At the moment, it's miserably failing in that regard, while mistakenly deluding itself that this is progressive. It's not a coincidence I think that Seinfeld was extremely popular among many people from former Yugoslavia in the 1990's.
All of this basically explains my current reaction to High Fidelity. Seeing it a long time ago, I really really liked it. Watching it now, coincidentally at the same age as John Cusack was when shooting it, I thought it mostly sucked. Nobody who starts a review of High Fidelity with a two-paragraph aside on an unrelated pop culture phenomenon can honestly say they find the film fully worthless, but it's kind of amazing in retrospect that it was released two years after Seinfeld ended. It feels completely derivative of it. Cusack's Rob Gordon is a Seinfeldian self-absorbed character who is largely clueless about romantic relationships, has barely got his life together, goes on and on about topics of little relevance, and gets irrationaly angry about minor details. The main difference is that Seinfeld lets you make up your own mind about what's on screen, while High Fidelity holds you by your hand and tells you exactly when you should find Rob sympathetic and when you should find him loathsome. Too much of the film is one big exposition dump that doesn't understand that breaking the fourth wall is more powerful/shocking/funny when it's done sparingly. It's for example much less interesting to present the four incidents that led to Rob's breakup with Laura (Iben Hjejle) as a story that he tells the audience directly, than as a series of interactions between the two actors. Obviously the film is largely about how Rob's subjective experience of his relationships differs considerably from the reality, but there are ways to show that without letting him drone on and on to us.
More surprisingly, I also thought High Fidelity has a somewhat banal depiction of how pop culture affects people's lives. To continue the comparison with Seinfeld, there the characters constantly riff about the movies/shows/concerts/etc they see. They make stupid jokes about them, make references to them in ordinary conversation, act in the way their pop culture heroes do, and use them as conversation fillers with strangers. In High Fidelity, Rob constantly blurts out what his favorite books are, his top 5 records, his top 5 artists, jobs, first singles, and whatnot. But we never get an impression of why "Johnny Cash's autobiography Cash by Johnny Cash" is his favorite book, how it has influenced his life, or what he gets out of Nirvana. Most of the pop culture references are presented in a highly generic way and could easily be replaced by others. There is one scene where Rob listens to The Velvet Underground after an unhappy encounter with his ex, and it it's only time in the film that it feels like there is a specific connection between Rob's experiences and feelings and the pop culture he interacts with. If the film had been more directly about how Rob, as an individual, is a shallow manchild, this would be less annoying. But it is more interested in using Rob as a figurehead for how 'we' are affected by pop culture and romantic fantasies, trying way too hard and too self-consciously to be a generational statement. I am no fan of that, and recently also got nothing out of The Worst Person in the World, despite very much liking other films by Joachim Trier.
I also probably just don't care for Nick Hornby's perspective. After watching this movie I saw a clip from the new High Fidelity show, with Zoe Kravitz taking on the role of John Cusack. It involved a huge debate with her record store buddies about whether they should sell a Michael Jackson record to a customer and whether Jackson is more problematic than Kanye West. The dialogue is such that it manages to smugly present the record store owners as a bunch of highly obsessive and knowledgeable music geeks with strong opinions, but refuses to see the audience on their level, belabouredly spoonfeeding us every stale and obvious argument they are making. It's the kind of boringly joyless bullshit the film is also full of. Zoe Kravitz and John Cusack may be among the top 5 most sympathetic actors of their generation. It takes some effort to make them actively annoying.
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