Chuck Klosterman On Film And Television (2 page)

Of course, this media transference is not all bad. It has certainly worked to my advantage, just as it has for all modern men who look and talk and act like me. We all owe our lives to Woody Allen. If Woody Allen had never been born, I’m sure I would be doomed to a life of celibacy. Remember the aforementioned woman who loved Cusack and Coldplay? There is absolutely no way I could have dated this person if Woody Allen didn’t exist. In tangible terms, she was light-years out of my league, along with most of the other women I’ve slept with. But Woody Allen changed everything. Woody Allen made it acceptable for beautiful women to sleep with nerdy, bespectacled goofballs; all we need to do is fabricate the illusion of intellectual humor, and we somehow have a chance. The irony is that many of the women most susceptible to this scam haven’t even
seen
any of Woody’s movies, nor would they want to touch the actual Woody Allen if they ever had the chance (especially since he’s proven to be an
über
-pervy clarinet freak). If asked, most of these foxy ladies wouldn’t classify Woody Allen as sexy, or handsome, or even likable. But this is how media devolution works: It creates an archetype that eventually dwarfs its origin. By now, the “Woody Allen Personality Type” has far greater cultural importance than the man himself.

Now, the argument could be made that all this is good for the sexual bloodstream of Americana, and that all these Women Who Want Woody are being unconsciously conditioned to be less shallow than their sociobiology dictates. Self-deprecating cleverness has become a virtue. At least on the surface, movies and television actively promote dating the nonbeautiful: If we have learned anything from the mass media, it’s that the only people who can make us happy are those who don’t strike us as being particularly desirable. Whether it’s
Jerry Maguire
or
Sixteen Candles
or
Who’s the Boss
or
Some Kind of Wonderful
or
Speed Racer,
we are constantly reminded that the unattainable icons of perfection we lust after can never fulfill us like the platonic allies who have been there all along.
²
If we all took media messages at their absolute face value, we’d all be sleeping with our best friends. And that does happen, sometimes.
³
But herein lies the trap: We’ve also been trained to think this will
always
work out over the long term, which dooms us to disappointment. Because when push comes to shove, we really
don’t
want to have sex with our friends… unless they’re sexy. And sometimes we
do
want to have sex with our blackhearted, soul-sucking enemies… assuming
they’re
sexy. Because that’s all it ever comes down to in real life, regardless of what happened to Michael J. Fox in
Teen Wolf
.

The mass media causes sexual misdirection: It prompts us to
need
something deeper than what we
want
. This is why Woody Allen has made nebbish guys cool; he makes people assume there is something profound about having a relationship based on witty conversation and intellectual discourse. There isn’t. It’s just another gimmick, and it’s no different than wanting to be with someone because they’re thin or rich or the former lead singer of Whiskeytown. And it actually might be worse, because an intellectual relationship isn’t real
at all
. My witty banter and cerebral discourse is always completely contrived. Right now, I have three and a half dates worth of material, all of which I pretend to deliver spontaneously.
⁴
This is my strategy: If I can just coerce women into the last half of that fourth date, it’s anyone’s ball game. I’ve beaten the system; I’ve broken the code; I’ve slain the Minotaur. If we part ways on that fourth evening without some kind of conversational disaster, she probably digs me. Or at least she
thinks
she digs me, because who she digs is not really me. Sadly, our relationship will not last ninety-three minutes (like
Annie Hall
) or ninety-six minutes (like
Manhattan
). It will go on for days or weeks or months or years, and I’ve already used everything in my vault. Very soon, I will have nothing more to say, and we will be sitting across from each other at breakfast, completely devoid of banter; she will feel betrayed and foolish, and I will suddenly find myself actively trying to avoid spending time with a woman I didn’t deserve to be with in the first place.

Perhaps this sounds depressing. That is not my intention. This is all normal. There’s not a lot to say during breakfast. I mean, you just woke up, you know? Nothing has happened. If neither person had an especially weird dream and nobody burned the toast, breakfast is just the time for chewing Cocoa Puffs and/or wishing you were still asleep. But we’ve been convinced not to think like that. Silence is only supposed to happen as a manifestation of supreme actualization, where both parties are so at peace with their emotional connection that it cannot be expressed through the rudimentary tools of the lexicon; otherwise, silence is proof that the magic is gone and the relationship is over (hence the phrase “We just don’t talk anymore”). For those of us who grew up in the media age, the only good silence is the kind described by the hair metal band Extreme. “More than words is all I ever needed you to show,” explained Gary Cherone on the
Pornograffiti
album. “Then you wouldn’t have to say that you love me, cause I’d already know.” This is the difference between art and life: In art, not talking is never an extension of having nothing to say; not talking always means something. And now that art and life have become completely interchangeable, we’re forced to live inside the acoustic power chords of Nuno Bettencourt, even if most of us don’t necessarily know who the fuck Nuno Bettencourt is.

When Harry Met Sally
hit theaters in 1989. I didn’t see it until 1997, but it turns out I could have skipped it entirely. The movie itself isn’t bad (which is pretty amazing, since it stars Meg Ryan
and
Billy Crystal), and there are funny parts and sweet parts and smart dialogue, and—all things considered—it’s a well-executed example of a certain kind of entertainment.
⁵
Yet watching this film in 1997 was like watching the 1978 one-game playoff between the Yankees and the Red Sox on
ESPN Classic
: Though I’ve never sat through the pitch sequence that leads to Bucky Dent’s three-run homer, I know exactly what happened. I feel like I remember it, even though I don’t. And—more important—
I know what it all means
. Knowing about sports means knowing that Bucky Dent is the living, breathing, metaphorical incarnation of the Bo Sox’s undying futility; I didn’t have to see that game to understand the fabric of its existence. I didn’t need to see
When Harry Met Sally,
either. Within three years of its initial release, classifying any intense friendship as “totally a
Harry-Met-Sally
situation” had a recognizable meaning to everyone, regardless of whether or not they’d actually seen the movie. And that meaning remains clear and remarkably consistent: It implies that two platonic acquaintances are refusing to admit that they’re deeply in love with each other.
When Harry Met Sally
cemented the plausibility of that notion, and it gave a lot of desperate people hope. It made it realistic to suspect your best friend may be your soul mate, and it made wanting such a scenario comfortably conventional. The problem is that the
Harry-Met-Sally
situation is almost always tragically unbalanced. Most of the time, the two involved parties are not really “best friends.” Inevitably, one of the people has been in love with the other from the first day they met, while the other person is either (a) wracked with guilt and pressure, or (b) completely oblivious to the espoused attraction. Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less. But
When Harry Met Sally
gives the powerless, unrequited lover a reason to live. When this person gets drunk and tells his friends that he’s in love with a woman who only sees him as a buddy, they will say, “You’re wrong. You’re perfect for each other. This is just like
When Harry Met Sally
! I’m sure she loves you—she just doesn’t realize it yet.” Nora Ephron accidentally ruined a lot of lives.

I remember taking a course in college called “Communication and Society,” and my professor was obsessed by the belief that fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel” and “Little Red Riding Hood” were evil. She said they were part of a latent social code that hoped to suppress women and minorities. At the time, I was mildly outraged that my tuition money was supporting this kind of crap; years later, I have come to recall those pseudo-savvy lectures as what I
loved
about college. But I still think they were probably wasteful, and here’s why: Even if those theories are true, they’re barely significant. “The Three Little Pigs” is not the story that is fucking people up. Stories like
Say Anything
are fucking people up. We don’t need to worry about people unconsciously “absorbing” archaic secret messages when they’re six years old; we need to worry about all the entertaining messages people are consciously accepting when they’re twenty-six. They’re the ones that get us, because they’re the ones we try to turn into life. I mean, Christ: I wish I could believe that bozo in Coldplay when he tells me that stars are yellow. I miss that girl. I wish I was Lloyd Dobler. I don’t want anybody to step on a piece of broken glass. I want fake love. But that’s all I want, and that’s why I can’t have it.

1
. Hopefully Charlie Rose, if he’s still alive.

2
. The notable exceptions being
Vertigo
(where the softhearted Barbara Bel Geddes gets jammed by sexpot Kim Novak) and
My So-Called Life
(where poor Brian Krakow never got any play, even though Jordan Catalano couldn’t fucking read).

3
. “Sometimes” meaning “during college.”

4
. Here’s one example I tend to deploy on second dates, and it’s rewarded with an endearing guffaw at least 90 percent of the time: I ask the woman what religion she is. Inevitably, she will say something like, “Oh, I’m sort of Catholic, but I’m pretty lapsed in my participation,” or “Oh, I’m kind of Jewish, but I don’t really practice anymore.” Virtually everyone under the age of thirty will answer that question in this manner. I then respond by saying, “Yeah, it seems like everybody I meet describes themselves as ‘sort of Catholic’ or ‘sort of Jewish’ or ‘sort of Methodist.’ Do you think all religions have this problem? I mean, do you think there are twenty-five-year-old Amish people who say, ‘Well, I’m
sort of
Amish. I currently work as a computer programmer, but I still believe pants with metal zippers are the work of Satan.’”

5
. “A certain kind” meaning “bad.”

Even before Eric Nies came into my life, I was having a pretty good 1992.

I wasn’t doing anything of consequence that summer, but—at least retrospectively—nothingness always seems to facilitate the best periods of my life. I suppose I was ostensibly going to summer school, sort of; I had signed up for three summer classes at the University of North Dakota in order to qualify for the maximum amount of financial aid, but then I dropped two of the classes the same day I got my check. I suppose I was also employed, sort of; I had a work-study job in the campus “geography library,” which was really just a room with a high ceiling, filled with maps no one ever used. For some reason, it was my job to count these maps for three hours a day (I was, however, allowed to listen to classic-rock radio). But most importantly, I was living in an apartment with a guy who spent all night locked in his bedroom writing a novel he was unironically titling
Bits of Reality,
which I think was a modern retelling of
Oedipus Rex
. He slept during the afternoon and mostly subsisted on raw hot dogs. I think his girlfriend paid the rent for both of us.

Now, this dude who ate the hot dogs… he was an excellent roommate. He didn’t care about anything remotely practical. When two people live together, there’s typically an unconscious
Odd Couple
relationship: There’s always one fastidious guy who keeps life organized, and there’s always one chaotic guy who makes life wacky and interesting. Somehow, the hot dog eater and I both fit into the latter category. In our lives, there was no Tony Randall. We would sit in the living room, drink a case of Busch beer, and throw the empty cans into the kitchen for no reason whatsoever, beyond the fact that it was the most overtly irresponsible way for any two people to live. We would consciously choose to put out cigarettes on the carpet when ashtrays were readily available; we would write phone messages on the walls; we would vomit out the window. And this was a basement apartment.

Obviously, we rarely argued about the living conditions.

We did, however, argue about everything else. Constantly. We’d argue about H. Ross Perot’s chances in the upcoming presidential election, and we’d argue about whether there were fewer Jews in the NBA than logic should dictate. We argued about the merits of dog racing, dogfighting, cockfighting, affirmative action, legalized prostitution, the properties of ice, chaos theory, and whether or not water had a discernible flavor. We argued about how difficult it would be to ride a bear, assuming said bear was muzzled. We argued about partial-birth abortion, and we argued about the possibility of Trent Reznor committing suicide and/or being gay. We once got into a vicious argument over whether or not I had actually read all of an aggrandizing Guns N’ Roses biography within the scope of a single day, an achievement my hot dog–gorged roommate claimed was impossible (that particular debate extended for all of July). Mostly, we argued about which of us was better at arguing, and particularly about who had won the previous argument.

Perhaps this is why we were both enraptured by that summer’s debut of MTV’s
The Real World,
an artistic product that mostly seemed like a TV show about people arguing. And these people were
terrible
arguers; the seven cast members thrown into that New York loft always made ill-conceived points and got unjustifiably emotional, and they all seemed to take everything much too personally. But the raw hot dog eater and I watched these people argue all summer long, and then we watched them argue again in the summer of 1993, and then again in the summer of 1994. Technically, these people were completely different every year, but they were also exactly the same. And pretty soon it became clear that the producers of
The Real World
weren’t sampling the youth of America—they were unintentionally creating it. By now, everyone I know is one of seven defined strangers, inevitably hoping to represent a predefined demographic and always failing horribly.
The Real World
is the real world is
The Real World
is the real world. It’s the same true story, even when it isn’t.