High Fidelity

I've been stuck on High Fidelity for months.  Too much to say.

Perhaps more than any other film, I distinctly feel how much I've changed since the first time I saw this one, way back in that little movie theater in Nelsonville, Ohio more than a decade ago.  

Back then, I sat there with the girl I was seeing, and over and over, I saw myself on the screen.  At 24 years old, I needed a film to tell me that what I was feeling and thinking about women and music was normal.  Other people were out there, and they were like me.  (For the record, I screwed that relationship up pretty badly.  So it goes.)

Now I realize that yes, other people like Rob are out there — and mostly they are all self-involved dicks who don't deserve much more than superficiality, and probably wouldn't recognize much more if they got it.  They are doomed.

I like to think that I've made progress.  I see Rob as a sad protagonist that I can't stand.  Watching him is like looking at a home movie of myself from years ago and wishing I could reach through and strangle the sullen little kid on the screen (or at least give him a decent haircut).  

He's a calculating misogynist — the kind of man who can't stand the idea of someone else sleeping with his ex, so he goes out and sleeps with someone, as if he's in a race to move on, or enact some sort of revenge...by striking first?

Once he sleeps with someone else, he immediately goes back to obsessing about his ex sleeping with someone else!  Then he flips out when he learns she's slept with the new guy!  But...look at what you just did, asshole!  AAARGGH.  

And because John Cusack is so damned likable, what his character pulls on screen is...okay?  Funny?  His redemption is...earned?  What did he do to earn this, other than going to his ex-girlfriend's father's funeral?  He's an asshole!

That's the first time I've gone off like that about this film and this character.  Ten years ago, I understood him — I felt his pain, even.  Bitches, man!  Women — especially ones who had the audacity to dump me (when I probably deserved it) — were the enemy, and I had so much stored up anger that I should've stayed away from women altogether, but I didn't.  I kept going back out there, and taking that darkness with me.  Baaaad.

These days, I'm still obsessed with collecting music, sure, and I spend a shitload of time and money in record shops and on eBay looking for stuff, and yes, I'm still self-involved (hello...blogging?), but...would I pull this shit?  No.  

I'm not perfect.  I still make plenty of mistakes with other people, but somehow I found a girl who stayed, and accepted all the faults and obsessions and stupidity and mistakes.  She stayed.  But more on that in a minute.

If not for the demise of physical media and my own canny move to stay in grad school through pretty much the entirety of George W. Bush's first term in office, I likely would be running my own record shop into the ground these days, hoping beyond hope that digital downloads and the death of physical media wouldn't be my undoing.  Of course, owning my own record shop also depends on if health care were affordable and if I could afford to pay myself a living salary and if the bullshit of owning and running a small business weren't so soul-crushing.  That's a lot of "if," but whatever.  

Mostly, record stores seem like a good life, but they're not.  "It's retail hell," my friend Stevie Ray used to say.  He went out of business a few years later.  But record stores are still cool, you know?  I idealize them.  They're fucking great.  They're my church.  Not like in Empire Records, which was nothing like any decent record shop I ever knew (more like a Sam Goody or the like).  No — record shops have an allure, a palpable attitude about them, and that hazy, nicotine and vinyl and incense smell.

Record stores are a fantasy that doesn't really deliver — at least not for me, anyway.  I know plenty of people who work in shops and have great lives and are happy.  I just couldn't get there, for whatever reason.  Loved the free music and the conversations.  Hated the retail drudgery.  But no job is perfect.  If record shops paid $60k a year, we'd all work in one.  Maybe.

Still, as a customer, I can't stay away from them.  Tangent: I once heard my dad telling someone about when he was maybe my age, and he'd work all week, and wake up on Saturday morning with this itch, like he had to go out, because there was a bargain out there.  He went out some weekends and would come back with all this stuff — a lawnmower, a car, a piece of furniture — never records.  Dad doesn't give a crap about music.  But I feel the same pull a few times a week — like if I don't check the shops regularly, I'll miss some amazing bargain, like when I found The Jimi Hendrix Concerts for one damned dollar, or both Traveling Wilburys CDs for $2, or when I found this for $90.  You miss stuff by staying home.  I don't club.  I don't karaoke.  I don't camp or climb rocks or ride a bike or take some martial arts class.  I dig around in record shops.  I might love that more than I love writing.

I'm Rob's age now.  But aside from the obsessive record collecting and the occasional (mostly harmless) navel-gazing, I like to think I'm a different guy now.  What changed?  I watched as my friends married off, had kids, bought houses, etc., and I didn't understand.  I kept collecting records.  I kept blowing money.  I kept having these aborted relationships with women.  Two dates, maybe even three, and then nothing.  Flameout.

Eventual solution?  Self-imposed exile.  Done going through the motions, telling the same stories, doing the same things.  I kept going with my gut: "Maybe this new girl is the one."

Finally, I had the same epiphany that Rob has around the 1:40 mark in High Fidelity: "I've come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains."  The film helped me get there.  I sort of traversed the same arc he goes through.  On New Year's Eve, 2005, I hung out with some friends, had a great time, and felt hopeful about 2006.  My friends would later say that something about me had changed.  They'd never seen me that way.  What way?  I'm still not sure.  Maybe I was just at peace for once.

And then, along came my wife, our life together, our home, and Rufus, our little house rabbit, who is a total asshole, but we love him anyway.  Boom, almost all at once.

The thing about High Fidelity is in the epiphany.  Music and the messages therein shape how Rob views the world and the people around him, and it's all just fantasy.  And after a while, it's easy to get tired of the fantasy, because the fantasy doesn't deliver.  The bitch about fantasies is that they're perfect, and you can't have that.  

Record stores sound great, until you have to actually do some work or listen to shitty music or stock something you know is awful.  Takes a real adult to work in a record shop and not be an asshole to everyone who buys something you don't like.  That stuff never shows up in the fantasy of sitting around listening to music all day and talking to people about Bowie or whatever.  How cool is it that Nick Hornby sets this book in one of the most fantasized, romanticized places?

High Fidelity isn't really about music.  High fidelity is just another phrase for commitment, and the peace that comes from letting go of the rest of what doesn't matter.  I'm sure there's some Buddhism in here somewhere.  

When you commit to somebody — really, really commit to something real and steady, you get something that transcends the fantasy (even if you get worn out women's underwear occasionally hanging in weird places in the house, or endless piles of shoes placed near virtually every door, or half-full glasses of water left on virtually every flat surface).  

What at first seems like less than the fantasy actually ends up being more than the fantasy, and by miles.  You get to come home to something.  (I say this with the utmost respect for people who come home to an empty home for whatever reason, and do not intend to brag or whatever.  I've done the living alone thing, and by choice, even, and although I like my current situation better, if my marriage doesn't work out, I'm living alone in a shabby apartment for the rest of my life.  Living alone was great, too.)

Yeah, you might still slowly piece together all the deleted Bowie albums on Rykodisc (the ones with the bonus tracks you can't get anywhere else), or maybe you suddenly start putting together the Stones' discography on SACD, or maybe you go through a phase wherein you spend so much money on music at the Borders going-out-of-business sales that you actually wonder whether you'll single-handedly resuscitate the company and/or the entire record industry.  Or maybe that's all just me.

But that doesn't mean I want any of that superficial, material stuff more than the person, the rabbit, the house, the kids (someday), and so on.  All that collecting, that obsessing, that itch on Saturday mornings to go out and find a bargain even as physical media sits on life support...it's all just providing a great soundtrack for a pretty good life.