John Cusack, Fake Love, and the Mix-Tape Test: How to Protect Yourself and Your Loved Ones from an Infectious Romantic Disease
John Cusack is our generation's first horseman of the Apocalypse.
What plague, you may ask, was spread by everybody's favorite adorably cynical actor? Chronic and incurable heart-sickness. Cusack's role as the impossibly romantic and chivalrous Lloyd Dobler in 1989's
Say Anything… had a pervasively noxious effect on our entire generation, infecting us all with a newly minted and hideously warped concept of what relationships are
supposed to be like. By the time the film reached its dramatic catharsis (the part where he thrusts the boombox into the air blasting
Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes"), we were setting the bar for our future boyfriends and girlfriends at heights that don't even exist in theoretical physics.
Chuck Klosterman was among the first to attribute Gen X's distinct brand of romantic delusions to Lloyd Dobler in his essay
This Is Emo, where he describes how our real-life relationships are robbed of all possible fulfillment when our expectations of love are so painfully unattainable. He dubs this cycle of chronic disappointment "Fake Love," and it's a much more serious problem than his cheeky tone lets on. Between the unrealistic hopes for Dobleresque overtures from our partners (which I call "Boombox Expectations") and the underlying attitude that makes us treat those partners like s**t (which I call "Romantic Narcissism"), Fake Love has all but extinguished the normalcy of a healthy relationship. While it probably could just as easily have been some other protagonist in some other flowery movie that carried the first mutated strain of Fake Love that would set the epidemic into motion, what's done is done:
Cusack is responsible for burying us in this emotional hole, so it's
Cusack's job to dig us out. Lucky for us, he does. When he came of age,
Cusack took on a role that stepped through the looking glass, showing us what the ugly effects of Fake Love really look like, and demonstrating how to break free of them: Rob Gordon in 1999's
High Fidelity.
Diagnosis:
"Ain't nothing too discreet about the disease of conceit." —
Bob Dylan, "Disease of Conceit"
In his portrayal of the mopey record-store owner in the film adaptation of
Nick Hornby's book,
Cusack nearly transcends the fourth wall. Rob's core concepts about relationships are based on the same fantasies at the root of Fake Love — Rob just gets his from pop music instead of movies. In an unflinching illustration of the plague's first symptom, Rob is depicted as a melancholy brat who's unable to resist an infatuation with any woman who glances his way, since only the butterflies of a new relationship or the drama of an illicit affair can make Boombox Expectations seem reasonable. So, naturally, Rob is a terrible boyfriend. Fake Love places no value on security, support, or companionship, and Rob has never been exposed to any other paradigm. Since he is unable to keep two feet planted in his current relationship, his girlfriend, Laura (who, as played by Danish actress
Iben Hjejle, is presumably foreign-born and therefore immune to the toxic fantasy culture of Generation X), packs up and leaves him in the movie's opening sequence.
With this performance,
Cusack shows us a side of Generation X's struggle that's been left largely unexplored. Cultural critics have always pointed out how Gen X constructed its collective identity through fiction because of a lack of defining figures and events that pitted us in sharp contrast to the Baby Boomers. That part is nothing new, and it is indeed a tough existential pill to swallow for our concepts of heroism to be based on Wonder Woman and evil to be based on Megatron. But there's a far more destructive consequence for our concept of love to be based on
When Harry Met Sally. The way we take this source material into our romantic relationships is much more literal than the way we take it into our moral scheme, and handling a relationship based on the tutorial you got in a romantic comedy is not at all unlike trying to hotwire a car based on the technique you learned watching
Beverly Hills Cop: it doesn't work.
Symptoms:
"I use to live in a room full of mirrors, all I could see was me." — Jimi Hendrix, "Room Full of Mirrors"
Rob then runs down his top five most memorable breakups, and by the time he's done, we have a grotesquely detailed portrait of Romantic Narcissism. He never gave a s**t about who any of these women were; his only concern was how they could made him feel. He tapped his high-school girlfriend to fuel his teenage sex drive and he tapped his college girlfriend to support his fragile ego; like a whiny incubus, he's never satisfied. This is Romantic Narcissism.
If Boombox Expectations are the fantasy ideals that set you up for disappointment, Romantic Narcissism is what makes you see your poor boyfriend or girlfriend as nothing but a source for those expectations. It's what leaves us sitting around waiting for our partner to show
us how passionately in love with us he or she is — for the elusive satisfaction of "you complete me" moments and soul-wrenching confessions in the rain, fictions that leave no room for the prospect of liking and, God forbid, even admiring someone other than yourself. Preoccupied with Boombox Expectations, we spend our relationships waiting for
Pretty in Pink happiness instead of thinking — let alone thinking hard — about who this other person is or how we might actually want to make them happy.
Fake Love has no gender boundaries, but the huge number of guys who latch onto it is sort of ironic, since the stereotypical objectification of women tends to be purely sexual rather than purely emotional. The young men flooding the airwaves with screamo anguish over the loss of some probably nameless, certainly faceless girl who had the gall to leave such a whiny bastard are really an army of Romantically Narcissistic Robs, flying in the face of the sexually explicit lyrics that once dominated their demographic. Indeed, when Rob recalls the evening he first met Laura during his days as a club DJ some years before, we see him procure for her one of his signature mix tapes, compiled from his massive and flawless record collection. It would seem that this, his sure-fire method for impressing the ladies, was devised as a tool for expediting a girl's journey to his bed — but it is in fact geared toward ushering her into his entire life, as Rob pursues not just the fantasy promised by an erection but the fantasy promised by Fake Love.
Treatment:
"Love is more than a one-way reflection." —
Pat Benatar, "Sex as a Weapon"
Anaïs Nin used the metaphor of incest to describe this selfish love, where we only appreciate in each other the reflections we see of ourselves. In her novella
House of Incest, she concludes that this amounts to loving someone only as a means of loving yourself: a one-way ticket to a boring, sterile life. Though a healthy give-and-take relationship clearly requires work, appreciating your partner's virtues offers a much greater return than waiting for grand overtures that they probably have no reason to give you. In Rob's case, the teacher of this lesson is
Joan Cusack, in her requisite supporting role as The Friend. After watching Rob wallow in self-pity over Laura's departure for long enough, she prompts him to simply contemplate why exactly he is so desperate to get Laura back.
The answer seems obvious to the audience: Rob mopes because he identifies with moping. That's what the forlorn character does in the Fake Love scenario: he pines. Rob does as he's asked, however, and what most likely began as just another chance for him to continue bellowing, "Father, why hast thou forsaken me!?," results in a vital epiphany: he sees that there was more to his girlfriend than what she was to him. He eventually presents us with his list of the top five things he misses about her, and we see him connect the things that made him happy in their life together to what a good person she was. She was nice even after a bad day (this shows character), she used her wry sense of humor to be forgiving (this shows kindness), etc. Like a page out of our generation's own personalized self-help guide, Rob's top five represents the simplest and most effective exercise in vanquishing Romantic Narcissism: naming things about your partner that you respect and admire.
Now we see how Fake Love's two pillars stand or fall on each other. Realizing what he was missing out on when he saw Laura as nothing but an adulation machine, Rob glimpses the hollowness of his Boombox Expectations. His age-old Fake Love fantasies look flimsy compared to the rich, albeit intimidating prospect of actually appreciating his girlfriend.
High Fidelity has a tandem message that it hammers home with a vengeance, however: the fantasies are a pipe dream. No girl has ever delivered them, and no girl ever will. There will be no boomboxes thrust into the air, there will be no
Peter Gabriel songs. Rob's acceptance of the fact that he's been chasing a phantom his whole life is cemented when he states the treatise for his entire generation: "I'm tired of the fantasy, because it doesn't really exist. And there are never really any surprises, and it never really…delivers."
Are You at Risk?
"Our real test of strength is caring." —
Dead Kennedys, "Stars and Stripes of Corruption"
The last scene finds Rob in front of the stereo again, this time, he says, to make a tape for Laura. "Full of stuff she'd like," he says, "full of stuff that'd make her happy. For the first time, I can kind of see how that's done." This seemingly innocuous statement explains the single most meaningful litmus test for emotional maturity. This is the exercise that you can do at home to gauge how beholden to Fake Love you and your loved ones are: the Mix Tape Test.
It may sound stupid, but the ability to assemble a compilation cassette, CD, or digital playlist for someone with the pure intention of making the receiver feel happy and not making yourself look good is the most vital possible indicator that you're not under the emotionally retarded thumb of Fake Love. It's a lot rarer than it sounds for the effort behind a mix tape to be altruistic instead of self-serving, for the intent to be to please, rather than to impress. Revisit the compilations you've received and think about the motivation behind each track. Listen hard and you're bound to hear a Satanic-sounding murmuring in the background that, if played backwards will say something like "I am so, so sensitive," "Yes, I am this cool," or "You are going to be so impressed by how well I get you."
For an infinitely harder and infinitely more important version of this test, administer it to yourself. If you can compile someone a pretext-free music mix, without trying to show off your indie cred, your sensitive side, or your artistic refinement, you pass. The only catch is that just as you're the only one who can overcome your own delusions of Fake Love, you're the only one who can tell if you pass the Mix Tape Test. So sit down in front of your music collection, fill in the
"To: ______" on the label, and do a little introspection for the betterment of your generation.
