—
“No woman will ever satisfy me. I know that now, and I would never try to deny it. But this is okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either.” So says Chuck Klosterman in the first sentence of “This Is Emo,” from his his book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. Cheery thoughts, especially as I ponder what it means to be single on the worst day to be single in this culture.
However, Klosterman is quite correct. No one can truly satisfy me. And I can’t truly satisfy anyone else. The problem is that we all think we can. It’s in the atmosphere, in the water, all around us in our media saturated culture. Think about the narratives we tell each other, the narratives we consume in the name of entertainment. They all tell us we are incomplete without that someone special in our lives. Klosterman continues,
“Whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inablility to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take fall for this.”
So who takes the fall? In postmodern fashion Klosterman deconstructs our pop culture naratives. Romantic comedies in general, and Say Anything in particular. I like Say Anything. I relate to Lloyd Dobler. I want to find my Diane Court. I want to live the Love Against All Odds story. Does anyone see a problem with this?
“Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no ‘normal,’ because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. You can’t compare your relationship with the playful couple who lives next door, because they’re probably modeling themselves after Chandler Bing and Monica Geller. Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake….
“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 unattainble icons of perfection we lust after can never fulfill us like the platonic allies who have been there all along. If we all took media messages at their aboslute face value, we’d all be sleeping with our best friends. And that does happen, sometimes. 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.”
For all of his critique of fake love (he skewers When Harry Met Sally, Coldplay’s “Yellow,” and the implausability of Woody Allen being considered “desirable”), Klosterman cannot find any resolution. After deconstructing our cultural narratives, all that’s left is cynicism–
“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 psuedo-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 Thre Little Pigs’ is not the story that is [messing] people up. Stories like Say Anything are [messing] people up. We don’t need to worry about people unconciously ‘absorbing’ archaic secret messages when they’re six years old; we need to worry about all the entertaining messages people are conciously 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 the stars are yellow…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.”
So what now? Next we’ll turn to another critic of culture to find our way out.
