1 This Is Emo 0:01
No woman will ever satisfy me. I know that now, and I would never try to deny it. But this is actually okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either.
Should I be writing such thoughts? Perhaps not. Perhaps itâs a bad idea. I can definitely foresee a scenario where that first paragraph could come back to haunt me, especially if I somehow became marginally famous. If I become marginally famous, I will undoubtedly be interviewed by someone in the media,1 and the interviewer will inevitably ask, âFifteen years ago, you wrote that no woman could ever satisfy you. Now that youâve been married for almost five years, are those words still true?â And I will have to say, âOh, God no. Those were the words of an entirely different personâa person whom I canât even relate to anymore. Honestly, I canât image an existence without _____. She satisfies me in ways that I never even considered. She saved my life, really.â
Now, I will be lying. I wonât really feel that way. But Iâll certainly say those words, and Iâll deliver them with the utmost sincerity, even though those sentiments will not be there. So then the interviewer will undoubtedly quote lines from this particular paragraph, thereby reminding me that I swore I would publicly deny my true feelings, and Iâll chuckle and say, âCome on, Mr. Rose. That was a literary device. You know I never really believed that.â
But hereâs the thing: I do believe that. Itâs the truth now, and it will be in the future. And while Iâm not exactly happy about that truth, it doesnât make me sad, either. I know itâs not my fault.
Itâs no oneâs fault, really. Or maybe itâs everyoneâs fault. It should be everyoneâs fault, because itâs everyoneâs problem. Well, okay⌠not everyone. Not boring people, and not the profoundly retarded. But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one for this (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (which is kind of meaningless), Iâm going to blame John Cusack.
I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack. Under certain circumstances, this would have been fine; Cusack is relatively good-looking, he seems like a pretty cool guy (he likes the Clash and the Who, at least), and he undoubtedly has millions of bones in the bank. If Cusack and I were competing for the same woman, I could easily accept losing. However, I donât really feel like John and I were âcompetingâ for the girl Iâm referring to, inasmuch as her relationship to Cusack was confined to watching him as a two-dimensional projection, pretending to be characters who donât actually exist. Now, there was a time when I would have thought that detachment would have given me a huge advantage over Johnny C., inasmuch as my relationship with this woman included things like âtalking on the phoneâ and ânuzzling under umbrellasâ and âeating pancakes.â However, I have come to realize that I perceived this competition completely backward; it was definitely an unfair battle, but not in my favor. It was unfair in Cusackâs favor. I never had a chance.
It appears that countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack. I cannot fathom how he isnât the number-one box-office star in America, because every straight girl I know would sell her soul to share a milkshake with that motherfucker. For upwardly mobile women in their twenties and thirties, John Cusack is the neo-Elvis. But hereâs what none of these upwardly mobile women seem to realize: They donât love John Cusack. They love Lloyd Dobler. When they see Mr. Cusack, they are still seeing the optimistic, charmingly loquacious teenager he played in Say Anything, a movie that came out more than a decade ago. Thatâs the guy they think he is; when Cusack played Eddie Thomas in Americaâs Sweethearts or the sensitive hit man in Grosse Pointe Blank, all his female fans knew he was only acting ⌠but they assume when the camera stopped rolling, he went back to his genuine self ⌠which was someone like Lloyd Dobler⌠which was, in fact, someone who is Lloyd Dobler, and someone who continues to have a storybook romance with Diane Court (or with Ione Skye, depending on how you look at it). And these upwardly mobile women are not alone. We all convince ourselves of things like thisânot necessarily about Say Anything, but about any fictionalized portrayals of romance that happen to hit us in the right place, at the right time. This is why I will never be completely satisfied by a woman, and this is why the kind of woman I tend to find attractive will never be satisfied by me. We will both measure our relationship against the prospect of fake love.
Fake love is a very powerful thing. That girl who adored John Cusack once had the opportunity to spend a weekend with me in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria, but she elected to fly to Portland instead to see the first U.S. appearance by Coldplay, a British pop group whose success derives from their ability to write melodramatic alt-rock songs about fake love. It does not matter that Coldplay is absolutely the shittiest fucking band Iâve ever heard in my entire fucking life, or that they sound like a mediocre photocopy of Travis (who sound like a mediocre photocopy of Radiohead), or that their greatest fucking artistic achievement is a video where their blandly attractive frontman walks on a beach on a cloudy fucking afternoon. None of that matters. What matters is that Coldplay manufactures fake love as frenetically as the Ford fucking Motor Company manufactures Mustangs, and thatâs all this woman heard. âFor you I bleed myself dry,â sang their blockhead vocalist, brilliantly informing us that stars in the sky are, in fact, yellow. How am I going to compete with that shit? That sleepy-eyed bozo isnât even making sense. Heâs just pouring fabricated emotions over four gloomy guitar chords, and it ends up sounding like love. And what does that mean? It means she flies to fucking Portland to hear two hours of amateurish U.K. hyper-slop, and I sleep alone in a $270 hotel in Manhattan, and I hope Coldplay gets fucking dropped by fucking EMI and ends up like the Stone fucking Roses, who were actually a better fucking band, all things considered.
Not that Iâm bitter about this. Oh, I concede that I may be taking this particular example somewhat personallyâbut I do think itâs a perfect illustration of why almost everyone I know is either overtly or covertly unhappy. Coldplay songs deliver an amorphous, irrefutable interpretation of how being in love is supposed to feel, and people find themselves wanting that feeling for real. They want men to adore them like Lloyd Dobler would, and they want women to think like Aimee Mann, and they expect all their arguments to sound like Sam Malone and Diane Chambers. They think everything will work out perfectly in the end (just like it did for Helen Fieldingâs Bridget Jones and Nick Hornbyâs Rob Fleming), and they donât stop believing, because Journeyâs Steve Perry insists we should never do that. In the nineteenth century, teenagers merely aspired to have a marriage that would be better than that of their parents; personally, I would never be satisfied unless my marriage was as good as Cliff and Clair Huxtableâs (or at least as enigmatic as Jack and Meg Whiteâs).
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 ânormal,â because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. You canât compare your relationship with the playful couple who lives next door, because theyâre 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. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool. The best relationship I ever had was with a journalist who was as crazy as me, and some of our coworkers liked to compare us to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. At the time, I used to think, âYeah, thatâs completely valid: We fight all the time, our love is self-destructive, andâif she was mysteriously killedâIâm sure Iâd be wrongly arrested for second-degree murder before dying from an overdose.â We even watched Sid & Nancy in her parentsâ basement and giggled the whole time. âThatâs us,â we said gleefully. And like I saidâthis was the best relationship I ever had. And I suspect it was the best one she ever had, too.
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, Iâm 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 didnât exist. In tangible terms, she was light-years out of my league, along with most of the other women Iâve 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 havenât even seen any of Woodyâs movies, nor would they want to touch the actual Woody Allen if they ever had the chance (especially since heâs proven to be an Ăźber-pervy clarinet freak). If asked, most of these foxy ladies wouldnât 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 âWoody Allen Personality Typeâ 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, itâs that the only people who can make us happy are those who donât strike us as being particularly desirable. Whether itâs Jerry Maguire or Sixteen Candles or Whoâs 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, weâd all be sleeping with our best friends. And that does happen, sometimes.3 But herein lies the trap: Weâve 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 donât want to have sex with our friends ⌠unless theyâre sexy. And sometimes we do want to have sex with our blackhearted, soul-sucking enemies ⌠assuming theyâre sexy. Because thatâs 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 isnât. Itâs just another gimmick, and itâs no different than wanting to be with someone because theyâre thin or rich or the former lead singer of Whiskeytown. And it actually might be worse, because an intellectual relationship isnât 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, itâs anyoneâs ball game. Iâve beaten the system; Iâve broken the code; Iâve 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 Iâve 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 didnât deserve to be with in the first place.
Perhaps this sounds depressing. That is not my intention. This is all normal. Thereâs 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 weâve 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 âWe just donât talk anymoreâ). 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. âMore than words is all I ever needed you to show,â explained Gary Cherone on the Pornograffiti album. âThen you wouldnât have to say that you love me, cause Iâd already know.â 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, weâre forced to live inside the acoustic power chords of Nuno Bettencourt, even if most of us donât necessarily know who the fuck Nuno Bettencourt is.
When Harry Met Sally hit theaters in 1989. I didnât see it until 1997, but it turns out I could have skipped it entirely. The movie itself isnât bad (which is pretty amazing, since it stars Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal), and there are funny parts and sweet parts and smart dialogue, andâall things consideredâitâs 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 Iâve never sat through the pitch sequence that leads to Bucky Dentâs three-run homer, I know exactly what happened. I feel like I remember it, even though I donât. Andâmore importantâI know what it all means. Knowing about sports means knowing that Bucky Dent is the living, breathing, metaphorical incarnation of the Bo Soxâs undying futility; I didnât have to see that game to understand the fabric of its existence. I didnât need to see When Harry Met Sally, either. Within three years of its initial release, classifying any intense friendship as âtotally a Harry-Met-Sally situationâ had a recognizable meaning to everyone, regardless of whether or not theyâd actually seen the movie. And that meaning remains clear and remarkably consistent: It implies that two platonic acquaintances are refusing to admit that theyâre 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 âbest friends.â 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 heâs in love with a woman who only sees him as a buddy, they will say, âYouâre wrong. Youâre perfect for each other. This is just like When Harry Met Sally! Iâm sure she loves youâshe just doesnât realize it yet.â Nora Ephron accidentally ruined a lot of lives.
I remember taking a course in college called âCommunication and Society,â and my professor was obsessed by the belief that fairy tales like âHansel and Gretelâ and âLittle Red Riding Hoodâ 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 hereâs why: Even if those theories are true, theyâre barely significant. âThe Three Little Pigsâ is not the story that is fucking people up. Stories like Say Anything are fucking people up. We donât need to worry about people unconsciously âabsorbingâ archaic secret messages when theyâre six years old; we need to worry about all the entertaining messages people are consciously accepting when theyâre twenty-six. Theyâre the ones that get us, because theyâre the ones we try to turn into life. I mean, Christ: I wish I could believe that bozo in Coldplay...