High Fidelity (2000)

2 years ago

High Fidelity (2000)

IF YOU REALLY WANTED TO SCREW ME UP, YOU SHOULD’VE GOTTEN TO ME EARLIER.

by Erica Ulstrom

Rob Gordon is the reluctant owner of Championship Vinyl – a used and indie record shop – who lives with Laura, a willowy urbane lawyer who lends him money and whom we suppose from the start is too good for him. But Rob is smart and clever and the sort of fellow who arranges his industrial record collection chronologically, in order of the life events each one provided a soundtrack for, and so we nod and understand the attraction.

We blink into their narrow railroad apartment moments after the culmination of A Talk, one we sense did not end well for our protagonist. The movie opens with Rob listening to terrific, serious headphones and wondering too loudly which came first, “the music or the misery”: Did we listen to music because we were broken or did years of songs about “heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss” crush our collective hearts?

There is none of the trendy inadequacy of earbuds for Rob’s ilk, only the massive, ear-encompassing headphones you choose when you’re begging the music to invade and conquer you, to overwhelm and become you.

For the nights you need this song to drown out life entirely.

“You don’t have to leave this second,” Rob tells her Laura. “You can stay ‘til whenever.”

“No. We’ve done the hard part, now I might as well -“

“Just stay for tonight then.”

Just stay for the night. Haven’t we been there? Haven’t we? Even with your sights set on someone else, even when I think I don’t want you anymore, that doesn’t mean I want to sleep without you just yet.

High Fidelity is a movie about the fickleness and injuries of the human heart. Or maybe, High Fidelity is a movie about us not knowing what we want. Not knowing if we want too much or are fighting some noble battle against settling for too little.

For a long time, High Fidelity was an unshakable part of my relationship barometer. As Rob points out, maybe it’s not what you are like – maybe it’s what you like that matters. Though I didn’t need a man to just like this film or the book generically (though bonus points if you recognize Nick Hornby’s angsty genius) – I needed to know how he saw it. I needed you to be flawed and conflicted and hopeful enough to relate with a long sigh of recognition and maybe a little shame. Condemnation will get us nowhere; you have to get it even if you don’t admire it. Because if you can entirely dismiss Rob as a mopey, introspective, indulgent, immature, indecisive bastard, you’re going to be so disappointed to discover even the small swells and dips of my heart months down the road.

Lying alone in their street lamp lit flat after Laura has left him – for where, he forgets or is too self-pityingly preoccupied to ask – Rob beings one of his trademark monologues that run out through the grimier streets of Chicago and back into the coziness and snobbery of his record shop roundtable. The subject this round: Top Five Worst Break Ups of All Time.

Which eventually leads him to crawl out of his musical middle earth and track down four of the ex-girlfriends (the fifth, it turns out, was only a straw man meant to keep Laura from her rightful place on the list). Just to catch up, he assures us. Like a Springsteen song. But really, he admits, to discover why they left him.

One at a time, Rob takes us through the rubble and epiphanies of his romantic past and naturally drifts towards new distractions along the way. We begin to suspect that Laura left to avoid catching Rob’s chronic dissatisfaction with life. And we learn how he and Laura have failed each other as she confesses his sins to her best friend for the first time to justify her new affair with Ian from upstairs. Rob seduces a musician, Lisa Bonet in a dreamy caricature, and dreams of their private jokes she’ll include in her liner notes even as he admits that life with Laura was actually mostly good. Really good. There are all the conflicted late night phone calls of a breakup and the hours of imagining the epic sex your ex is having with some new nymph or Adonis. And as restless and dissatisfied as they were, in the bomb shelters of midnights and Sunday afternoons, they still think mostly of each other.

And it all nods to the universal truth that, in most relationships, no one is a martyr and no one is the devil. It’s all a matter of whether you’ll highlight the solidness and camaraderie, or the little betrayals and disappointments. It’s all a matter of what you decide is a deal breaker.

There’s room for a cubic ton of psychoanalysis in this movie. Are we afraid of getting left or are we afraid of getting stuck? Do we fuck things up because we’re terrified of staying and trusting? Or are we greedy philistines who will never be satiated with a good woman or a good man?

There’s this scene where Rob’s mother calls and begins the light-hearted banter about his good fortune in having Laura around to keep his head on straight. He breaks it to her that Laura is Gone – to the quick echo of his mother’s sobs of disappointment in him. Not for him. And really, isn’t this our worst fear materializing?

There are two camps you encounter after each next failed relationship: those who will celebrate your emergent freedom and those who will compile this as growing evidence that you are incapable of coupling well. And it seems each time we leave or are left, the camps grow closer together until you begin to suspect the doubters are recruiting the celebrators and they’re all starting to wonder if you are unable to accomplish the basest human duty. And even as Rob knows he could have kept Laura if he’d known for sure he wanted to – if he’d been willing to exert a modicum more of effort – doesn’t the paired world at some point begin to give up hope on us and our caveats anyway?

Rob is a man afraid of loss. But he’s also a man afraid of the loss of opportunity. And he embodies that terrible, liberating, weak moment in a relationship where you get just comfortable enough to stop clutching at it, to stop worrying all the time that it might dissipate overnight…and then if you’re a certain kind of person, that maybe we have each been at a point, you begin to scan the crowd for who you might become afraid to lose next.

Laura is both the quintessential Modern Female and the Saddest Product of American Dating. Another hopeful in love with a man’s potential. Another woman just the same as her man: eyeing the horizon and trying to figure out if she’s supposed to, allowed to, want more. If she’s a fool to love a man who disappoints her. Trying to figure out how long you heed the cosmopolitan lecture: Don’t settle, keep looking, hold out for better. Because no one told our generation when to stop.

And we’re all exhausted of looking over each other’s shoulders to see if a better version might be approaching. Aren’t we?

High Fidelity is our love letter to music as much as it is to the imperfection of love itself, to the songs and albums that carried us through the wilds of heartache and the ones that crested us back up and into the next season of infatuation and possibility. To the songs that gave us the mettle to stay or the guts to leave.

High Fidelity is the best of the human heart and the worst. It is faith and patience and endurance. It is dissatisfaction and ingratitude and greediness. It is fear and brokenness and love in your 30’s. It is cynical and it is hopeful – it is the revelation that we’ve so much to be grateful for…if we could ever just figure out how to know when we’ve found a place to anchor, when it’s the right time to turn the boat back from the sea.

It is us. And we understand. At the first viewing and the fiftieth, we understand. The complexities of the decisions and indecisions are what fascinate and comfort here, even as they taunt us in the real world.