Singles (1992)

2 years ago

Singles (1992)

BEING ALONE. THERE’S A CERTAIN DIGNITY TO IT.

by Michelle Said

Janet Livermore works in a coffee shop in Seattle. Not a “diner-coffee shop” like you’d see in a Quentin Tarantino movie, but a coffeehouse-coffee shop. You know, a shop that, um, sells coffee: a creation so novel in the early-90s that they called it a movement. They also called them espresso bars and bean grinders. But, anyway, back to Janet. She’s just a girl who works in a coffee shop. She’s 23 and she wants to go to school for architecture one of these days. And she loves grunge music and the guys who make it.

Janet is one of the characters in Cameron Crowe’s 1992 ode to mid-twenties malaise, centered around the strain of modern dating: Singles. This movie is basically like Friends before Friends was Friends. Kind of like Threesome or Reality Bites before they existed. These characters went to Starbucks before Starbucks was Starbucks. In a way, Singles kind of started it all.

[TRUFAX SIDE NOTE: The soundtrack is the only thing 95% of the population remembers about this movie. Take a poll of your friends and see if anybody could tell you that it featured Kyra Sedgwick in one of her first roles. Ask them if they remembered that the movie featured Paul Giamatti, Jeremy Piven, Bill Pullman or the guy that played Prezbo on The Wire in bit parts. I guarantee you they will not, since this movie also happened to feature cameos by a boyish Eddie Vedder and a fledgling Chris Cornell, performances by Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, with a soundtrack that featured all of the above as well as Mudhoney and the Smashing Pumpkins./TRUFAX SIDE NOTE]

The film is full of that developing scene that was bursting, popping, oozing out of Seattle into the nationwide consciousness. It was dirty, it was raw, it was underground. It was grunge. And Cameron Crowe, the man behind Say Anything and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the man once credited with finding the pulse of Young America in the 1980s, gave us Singles - a movie that merged a fringe music scene with a big Hollywood movie.

And what was that movie about?

Feeeeeeelinnnnngs.

Okay, more specifically, relationship feelings. Disgusting, annoying, whiny single-people feelings. Nobody-will-ever-love-meeeee feelings. The feelings of a generation (specifically, Generation X) trying to find love.

Singles is about people on the edge between youth and adulthood. Fifty years ago, this movie would have been more appropriate in the period between high school and college, but as recently as the early 90s, Generation X (perpetuated by Y, and soon Z—or whatever kids these days are called) decided, Hey! Adolescence is too short, man! Let’s keep that party rolling! The movie tells the tale of what it’s like to have a job and be ostensibly independent but still searching for that greater purpose, the one you’re supposed to find and embrace. About going out to bars and gigs, bopping your head to the music while acting like you don’t care and looking across the room at the guy with those eyes (and oh, what dreamy eyes!) and hoping that he meets your gaze. And in that split second as you’re looking at him, you, trained by all of those years of watching all of those horrible Hollywood movies with the pat-resolutions and the triumph and the struggle and the lightning sent from heaven above, wonder, “Is this it? Is that him?” And then you avert your eyes because, “What if it is?” And then, a moment later, “What if I’m not ready for him?”

It’s a movie about what it’s like to not know what you want, or even what you’re supposed to want. It’s a movie about me and, probably, you (but only if you’re anything like me).

When you’re single in your twenties and have a relative grasp on self-sufficiency, you are free as a bird to do what you like. Would you like to live in another country for a year? Sure, why not? Would you like to live from city to city? Not reason not to. Sleep with whoever you want! Who cares? This is the time of your life to enjoy all the freedom the world has to offer! But when you’re flying (or UP IN THE AIR, forgive the pun) you don’t even know if there’s any place to land. You’re searching. You want to find that place to come home to. You want to find the person to come home to. You’re looking for the perfect situation to call your own.

And the thing is, for most people, this is not easy. In fact, it’s ridiculously hard and painful. You will fail. You will get your heart broken. You will break somebody’s heart. But then there’s that ever-present whisper in your ear telling you that you have to keep working, to keep putting yourself out there, that anything that’s really worth anything in life doesn’t come easy. But that whisper also says that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. So maybe that’s it. Maybe that period between 20 and 30 is really just a period of constant insanity. You keep moving forward as best you can, you keep trying to shove square pegs in round holes, and you keep dating the same unsuitable suitors that have always failed you. Your twenties may very well be the most dangerous and (literally!) crazy decade of your life.

This truth—this feeling of failure and trial and struggling—takes up the first two-thirds of Singles. And I was actually quite stunned by the clarity and realism that Crowe distilled here. I mean, aside from four young people living in one apartment complex and all dating each other, a la Melrose Place. (Again, Singles preceded Melrose Place. Don’t you feel like you’re discovering the Adam Kadmon of popular culture from 1991 to 1999? I do.)

To wit: I love the scene where Janet (Bridget Fonda) bounds up to her rocker “boyfriend” Cliff (Matt Dillon) at the end of his band’s practice, oblivious to the fact that he has about as much enthusiasm for her as a pair of khakis. This is obviously a pre-He’s Just Not That Into You world. She asks him when he’ll be free. He deflects and then says, “You know I’m seeing other people, right?” Strangely, this admission doesn’t faze Janet. “You don’t fool me,” she says. “We made the connection, and when you make the connection, the chemistry takes care of itself. I mean, it makes its own decisions, you know?” She debates with herself as to whether or not she should call him, she excuses his behavior when he stands her up, and she subsists on a diet of cucumbers and lettuce in order to be attractively thin… for him! For a guy named Cliff with stringy hair in a fledgling rock band called Citizen Dick, a guy who won’t commit to her! It’s all so ridiculous to the point that it’s depressingly real. I’ve known this girl. I’ve seen her in action. Maybe I’ve even been her in my younger days. And it’s not really all his fault, she’s putting herself through this mental tailspin of desperation where walking away early on would have saved herself a whole lot of trouble. At the height of this pursuit, she notices that he has pictures of big-bosomed women plastered all over the walls of his apartment. “Are my breasts too small for you?” she asks. “Sometimes,” he says. She then goes out and books herself an appointment with a plastic surgeon for a breast augmentation. Here Crowe seems to tell us that the people we like have no bearing on whether or not they are good for us, or if we should even be with them. It becomes more of a pursuit of self. It is a quest for approval, not for a functional relationship. Eventually she tames these urges and comes to her senses, not without the help of her plastic surgeon (Bill Pullman) who happens to inexplicably have a crush on her. (Again, my argument that the first two-thirds of this movie are riddled in realism is falling apart, but, hey.)

All that said, Janet isn’t really the main focus of this movie. That distinction belongs to Steve Dunne (Campbell Scott) and Linda Powell (Kyra Sedgwick). Linda’s been hurt before. It may be because of the wall she has erected to protect herself against being hurt again that Steve finds himself inextricably attracted to her. I mean, who among us have not been there? You meet a person and this person is so damaged and tortured by their past that we feel (we hope!) that we can save them. We will be the savior of this attractive individual with whom we also want to have sex! The internal monologue does smack a bit of a hero complex. Steve pursues Linda gingerly, each of them tiptoeing around the idea of commitment, until they eventually fumble their way into something like a relationship. But then LIFE happens. (Read: Pregnancy.) They find themselves closer than ever before. (Read: Marriage talk.) And then, in an instant, they are torn apart. (Read: Miscarriage.)

All of this is so beautiful and so staggering that I just wanted to cry because I felt like I knew these people and their stories so well.

That is, until we get to the end.

There’s a mark towards the last third of the movie where it becomes pretty obvious that some honcho in Hollywood has placed a clunky chokehold on the story. You can almost see them sitting in a conference room, saying, “Yes, yes, but isn’t it all a bit, I don’t know… Depressing?”

Which is kind of when the movie goes to shit.

You see, we are lead to believe that every single person living in the same apartment building ends up happy and joyous and in a committed relationship! Hurrah! Including the other chick, Debbie (Sheila Kelly), the one I didn’t mention who decides to try out video dating, which leads to a few mildly interesting anecdotes but nothing worth mentioning here! Even Janet and her douchebag obsession Cliff somehow end up in each other’s arms. Somewhere midway through the movie, Janet switches the flip in her brain and becomes a completely different person, one who doesn’t care about the waste of a man that is Cliff. Conveniently, once this change-up occurs, he begins to aggressively pursue her, leaving rose petals on her bed, calling her constantly. And then he suddenly meets the one criteria she was looking for earlier (a guy who says “Bless you” after she sneezes) and she starts making out with him. While I concede that this phenomenon does happen in the wild, i.e. real life, I maintain that girls who are as obsessed with a guy as Janet do not just suddenly go from psychotic obsession to utter indifference.

And then there’s Linda and Steve. After becoming close to engagement due to an unintentional pregnancy that is lost after a car crash, Linda leaves Steve in a lurch and retreats back to her ex-boyfriend. He winds up lying on his kitchen floor in a pile of filth, not going to work, not taking calls. He calls her and leaves a message on her machine begging for her to come back but the tape (heh, the tape, oh, the 90s) gets eaten by the machine. Of course, as always happens in Hollywood, she comes to the epiphany that she should really be with Steve and dashes over to his house in the middle of the night. “Look, I don’t want to be your girlfriend or anything… I just want to know you again,” she says. “What took you so long?” he asks. “I was stuck in traffic,” she says. And then Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, taking on the form of enormous man-eating pterodactyls with gigantic teeth, swoop in and eat the entire apartment complex.

Just kidding. That didn’t happen. It was just wishful thinking on my part. MY BAD.

All of this is so fucking pat and obsequious that I just wanted to vomit all over my laptop a million times. Mostly because a movie that was so great at showing life as it really is for a certain subset of people winds up with every main character in the movie ending up happily ever after, all at the same time. Let me repeat that: ALL AT THE SAME TIME. I’m not one to argue against happiness as a possibility in this world, but we don’t all reach it at the end of 90 minutes, you know? Even Joey and Phoebe ended up dangling at the end of Friends. THE BACK OF MY HAND, CAMERON CROWE, LET ME SHOW YOU IT.

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.

I think what really angered me about this ending is that it just perpetuates the romantic Hollywood stereotypes that have turned us all into neurotic, over-expectant messes that demand a level of romantic gesture that only leads to more pain and less understanding. They want us to give the asshole who treats us badly another chance even though he doesn’t deserve it, they want us to send drunken voicemails to past loves in a fit of desperation, they want us to run over in the middle of the night to someone’s house and ask for forgiveness because… That’s what the people in the movies do! And it works out for them, doesn’t it? So it could work for me! Except, no. It never does. It never has. Not in real life, anyway. If you followed the relationship advice of these crazy characters, you would be locked up in a mental asylum or, at least, slapped with a restraining order.

I digress. I am making it sound like I hated this movie when I really did enjoy it. The characters are so richly drawn and so real, something Cameron Crowe has always been able to do so wonderfully. I especially like thinking about where these characters would be today, 18 years later. Janet Livermore would be 41. Maybe she ended up getting an architecture degree and maybe she didn’t. Maybe she married her rocker boyfriend and maybe she didn’t! In fact, she probably didn’t! I hope she didn’t, anyway! The kind of person you date when you’re 23 a lot of the time doesn’t turn into the kind of person you want to settle down with long-term, no matter how much you think they’re going to rock your world or how dreamy their grunge hair is. When I was that age I dated a guy totally unsuitable for me, someone who I would have never have been happy with long term, because I was, for lack of a better word, an idiot. And now, four years later, here I am and I’m still an idiot, I’m just not with that guy anymore. One of these days, I am hoping I’ll grow out of this emotional lunacy, but who knows? The bottom line is that watching these characters in their twenties trip and fall through the world of romantic relationships, lost and searching, just like me, made me feel a little less alone, even if it was made almost two decades ago.

So, next time I watch it, I’ll turn it off it after the first hour. Unless they re-edit the last third of the movie and rename it Singles: You’ve Got Megatron.

Michelle Said is an Associate Editor of A Bright Wall in a Dark Room. She is, as you may have gathered, single. She tumbls here.