jane dark's sugarhigh!

Don't call it a cupcake

One of the classic Econ101 lessons involves the rationale for offering "second ticket, half-price" bargains at porn theaters: in short, because otherwise no one's going to sit next to anyone else and you'll get nothing for every adjacent seat.

High Fidelity was fine. John Cusack is superadorable, and his minions were fab (launching Jack Black toward his current toxic level of chipper bloviation). But the audience in my Bay Area spot might as well have been rolling with the Mitchell Brothers: lank-haired zip-jacketed record nerds transfixed by finally seeing their story brought to the big screen, an event apparently so erotically hefty that the theater was almost exactly half-full. There was something creepy about it, as there always is in the specter of a host of beta males basking in their own validation by the swaggering culture machine (...surely each of us would one day have sex with Lisa Bonet and Iben Hjele in a two-hour span)

Tthis was not a proud moment for any of the assembled record nerds, and I'll include myself. If the movie itself offered validation, anyone looking around the crowd should have gleaned the opposite: an indisputable survey of the culture's wan, dudely homogeneity, almost fatally low on elan vital, hybrid vigor, cultural difference, self-recognition, immediacy and intensity, but high on stunted aggression, a blindered sense of superiority and convenient, flattering identification.

That makes the movie, somehow, great -- that it could, for two hours, render such a list of values tolerable and even appealing. But please stop telling me that the books are okay. This has become common wisdom, as any number of smart people sit around snarking on Hornby's humiliating stabs at music crit have ponied up for his books.

Okay, I think we can all agree that Mr. Hornby is rather hopeless at talking about an art form with which he couldn't keep pace, even as it toddled ahead in a rather leisurely fashion. But Hornby's books have also always sucked (and this is no new news. Here's a passage from a review of his second novel: "Hornby invokes the two great streams of middle-class sentimentality: the Afterschool Special and The New Yorker story.") Moreover, they have always sucked in exactly the same way: wan, dudely homogeneity, almost fatally low on elan vital, hybrid vigor, cultural difference, self-recognition, immediacy and intensity, but high on stunted aggression, a blindered sense of superiority and convenient, flattering identification.

The books no less than the music writing race toward the endgame of the lost, melanc- and alco-holic boor, the ugly white guy whom culture has passed by, but who still manages to feel smug and lash out at everyone who fails to replicate his values. The sentiment is awful; the prose is no better than in his music writing. I'd propose that if the Hornby-bashers recognized the stakes of fiction to be as high as those of music, they wouldn't forgive the books quite so easily.

Posted by jane at May 28, 2004 07:45 AM | TrackBack