Klosterman - Chuck klosterman on film and television: a collection of previously published essays

A Collection of Previously Published Essays

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Essays in this work were previously published in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs copyright 2003, 2004 by Chuck Klosterman, Chuck Klosterman IV copyright 2006, 2007 by Chuck Klosterman, and Eating the Dinosaur copyright 2009 by Chuck Klosterman.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-4516-2478-6

Portions of this work originally appeared in Esquire and on SPIN.com.

From Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

From Chuck Klosterman IV

From Eating the Dinosaur

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 its 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, and the interviewer will inevitably ask, Fifteen years ago, you wrote that no woman could ever satisfy you. Now that youve been married for almost five years, are those words still true? And I will have to say, Oh, God no. Those were the words of an entirely different persona person whom I cant even relate to anymore. Honestly, I cant image an existence without _____. She satisfies me in ways that I never even considered. She saved my life, really.

Now, I will be lying. I wont really feel that way. But Ill certainly say those words, and Ill 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 Ill chuckle and say, Come on, Mr. Rose. That was a literary device. You know I never really believed that.

But heres the thing: I do believe that. Its the truth now, and it will be in the future. And while Im not exactly happy about that truth, it doesnt make me sad, either. I know its not my fault.

Its no ones fault, really. Or maybe its everyones fault. It 1 should be everyones fault, because its everyones 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), Im 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 dont really feel like John and I were competing for the girl Im referring to, inasmuch as her relationship to Cusack was confined to watching him as a two-dimensional projection, pretending to be characters who dont 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 talking on the phone and nuzzling under umbrellas and eating pancakes. 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 Cusacks 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 isnt 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 heres what none of these upwardly mobile women seem to realize: They dont 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. Thats the guy they think he is; when Cusack played Eddie Thomas in Americas 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 thisnot 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 Ive 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 thats all this woman heard. For you I bleed myself dry, 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 isnt even making sense. Hes 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. hyperslop, 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.