Alex's Book Club: Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

Chapter 1: This is Emo

I actually didn’t know what Emo was for a very long time. When the Skits-O-Phrenics recently did a sketch called “Emo Club,” I had no idea what that meant.

Does that mean I’m getting old? Probably. I am eating more peanut brittle, so who knows.

In this chapter, CK introduces what is a recurring theme in his book: the thin line between fiction and reality.

In this case, we’re talking about how romantic movies, and in particular “Say Anything” and “When Harry Met Sally,” have determined how we view our romantic ideals.

Frankly? Its true. This is a discussion I’ve had three thousand times with people, usually utilizing the phrase, “Movie Love,” to describe it. And of course, it sounds great. The phrase romantic ideal has the word ideal in it for a reason.

CK makes a good point that perhaps this has ruined our current interactions with love. For girls, you’re not looking for a guy, you’re looking for John Cusack playing Lloyd Dobler. And guys are looking for their female friends to fall in love with them.

This is actively true. Every female I know is in love with Lloyd Dobler. Every guy I know is in love with their female friends. Chuck Klosterman makes a very good case that there is no way this is going to work out.

In the real world, he argues, our romantic entanglements don’t last for 93 minutes, they stretch on for weeks and months. The pat dialogue that we’ve perfected date in and date out? That runs out, eventually. And then, so does the relationship.

However, and I want to stress that you’re going to hate me by the end of this paragraph, and maybe even this run-on sentence, this is the whining of a lonely singleton.

It’s certainly something I’ve felt before, and discussed ad naseum. But as a person who is very happy with the relationship I’m currently in (although I wrote this well in advance, I can actually feel your collective eyes rolling right now), I can tell you that once you get out of the movie love phase, there are other things that take its place.

I used to be unhealthily obsessed with movies and television. That’s a lie. I’m still unhealthily obsessed. Yesterday, though, I was watching one of my favorite TV shows ever, “Cupid,” with my girlfriend.

“Cupid,” in case you’ve never seen it (and as it was cancelled after five months, so literally billions of people have not seen it), is about a guy named Trevor Hale who thinks he’s Cupid. Or, he may actually be Cupid. It’s unclear. But basically, he’s a romantic idealist, and he’s in the care of a psychologist, Dr. Claire Allen, who’s a romantic realist. Hilarity ensues!

Actually, it does, every single episode is a goddamn brilliant romantic comedy, wonderfully written, acted, directed… It’s a great show that was killed way, way, way too early.

But I have to admit… Watching the show, I still loved the craft that went into making it, and still loved the characters who are played by B-List celebrities, appear each week, fall into true love, and are never heard from again. I loved every second of it, but I couldn’t help compare it to hanging out on a couch all day with my girlfriend.

The romantic reality was NOTHING compared to the romantic fantasy we were watching on TV. I mean, nothing. We slept most of the day, got up, sat on a couch, and mostly didn’t talk. But it was also better than anything that was happening on TV.

I’m not trying to brag here, I’m just saying that at a certain point in a relationship, CK’s argument ceases to hold water.

Romantic reality would make a very boring movie, though.

(No worries, by the way, I’m going to leave this particular thread of discussion behind in the next chapter. Sorry about all this.)