About that New Show with Zoe Kravitz, that one and only Pop Culture, and those extremely Painful Breakups
“If you were worried ‘bout where
I been or who I saw or
What club I went to with my homies
Baby don’t worry you know where you got me”
The Roots You Got Me ft. Erykah Badu
Rob runs a vinyl discs store in Brooklyn. The girl can’t imagine her life without music as she is a pop culture fan (who of us isn’t?). She’s 29 years old. She had never watched Soprano show and she broke up with her boyfriend Mac 13 months ago; now she is sitting in her armchair embracing her knees wrapped up in a shapeless sweater, smoking a cigarette trying to understand why breakups are so hard for her to handle. Equally hard: in her childhood, when her “first boyfriend” traded her for another girl in the 7th grade, and in her adulthood when Mac left Rob alone thinking about her failures in New York and went to London. The girl makes a top list of traumatic breakups in her life to move on towards a better tomorrow.
This is the opening of the High Fidelity TV series. It’s not even a remake but rendering of 2000 Stephen Frears’s High Fidelity movie, a screen version of Nick Hornby’s novel. The main character (white cis-gendered male, as it’s now conventional to say) played by John Cusack was replaced with Zoe Kravitz, who’s character is bisexual (Kat Monroe, an Instagram blogger, female activist is #2 on the Rob’s top most painful breakups), one of her partners and then friends Simon turned out to be gay (#3 on the Rob’s top most painful breakups). Jack Black’s character went to African American Da’Vine Joy Randolph. Just like her prototype, she devotedly gets sassy with her clients, who necessarily are eager to buy some pathetic shit.
Rob is free and quite self-centred; she loves making playlists. She loves with all her heart the thing that we can’t imagine our life without: series, rare vinyl discs, Godfather trilogy.
High Fidelity is not about the gender roles change in a contemporary world; it’s about the fact that men from Mars and women from Venus are not that different when it comes to love affairs. When someone who has been so dear to you disappears in the night saying an ordinary phrase: “Sorry, we are too different”, it will hurt you. No matter what gender you are, biological or social. You are happy when you fall in love. Oh yeah, sometimes we can be real scums. All of us. Don’t jerk around and don’t act like you can’t remember the time, for God’s sakes. Even Rob dared to accept her mistakes albeit in the end.
So…
I always wanted to know if there’s a person, a wise-guy, and apparently a pedant who became an overjoyed lucky thing after reading a book, which promised liberation from suffering. The authors of that codswallop, however, have never inspired confidence in me. Coaches with their toothy, shiny, and no doubt sincere smiles, directed exactly to you and no-one else; do they have something alive left after they suddenly realise what the Universe is all about? Or maybe some evil genius creates droids, destined to assure as many residents of the planet Earth as possible: everything is going to be all right, all your dreams will come true, solutions for the most difficult life problems will be found with a flip of a switch, just don’t lose a chance to sell your soul to the devil. Yes, you probably may easily accuse me of something horrible, saying that I’m a failure since I don’t believe in other people’s success. And you’ll be wright even. Most certainly. One of my friends gives people like me a succinct word “frustratee”. Well… That’s your right. As if I need to reassure you. All that I’ve understood about the world structure for 9,963 days is that you should never be ashamed of admitting your weaknesses. People are vulnerable because we fall in love with them. You can always find gaps in their perseverance; the gaps, which can be filled with ourselves. People break up because they stop tolerating each other. One says to another: “I don’t love you anymore”, meaning “I’m too tired” by that. By the way, I know nothing about droids apart from what Westworld series audience knows.
High Fidelity isn’t fully about how to survive a breakup, it’s about how to go on living when you are almost 30 and caged in your confined life, which seems to be going down the drain. Rob doesn’t understand (any of us refused to know that at least once) how the relationship, in which you were so outrageously happy, turns into just a little memory. “You should move on”, what does this recommendation require? You. Should. Move. On. How to deal with the fact that you are no longer loved? How to cope with the idea that you had something more valuable than the other, filthy traitor, had? How do you feel when you arrive in the future they rant so much about?
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, an American psychologist, singled out five stages of acceptance of the inevitable in order to help people with a terminal diagnosis. Do you want to understand if you were able to cope with a disappointing sentence you once had? So let’s remember one of the psychology classes where you studied Kübler-Ross’s theory.
1. Denial. You know, there is this moment, one dratted moment when you quarrel with someone who seemed to be very dear to you, so irreplaceable, so untouchable. Recall the second when all the most insulting words were said, the second of a true terror, the second of realisation: here is the line, and after crossing it you will be living in parallel worlds. Separately. Forever. Forever separately. Rubicon is crossed, but day by day, you keep on dreaming to run into your lovey after a couple of days and that passions will reignite anew. You continue dialogues with that person in your head. The person who is only a shadow on a wall, a ghost, unlucky memory. You are afraid of being alone, sitting in your armchair embracing your knees, wrapped up in a shapeless sweater, you smoke a cigarette trying to understand why breakups are so hard for you to handle. You can’t go further because it is the “further”, which everyone around loves talking about and it is where the flames of hell are. You are going to burn in those flames forever and that’s why you need to entertain the hope: one day someone will come back for you, just wait a little bit. In fact, if you were left alone only for some time, you should: a) go to the underworld; b) wait for a guide who will show you the right way, the one who seemed to be so decent to walk hand in hand with. Even to the devil’s tea party.
2. Anger. You place the blame. Now you know for sure: the other is a scum unworthy of your love. A filthy coward who left you deadly wounded dying on a battlefield. Even if you happened to be the breakup initiator, the imaginary opponent would be a traitor anyways. That imaginary opponent constantly receives flying imaginary plates, imaginary furnishing, and quite real curses. You are unlikely to picture yourself, it is the other, who is going to be cursed, desolate, and miserable. You will laugh while drowning in tears and trying to figure out how a person like that could draw somebody’s attention. This is how people move on to a place where the flames of hell await.
3. Haggling. At this stage, after a necessary dose of wine, you write a long message to the other begging to come back, confessing to all committed and not committed crimes, promising to forgive all his wrongdoings. You don’t get the answer and you decide that you’re going to live another way. In reality, you still dream of getting back what was lost. You imagine the person who you’re going to be and what tops you are going to attain. You start going to private coach at the gym, change your hairstyle, begin caring about people who surround you, listen to complains of your friends and say: “I haven’t been myself for the last six months”, but you look around hoping that he has read your touching message and is ready to appear as a glowing angel before your very eyes and kiss you to the envy of your current company. Just like in childhood, remember? “If you behave Santa Claus will give you what you want so much”. You behave. But Santa isn’t in a hurry to give you what you want. Not for your Birthday. Not for Christmas. Not for New Year’s Day.
4. Depression. “I’d rather be in hell”, you think. You are too exhausted to sit in your chair embracing your knees wrapped up in a shapeless sweater, to smoke a cigarette trying to understand why breakups are so hard for you to handle. You lie on the floor, with your eyes fixed on the ceiling. You are beaten, destroyed, smashed, and defeated. You are waiting for this world to end after all; for your friends to stop calling you offering dates with some strangers; for time to stop. It’s all over. You’re doomed to die slowly. Alone. No-one’s going to save you.
5. Submission. Remember a long time ago you wanted to wake up as a different person, who doesn’t recall names of offenders; a beautiful, healed up, comforted person? To become a lake after a raging river with water so transparent that you can see the bottom. So, after surviving depression it becomes clear: there are no damn metamorphoses (as much as we’d like them to be). After a breakup, you don’t become a different person, but if you managed to survive the inevitable go on living and be happy; you can (and perhaps you must) go on to a place with no sinners, howling in pain in boilers at a simmer. And you know, nobody, nobody in the whole Universe has an idea of what exactly is going on in that mysterious “tomorrow”.
In the final, Rob with her headphones on is walking away from the frame down the New York streets. The audience realises: now she’s okey. The audience is okey as well. If the audience would like to read self-development books, do yoga three times a week, eat only healthy food, drink at least 2 litres of filtered water a day, it would be okey even before watching the show. But let’s be honest, how do we always know how okey the audience lives? How do we know?
Omnifinery — Feel Comfort in Your Individuality
Text: Editorial Staff
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Evgeny is an art director and a global citizen based in Hong Kong and working between Asia and Europe.
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