[A generous reading might consider the show a corrective to the
original, particularly because women, people of color, and queer folks
now work the stacks at Championship Vinyl. A more skeptical take is
that even this is morally suspect.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

WE DIDN’T NEED THE HIGH FIDELITY TV SHOW  
[[link removed]]

 

Jillian Mapes
February 14, 2020
Pitchfork
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ A generous reading might consider the show a corrective to the
original, particularly because women, people of color, and queer folks
now work the stacks at Championship Vinyl. A more skeptical take is
that even this is morally suspect. _

John Cusack in the 2000 film version of High Fidelity, and Zoë
Kravitz in the new reboot., Kravitz photo by Phillip Caruso.

 

It is worth remembering, particularly right now, that _High
Fidelity_ was never just a story about record store nerds ranking
their days away. Part of what made Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel
[[link removed]] such
a hit, leading to a 2000 movie adaptation, was its uncensored view
into the psyche of stunted, self-pitying, supposedly sensitive
straight men who obsess over _stuff_. This fundamental male-ness was
well-noted in reviews at the time. “Hornby’s books reveal a
fascination with the sheer voodoo of what so often passes as
masculinity: the weird ritual facts, the useless objects...”
wrote _The New Yorker_, while lad mag _Details_ was a bit blunter:
“Keep this book away from your girlfriend—it contains too many of
your secrets to let it fall into the wrong hands.” Those secrets
include a deep fear of sexual inadequacy, including a passage where
the record-store owner protagonist Rob self-deprecatingly longs for
his father’s era, because back then a man wasn’t expected to make
a woman cum. There’s another, more famous part where this same
middle-aged man feels the need to warn other men that women don’t
wear sexy underwear 24/7.

Hornby’s book is laden with Rob’s interior monologues, which are
boiled down to a few key philosophies delivered straight to the camera
by John Cusack in the movie: There’s the link between being sad and
loving pop music
[[link removed]] (“What came first,
the misery or the music?”), the rules for properly sequencing a
mixtape [[link removed]], and the guiding
principle that you are what you culturally consume
[[link removed]].

The rom-com format also emphasizes Rob’s quest to track down his
“Top 5 All-Time Most Memorable Heartbreaks,” starting with a girl
he made out with for two afternoons in middle school, who apparently
married the next boy she kissed. Later, Rob meets up with his high
school girlfriend and asks why she slept with another guy so quickly
after they broke up, since she was such a prude with him. She reminds
Rob that he actually broke up with her and reveals that she was “too
tired to fight [the other guy] off, and it wasn’t rape, because I
said OK, but it wasn’t far off,” adding that she didn’t have sex
for many years afterward. To which Rob responds, quoting the book
verbatim, “That’s another one I don’t have to worry about. I
should have done this years ago.” His pathetic need to know why
these women dumped him presumes that they owe him some kind of
explanation, often at their own expense.

Now 20 years after the movie, _High Fidelity_ has been rebooted as a
10-episode Hulu series centered around a woman—a woman named Rob
(short for Robin). She’s played by Zoë Kravitz, who at least looks
way cooler in a baggy leather jacket and beat-up Dickies tee than
Cusack ever did. Still, I found myself wondering how the show would
deal with the outdated aspects of its source material. Would Kravitz
drop ugly truth-bombs about women in the same way that the book did
about men, or be forced to turn her tastes into “Top 5” lists? And
could this ode to music superfandom really get away with not
acknowledging the advent of streaming?

Kravitz, it turns out, makes for a more dynamic, likeable Rob. She
still owns Championship Vinyl, a perpetually empty used record store
(this time in Brooklyn), where she employs two fellow pop-culture
junkies who channel their passions in wildly divergent ways (Da’Vine
Joy Randolph and David H. Holmes, both in heart-filled, star-making
turns). Their world is strewn with useless trivia from the _High
Fidelity_ universe—the kinds of details these characters might
obsess over, only turned into easter eggs: The main hangout is a bar
named DeSalle’s, as in Marie DeSalle, the singer-songwriter
character once portrayed by Kravitz’s mom, Lisa Bonet. The show’s
musical canon centers around classic artists like David Bowie, who’s
something of a spiritual guide to Rob, along with Prince and Fleetwood
Mac. Echoing a memorable scene
[[link removed]] from the movie, there
are multiple nods to folktronica group the Beta Band, as well as a
moment where they remake said scene with a song by outsider icon Swamp
Dogg.

There are other modern updates to key comedic bits as well, some more
eye-roll-inducing than others. The out-of-touch dad who comes in
looking for “tacky, sentimental crap” like Stevie Wonder’s “I
Just Called to Say I Love You” for his daughter is replaced by a
woman trying to buy Michael Jackson’s _Off the Wall_ for her
boyfriend. (Rob argues that it’s OK because the album is as much the
work of producer Quincy Jones as it is MJ.) While debating whether to
cancel great artists who did very bad things is indeed top of mind
these days, it’s not exactly a discussion that lends itself to
laughs. And just like the movie, there are direct quotes from
Hornby’s book in the script (the author served as an executive
producer, alongside Kravitz, the team behind _Ugly Betty_, and more).

The series opens a year after a devastating breakup, just as Rob’s
putting herself out there again. Her ex Mac (Kingsley Ben-Adir) is
back in town and engaged, which prompts a similar search for past
relationship closure as the source material. In the beginning of the
season, Kravitz’s character’s personality seems a lot like the
Robs of the past: self-involved, secretly sentimental and
not-so-secretly sad (there are so many shots of her poutily smoking
and listening to records), equally terrified of commitment and
loneliness. While Rob’s journey in previous versions offered only
slight personal progress (with his off-on girlfriend Laura actually
facilitating much of the change), Kravitz’s Rob shows the real-life
challenges and vulnerabilities of self-improvement. By the last
episode, she’s taken the first steps toward treating the people in
her life better, and makes a decision that plants her firmly pointed
forward.

A generous reading might consider the show a corrective to the
original, particularly because women, people of color, and queer folks
now work the stacks at Championship Vinyl. A more skeptical take is
that even this well-meaning shift is morally suspect. As the _New
York Times_’ Amanda Hess wrote
[[link removed]] two
years ago of Hollywood’s thirst for gender-flipped remakes, “These
reboots require women to relive men’s stories instead of fashioning
their own. And they’re subtly expected to fix these old films, to
neutralize their sexism and infuse them with feminism, to rebuild them
into good movies with good politics, too. They have to do everything
the men did, except backwards and with ideals.” Why spend all this
time, money, and energy updating and changing the gender on source
material that, in hindsight, is pretty dodgy about women? Is _High
Fidelity_ really so beloved (or its brand name so powerful) that they
couldn’t have started from scratch on a series about music
obsessives who aren’t exclusively straight white men? What is the
point of paying homage to all this ephemera?

There’s a specific strain of toxic masculinity that lurks underneath
the surface of, and is core to, the music fandom in _High Fidelity_.
It’s the kind where men who struggle with conveying their feelings
turn to their record collections as emotional support blankets. They
dole out their music knowledge like baseball-card statistics and treat
women as fair-weather fans who don’t even know the rules. (Many
women critics I know prefer not to publicly rank their favorite music,
which likely has something to do with how we’ve been condescended to
in the past.) It doesn’t exactly help that the movie—arguably the
first quintessentially ’00s-hipster rom-com—was successful enough
to turn this argumentative mode of listenership into a full-blown
cliché.

Reading _High Fidelity_ recently, I noticed that nearly all the
women characters were perceived as outside the realm of
record-collecting. Love interests require a recalibration of taste
(timid shop employee Dick’s new lady friend
can’t _possibly_ stay a Simple Minds fan), or a correction
(Rob’s music journalist crush needs to be schooled on Top 5 list
distinctions). Over the course of the book, Rob essentially schools
girlfriend Laura to understand the differences between “good” pop
music (“authentic,” soulful, largely old and American) and
“bad” pop music (Tina Turner, Mike Oldfield’s _Tubular Bells_),
distinctions that by today’s poptimist standards seem positively
arbitrary. (Which the show, to its credit, appears to realize: Tina
Turner’s _Private Dancer_ is on display behind the cash register,
alongside Jay Reatard’s _Matador Singles ’08_ and Tyler, the
Creator’s _Goblin_.)

With all this in mind, it’s hard to even enjoy the series’ turning
point, the moment when it dawns on Rob that maybe she shouldn’t be
such an asshole. The realization arrives, like a seed being planted,
at the end of the episode “Uptown,” which turns a five-page
passage in the book and a deleted scene
[[link removed]] from the movie into
one of the season’s centerpieces. A woman calls Championship Vinyl
saying she’s selling a record collection, so Rob and her
kinda-boyfriend Clyde (Jake Lacy) go uptown to check it out. The
woman, a performance artist delightfully played by Parker Posey, is
offering up her husband’s prized collection—likely worth tens of
thousands of dollars—for a mere $20, as a conceptual stunt seeking
revenge for his infidelity. Rob isn’t sure what to do, so she and
Clyde go down to the fancy hotel where the cheating husband is
staying, in an attempt to _casually discover_ if this guy indeed
sucks. Turns out he’s even worse than expected.

Played by Jeffrey Nordling, aka Laura Dern’s spectacular man-child
of a husband in _Big Little Lies_, the dude is a total shitheel,
replete with a midlife-crisis ponytail and a young girlfriend who
doesn’t speak. He cuts off Rob at every turn, name-dropping rock
stars and talking exclusively _at_ Clyde. It all comes to a head
when Rob challenges him on the release year of Wings’ live
album _Wings Across America_; she knows it’s 1976. “No, sweetpea,
you’re wrong,” says the smug jackass, who’s sticking by 1984 as
the answer. What comes next is, briefly, one of the best moments in
the whole first season: Rob flexes her knowledge by critiquing the
LP’s backing vocal overdubs (“At what point is a live album not a
live album?”) and praising its version of “Maybe I’m Amazed.”
Kravitz plays it perfectly, meeting the man’s growing indignance
with an unbothered coolness. Ponytail guy responds by turning to Clyde
and saying, “You’ve got yourself quite a little firecracker there,
don’t you pal? Word of advice: It’s all cute now but it gets
old _fast_, trust me.”

Rob should absolutely buy this man’s records at a deep
discount—both because she _owns a freaking record store in this
musical economy
[[link removed]]_,
and because he deserves it. But she bails at the last minute, telling
Posey’s character that “music should be for everyone.” Really,
as Clyde points out on the ride home, it’s because of her own fear
that, if she’s bad enough, someone could take away her records, too.
I suppose it wouldn’t be _High Fidelity_ if it didn’t treat
music fanaticism like the ultimate form of tribalism, but the show
only adds fuel to the fire by making Rob’s adversary perfectly
emblematic of a certain insufferable strain of wealthy, recreational
music expert. The Robs of the past were showing off their collector
code of ethics when they balked at the purchase, but Kravitz is
motioning vaguely towards personal betterment. The “female” twist
on _High Fidelity_? Growth and maturity.

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit portside.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]