Top Five Reasons High Fidelity Brings Me Break-Up Catharsis

1: It sheds light on the all too fortunate reality that my former fellow and I had absolute minimum common interest in music and movies. Not quite true. Movies we bonded over a bit, but he never did pull me onto the Battlestar Galactica bandwagon and I still hate most of the cartoons on Adult Swim because they make me feel small, and not in that good humble sort of way. But music set us even further apart. Save a couple of Gary Jules tracks and Harry Chapin, our opposing taste in bands put an impatient strain on any long drives and road trips. The language and sex in his punk collections clammed me up and he complained that my music wasn't loud enough to cover the humming noise his tape deck makes, which irritated him. Though, he did like Elliott Smith and Jose Gonzalez even though he could never remember their names. He'd just say, "Oh, I like this," whenever one of their tracks came on. It became almost uncanny, how I came to count on that, "Oh, I like this." I made him a mix cd the week he first kissed me. I thought he was somebody totally different and made it all completely wrong for him.

2: High Fidelity brilliantly captures the subtle dishonesties and honesties in virtually every budding or breaking romance tale. I love when Cusack and Lisa Bonet talk all night and Cusack admits he is only acting the role he contrived as the sensitive, witty guy who has hints of melancholy beneath the surface of his recent split romance. Or the bridge scene when he gives the top five things he misses about Laura. Or when he cries at Laura crying at her dad's funeral. It's cathartic to me because I now feel less like a moron or a loon for talking to myself during my run through east Rigby on Tuesday. Telling a couple of shaggy-coated ponies on 4300 East all about the specifics of my recent heartbreak makes me more like John Cusack, who is awesome, thus making me also awesome and not crazy like I had originally pigeonholed myself.

3: The violence and the sarcasm. It might make me look like a jerk, but I love the scene when Tim Robbins confronts Cusack in the record store and Cusack fantasizes about what he'd like to do to the guy, which escalates into knocking out Robbin's teeth and slamming a cash register onto his face. I'm not saying I condone this kind of violence or that I'd ever put a comparable scene into any movie I'd ever shoot, I'm just also saying that it kind of felt good to feel an outlet for the conflicting and embarrassing emotions I have felt myself trying to bury all week. I like Cusack's anger. And Jack Black's anger makes me laugh, which feels good too.

4: Obviously the soundtrack is cathartic. I've dated enough guys who love that movie that almost every track reminds me of someone I've cried over since the film came out in 2000. While Rob Gordon is reliving his top five most humiliating breakups, I'm reliving my own top five. This can be cleansing. A smart man I know sent me the sentiment that breakups always involve your same heart falling onto the same hardwood floor, except each time your heart cracks into new patterns, different wounds. I agree. But I also think the fall can reopen old scars; I can hear echoes of past losses exhaling through the split seams I'd forgotten I'd only just sewn up the year or two or three before.

5: High Fidelity helps me fall in love with John Cusack all over again. When life takes away a lover, Hollywood provides fantasy characters for us to project all our desires for kissing and cuddling and long hand-holding walks along a pretty horizon. It hurts too badly to think back on the real-life experiences you just had because it only magnifies your inability to have that again with that same love, and it almost always gets followed up with an image of this said former lover doing all of those same things with somebody different--usually a skinny blonde with cute, clever fashion and perfect teeth. And a clean car. And no moodiness or clamming up moments. Just any perfect blonde skinny girl one can find almost anywhere along the Wasatch Front or in a singles' ward near you. But John Cusack, he'll always be there for me. I just slide in an old VHS of Say Anything and let the dreams begin. The trenchcoat, the boombox, the idea of being led around a pile of broken glass, that car in the rain. Or Better Off Dead, the mad scientist laugh in the cafeteria scene......I swoon! I swoon! And when I'm not swooning for Cusack in High Fidelity, I'm swooning for Jack Black. Black is witty, spazzy, quirky, and he makes me laugh. I would totally date him. Plus, what a voice. Seriously.

The only drawback for having High Fidelity act as a catharsis for my recent breakup is that Cusack's character ends up with Laura in the end after all. They get back together!? So I'm left feeling cleansed and jealous and almost angry that Cusack is making that perfect mixtape for the girl he wants to make happy for the rest of forever and I'm sitting on this lonely couch in this lonely house in this lonely town in the middle of nowhere, where I am an anachronism at my own school--too young to be treated like I belong with the faculty folk, too old to be let into any of the singles' institutes or social events........I'm lost in limbo, and it's cold outside.

I'm going to get a bowl of cookie dough ice cream out and watch Say Anything until someone responds to this post and then I'll read your comment and check "Be Social" off my list of appropriate human functions to accomplish on this day of February 6, 2009.