Revisiting ‘High Fidelity’

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The hero’s journey of High Fidelity (2000) is a modest one: it simply describes one man’s passage from being a total arsehole to mere arsehole. Middle-aged record store owner Rob…

The hero’s journey of High Fidelity (2000) is a modest one: it simply describes one man’s passage from being a total arsehole to mere arsehole. Middle-aged record store owner Rob Gordon (John Cusack) is inert and chronically self-absorbed. His verbal dexterity does not extend to personal insight, and so his extravagant self-pity is never relieved by his awareness that he suffers from a wretched case of arrested development.

Based on Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel of the same name – a pop-cultural phenomenon much like his 1992 memoir Fever Pitch, another book about male obsessiveness and emotional repression – the film didn’t suffer from its being transplanted to Chicago from London. Rob Gordon was universal.

I saw the film in the cinema when it was first released, as I’d read the book a few years before. I was still a teenager and a music obsessive myself, and thus approved of Rob’s callow sources of self-identification. “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like,” Rob says in the film (as he does in the novel). “Books, records, films – these things matter. Call me shallow, but it’s the fuckin’ truth.”

It seems absurdly redundant to remark that Nick Hornby did not actually believe what his character espoused (though he likely once did). Hornby was a father when he was writing High Fidelity, and Rob’s soliloquy – the film’s most distinctive quality is these direct addresses to the audience – was a kind of disavowal via playful exaggeration.

What seemed important about this declaration, though, was that it was not being made by a teenager but a man approaching middle age. Context is everything. From the mouth of a babe, we might forgive such pronouncements as a mark of engagement and pugnacity just as much as immaturity. In the mouth of Rob Gordon, though? It just seems sad.

I loved the film, like many others, but in the subsequent quarter of a century it found some contemptuous reappraisal: High Fidelity was the work of – nay, a celebration of – misogynists…

I…

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