Colin Firth and Gary Oldman had lunch together in the restaurant I work at in London. It was on one of my days off—I didn’t find out about it until the next day. It was probably for the best. Can you imagine how gitty I would’ve been around Colin Firth? I would have kept on calling him Darcy the whole time, to begin with. Secondly I would have, no doubt awkwardly, tried to lead him into a conversation in which I present my theory that his acting career is such an appropriate metaphor of my life in London, that I’m his doppelgänger (conceptually speaking, not vernacularly). What kind of ghostly coincidence is it that I thought of the haunting spirit of Firth’s character archetype as providing the framework for my London life—only to have this ghost escape into the ether, me arriving a day late?
So poetic! Horatio tried to capture the ghost of King Hamlet in speech but was late. Life is always late because you’re always chasing. Love and work and politics and art—it’s always deferred. Had I been at work that day, the chase would’ve been over. Killing the metaphor, killing the dream.
I was in Belgium for a few days with some friends. My mate Jon is a good bloke—he’s got one hell of a blunt sense of humour. Rough around the edges but with a big heart, few people like Jon demonstrate such a high degree of legitimate concern for others around him and the ones he cares about. I met him through working together at the campus newspaper at McMaster. I was a regular columnist and Jon was the assistant photography editor.
Jon is spending a couple of months in the city of Ghent, northwest of Brussels, before heading off for the latter half of summer to work as a tour guide throughout Europe for sightseers. He invited me to stay with him for a couple of days; coincidentally and fortunately, the weekend that was most convenient for me to visit was the same weekend a mutual friend of ours, a lovely girl named Medina, was also visiting Jon. Jon and I also met Medina through the school newspaper, and she’s spending her summer couch surfing across Europe. Medina could easily be a female version of Darcy, in a certain context of course. Beautifully beautiful but with an ostensible and peculiar, almost cynic, character, if you act prideful around her you won’t get to know the real girl, which would be an unjustifiable shame.
Getting incredibly drunk off Belgian beer Rochefort 10 in the very traditional European city of Ghent with these great people helped me to realize that chasing what can’t be understood, the unattainable, is what is worth doing in life. Somebody who doesn’t understand this notion is Chuck Klosterman.
I’ll tell you why I don’t like Chuck Klosterman. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. By that I mean I don’t particularly dislike Chuck Klosterman. Sure, he’s a better writer than most people. Yes, he’s funnier and wittier than the run of the mill. And yes, I’ll admit he’s a more acute observer of pop culture’s subtext than your average bear. Actually, I don’t know if that’s much of a large accomplishment; but at least Klosterman can analyze the subtext without sounding contrived.
Is he better than Nick Hornby though, as some commentators have argued? Hornby, regarded by many as one of Britain’s most celebrated living writers, and seen by some as Klosterman’s British counterpart, doesn’t piss me off the way Klosterman does, that’s for sure. I think GQ (in praising Klosterman) said it best: he is “sometimes exasperating but almost always engaging.” I have no beef with the principle that the best writers, thinkers, artists, what have you, are the ones with whom you disagree to the point of sheer frustration; but from a personal perspective I don’t apply that principle to Klosterman. I find Klosterman the most engaging when I do agree with him and when he’s not angering me. His analyses of Billy Joel or Morrissey, or Val Kilmer, or Saturday morning cartoons, or MTV, or whatever, or his awesome hypothetical questions, are fascinating because they are well written, nuanced, and clever. That’s the Chuck Klosterman I enjoy. He mostly sticks to these guns in Chuck Klosterman IV, which is why it’s a half-decent book.
The Chuck Klosterman that I can’t stand is the one who tries to blame pop culture, specifically romantic comedy movies, and even more specifically John Cusack, for why normal human beings will never be able to have meaningful romantic relationships.
Put your hand up if you’ve seen Fever Pitch. I’m not talking about the American film adaptation starring Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore (which actually isn’t bad). No, no, I mean the British romantic comedy Fever Pitch starring Colin Firth, based on a Nick Hornby book, no less.
It’s great—probably one of the best movies out there. Low budget and character-driven, it has all the makings of a classic. Colin Firth plays a teacher with a long-standing love affair for the Arsenal Football Club. His Arsenal fandom borders on obsession, and it deeply complicates a blooming but ambiguous sexual and romantic tension with a new teacher at the school he works at, who herself is puzzled by his laissez-faire teaching methods, yet alone by his fascination with Arsenal. Oh yeah, she’s a beautiful girl.
What makes the film great is that Firth’s character’s relationship with Arsenal and football is in the foreground and not the background. Of course Hornby’s book, the source material, is an autobiographical collection of essays about Hornby’s love for football, and not a romance novel. In both book and film, we get a glimpse of the real conditions of British life, empathizing for why football is so integral to one’s upbringing and consciousness—and it doesn’t always make meeting girls so perfect-going.
Klosterman thinks “every woman born between 1965 and 1978” (my emphasis), is so fixated by John Cusack in Say Anything, the go-to teen romance movie of the late 1980s, that it clouds their ability to focus on real-life relationships and more realistic romantic encounters and situations. Klosterman extends the vitriol to When Harry Met Sally, accusing the film of giving infinite false hope to every optimist in love with their opposite-sex platonic best friend. Basically Klosterman thinks pop culture is ruining society, specifically our ability to love. Bummer, dude.
In another essay, Klosterman argues soccer will never live up to its potential in the U.S. It is a sport not worthy of North America’s attention because it is not competitive enough, and more significantly, it is inherently too inclusive, the one sport that allows America’s “outcast” culture to float by elementary school extracurriculars before they are old enough to realize they can shop at Hot Topic and American Apparel. It’s the sport kids bullshit their way through before discovering hipsterdom, according to Klosterman. And although he never explicitly mentions him in the essay, Klosterman put the following name in the essay title as an implicit attack on the Fever Pitch-culture: Nick Hornby.
Outside of sports, Klosterman claims to be “apolitical” but his interrelated analyses on Cusack and soccer make one fact, to me at least, abundantly clear: Klosterman is an unironic Platonist and a closet ideological Republican who refuses to accept the world we live in is one of mutual vulnerabilities. Football’s inclusiveness is what makes it so economically and culturally significant to everywhere in the world except North America, especially Africa. The flip-side of Klosterman’s narcissistic, Westernized hatred for soccer is what keeps a poor, starving 10-year-old in Kenya from utter and absolute despair, possibly even death. Klosterman cynically whines that it’s too inclusive without realizing that inclusivity is all we have in this world keeping us from going over the edge.
Just as football gives the possibility of hope to every child in the developing world who has no reason to hope, no viable reason to have hope for anything, Colin Firth goes for the impossible scenario, something Klosterman fails to realize in his jaded Say Anything attack. Is my argument flawed because Mr. Darcy does eventually get Elizabeth Bennet, or that Mark Darcy wins Bridget Jones’s heart in the end? No, because like I said earlier, it’s all about the chase—and I don’t mean that in the romantic, courting sense; I mean it in the abstract metaphorical sense about chasing ourselves, but our deferred selves, just as I was a day late meeting Colin Firth. (Also, how fucked up is it that Helen Fielding named the character Darcy?) You can’t dismiss romantic comedy movies as unrealistic about love because a guy and a girl fall for each other in the end. That’s like dismissing action movies because they have explosions. Call me crazy, but the typical scenario of two characters falling in love after hating each other is far from clichéd, it’s actually wonderfully brilliant. It turns the impossible into the possible—the kind of hope upon which inclusivity, whether political, social, or cultural, relies. Football does the same thing, and so does Colin Firth. It should go without saying that between Aidan and Big in Sex and the City, Colin Firth would undoubtedly be Aidan, yet Big gets the girl. Aidan’s experiences with Carrie are still just as valuable as they would have been had he and Carrie married. Had they not even occurred in the first place, in other words, if Carrie hypothetically knew she would be choosing Big in the end, thus prompting her to bypass dating Aidan in the first place—well fuck, hope and inclusivity can go right out the window. It’s the hope from romance and football that allows us to learn about ourselves, which is to say each other. But we’re always late, we are always a day behind; otherwise we would reach full self-actualization, which sounds like the most boring and dangerous neo-Nietzschean death to political free will of which I can think.
Rochefort 10 and many other Belgian beers have a high alcohol content of ten percent or more. Many of the beers are brewed by monks in a Belgian monastery. Drinking these beers is like doing cocaine or riding a bike for the first time. They bring out the best and the worst of you, simultaneously.
Belgium is the country where Jon met his last love, a girl who eventually tore his heart out of his body, like in that scene in Temple of Doom. Yet Jon took us to his favourite pub, mostly because there’s a girl working there on whom he has a crush. He didn’t let the past hamper his hope for the future, no matter how dim. I say dim both metaphorically and literally—the whole pub was lit only by candlelight. Outside, almost all of Ghent is built on brick streets, with old buildings dating back many centuries. The history and the architecture are indescribable. Earlier Jon had introduced Medina and I to a local friend of his, a blind guy named Didier, whose amazingly expansive knowledge about music gives credence to the “heightened other senses” myth. Didier showed us a time—and we let the culture of Ghent consume us. Canals run through the city rampantly, and the centre of Ghent consists of countless pub patios and vendors selling chips with mayonnaise (fries are Belgium’s national dish, so naturally, they tasted amazing), all overlooking the canals and surrounded by many ancient buildings, one of which was a very splendid-looking castle.
Returning to the dim pub over candlelight and Belgian beer in a very old building, in the place where Jon remained upbeat in spite of, well, Mola Ram; the place where Medina wondered why all of her relationships have expiry dates; and the place where I wondered why all of my relationships have starter-ignition problems (and where I bordered on melancholy for having left a girl behind back home), all three of us had reasons to be cynical and pessimistic. It’s what Klosterman can’t escape: the girl who left him for a John Cusack movie. What he didn’t realize is what the night in Ghent all helped us to realize, while we happily continued drinking outside near the canal and the magically-lit buildings reflected in both the night sky and the still water: bonding together meaningfully and learning that there’s more to life than blaming others, whether it be in Ghent or elsewhere. As we learned from each other that night, sharing stories and experiences, that just because love is deferred, or something we have never, and will never, experience, doesn’t mean we don’t deserve it—doesn’t mean we have to give up hope. That is ultimately what I think Colin Firth would’ve said to me. That or, “Look, can you just get me a napkin?”
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