Sex, lies, and popular media
This Week’s Winner
MANILA, Philippines - M.C. delos Santos is a photographer and lecturer in digital productions, currently attempting to launch an art blog. “I used to write comic strips, now I’m trying to make storybooks for children.” He is a life-long bookworm.
When Chuck Klosterman said in Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs that the popular media is to blame for our inability to have and maintain relationships, something clicked in my mind and I thought, Hell, yeah!
I’ve always blamed the media — MTV in particular for the slew of colorful hyperbolic personalities they encouraged and promoted — for my generation’s unwillingness, inability really, to aspire to any semblance of normalcy in our lives — in our careers, particularly. It wasn’t enough to have a stable, high-salaried job, no, we all yearned to become BIG — Michael Jackson/Madonna/Gordon Gekko-big! It wasn’t enough to have a lot of money, we had to have the lifestyle, too — the condo with a view, the expensive gym memberships we scorn and will never take seriously, abs be damned, the car/s, gadgets and, of course, the no-commitment relationships. The failed, yuppie lifestyle, in short. But, we knew, of course, even then, that the money — the only true religion of the ‘80s — was really just the way to keep score.
But, anyway, as Klosterman points out, popular media is to blame too for our dissatisfaction with our relationships that keep us from ever being content or happy. He recounts being in love with a girl who almost loved him, but not as much as she loved John Cusack — not the man, mind you, but an earlier persona inhabited by the actor, that of optimistic, charming, heart-on-your-sleeve teenager Lloyd Dobler of the ‘80s movie Say Anything.
“We all convince ourselves of things like this – not necessarily about Say Anything, but about any fictionalized portrayals of romance that happen to hit us in the right place, at the right time. This is why I will never be completely satisfied by a woman, and this is why the kind of woman I tend to find attractive will never be satisfied by me. We will both measure our relationship against the prospect of fake love,” writes Klosterman. Amen, say I.
My last relationship ended after three months even though I knew it was doomed from the beginning for reasons too petty to get into and which I then blamed on polarities. But now, having read Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, I blame my last unsuccessful relationship, and to cover all bets, my future ones as well, on the media. But this too, I already knew, even then. I knew, having been exposed to the same influences, that we were both just following the script all relationships initially must stick to: fights, bouts of jealousy and bursts of tenderness on cue. I was aware of this and I suspect he was, too. We could have had another season or a rerun, I guess, had we kept at it. But we opted for an early axing. The whole three months already felt like a f*cking third-rate reality TV show I was auditioning for. Ah, me.
Popular media have unwittingly conditioned us to expect our love woes to be resolved, if not within 30 minutes, at least within the current season, to have friends as charmingly neurotic and hopefully as good-looking as the cast of Friends, to explore the When Harry Met Sally scenario of falling in love with someone you’ve known for ages, and that pretty boys are vapid while funny albeit funny-looking geeks provide profound love.
Klosterman claims, “If Woody Allen had never been born, I’m sure I would be doomed to a life of celibacy… But Woody Allen changed everything. Woody Allen made it acceptable for beautiful women to sleep with nerdy, bespectacled goofballs; all we need to do is fabricate the illusion of intellectual humor, and we somehow have a chance.”
Fair enough. I certainly thought Brian, the “brain,” was adorable. Although, Anthony Michael Hall was only acting nerdy and clueless. In any case, I realized that while art reflects life, life imitating art could be a disastrous flop.
Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs is a collection of 18 essays or tracks with chapters titled like songs on a CD. I Am Emo is the track I discussed above. The rest are recordings of astute observations delivered in a roundabout, tangential manner that almost always seems relevant. Examples: playing video games as an esoteric exercise in self-evaluation (Track 2: Billy Sim), the fashioning of teenagers from individuals into recognizable archetypes in MTV’s The Real World made good entertainment but screwed up generations of American teenagers who subsequently tried to mold themselves into identifiable stereotypes (Track 3: What Happens When People Stop Being Polite), and the chronicling of a Guns ‘n’ Roses tribute band, i.e., they only do covers of GnR songs, and their attempts to live wild like the original band is pathetic yet fascinating and under Klosterman’s hand imbued with near tenderness (Track 5: Appetite for Replication).
This book made me laugh, snort, guffaw, but mostly it made me think. Not profound, soul-searching-think, more like, Oh, yah… Why hadn’t I thought of that?
Chuck Klosterman was to the ‘10s what Douglas Coupland was to the ‘90s and Brett Easton Ellis was to the ‘80s, as far as I’m concerned, with the same encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary Americana. And in this day and age of collapsed physical borders — Hello, Internet! — his pop culture observances resonate. Even here, or maybe, especially here in this third-world repository of American junk.
