The Disappearance of Home

During the middle weeks of August 1997, I lived well. My friends had copious amounts of fun simply by sitting around someone's house and, in the parlance of those times, "enjoying each other's company." This might have involved capture the flag in Carolyn's back yard, listening to Joe narrate the muted Discovery Channel documentary on the wildebeest, or even deciding to go out and get the "weggie patch pizza" at Applebee's. And I had Janelle, that girl I loved madly and could just look at for hours without ever becoming bored. So things were pretty good in those last days of my seventeenth year, but then everything essentially vanished. It's that period of change that I'm interested in right now, that period which takes place many times over the course of an average American's life. Everyone moves, meets different people, loses touch with some, acquires entirely new sensibilities with which to relate to the world, and can never go back on any of these changes. In Anywhere But Here, Natalie Portman does a tremendous job of capturing that period in her role as Ann August. Although many people don't like that film because of the liberties it takes with the adaptation of Mona Simpson's fabulous novel, I think it's a pretty decent movie.

Ann's mother Adele (Susan Sarandon) decides that the two of them need to move to California to escape the "nothing town" of Bay City, Wisconsin. Of course, the irony is that Bay City, in an early flashback where Adele buys the Mercedes to take to California, is portrayed as something of a lush, green dreamland while Adele and Ann drive through dry, uninhabited scrubland in Utah. In Bay City, the original owner walks out of his cozy-looking home and over his soft lawn with a beer in his hand to show the car to Adele and Ann. A sprinkler is audible in the background. One thinks, during that flashback, of the so-called "American Dream," and Natalie Portman does dejection extraordinarily well to convey how upset she is over her mother's constant ramblings about leaving town. In Utah, Ann says to Adele, "This is like being kidnapped; you don't understand that, do you?" She's left her entire life behind in Bay City. She has friends, family, and familiar surroundings there, but is forced to leave.

I suppose, in retrospect, that I wasn't forced to leave Bethel Park or the Pittsburgh area as Ann was forced to leave Bay City, but I chose to go to school nearly 2100 miles from home in part because I wanted to save the image I had of that place and that time. I knew that if I stuck around, others would move away, and everything would change around me and leave me behind. By leaving for Missoula, an entirely new place in which I knew no one, I could maintain that home in my head. That's the quintessential part of the period of change I'm talking about: preservation of the image of home. While that image was inevitably depressing in my new location because of its inaccessibility, I felt as though I'd die without it. Similarly, Ann tries to maintain the image in her head on numerous occasions in Anywhere But Here, and is quite upset at her failure.

In the California diner where Adele fortuitously meets her real estate agent friend, Ann calls her grandmother's house in Bay City, but Adele interrupts her before anyone picks up. Ann leaves the diner for the impersonal, uncaring street outside and can't prevent herself from crying. Later in the film, she makes an illicit phone call to her cousin from a house she visits with her mother as a potential homebuyer. These types of incidents lead to an increasingly successful image of home in Ann's head, though inevitably that fight for preservation is a no-win kind of deal. Those incidents do remind me of the ridiculous phone bills I ran up calling Janelle in her Michigan Tech dorm room and the crazy amount of time I spent emailing everyone else, but like the movie suggests, no one can ever really "go home" after this kind of period of change.

Ann's cousin Benny dies late in the film, so Ann and Adele head back to Bay City for the funeral. In those scenes, the houses in Bay City don't look cozy; they look cramped and dull. The lighting isn't as bright, and it's raining. Ann's extended family is fighting. Nothing is the same. Similarly, when I go back to the South Hills these days, the place just doesn't look like it used to. Now, instead of the sprinklers and the nice-looking lawns, I notice all the Republican campaign signs in the yards, the gratuitous SUVs in every driveway, and the complete lack of sidewalks so that no one can safely walk anywhere. And just like Benny vanishes from Ann's Bay City, if you Google Janelle, you won't find anything, and no one I know has heard from her in years.

In the beginning, there was High Fidelity

Clearly, the logical place to start something like this is that film from the year 2000, that film entitled High Fidelity. Even if it didn’t bring about as original material the idea that what we read, listen to, and watch is important, certainly it gave a certain cinematic presence to it, or articulated it in ways the rest of us didn’t imagine. Its top-five lists and constant references to popular movies and music place it in the same genre as this potentially ill-fated blog. Without the popular culture surrounding it, the film High Fidelity couldn’t have existed in any meaningful way.

When I think actively about this movie, which I frequently do, I can’t help pondering the scene near the beginning of the film in which Rob and Dick are listening to “the new Belle & Sebastian” in the record store when Barry barges in and replaces Belle & Sebastian’s melodious melancholy with a mix tape populated by some kind of offensive 80s-sounding pop. Before Barry barges in, Dick lovingly and curiously mentions that what he and Rob are listening to is, in fact, “the new Belle & Sebastian.” I can’t help remembering at this point, from my own experience, Carolyn C’s awareness of said band in high school, and her presenting to several of us that album cover of “Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant,” on which a woman seems to interrogate some manifestation of her own reflection. At any rate, I can recall Carolyn playing this music for us, and I can recall feeling as the result of this band’s work the same sort of comforting, homelike presence which Dick and Rob clearly experience in that early morning, workaday scene of High Fidelity. But then Barry comes in with his offensive mix tape, representing the mass of mainstream culture who have no appreciation for the harmonies of something like Belle & Sebastian. During that era, in the mid to late nineties, neither Carolyn nor I could very well have gone to school and talked to anyone about Belle & Sebastian. Bethel Park and Peters Township are not communities suited to the appreciation of that sort of cultural pleasure.

But apart from the Belle & Sebastian scene, the thing I revisit most frequently in High Fidelity has to be the scene featuring Rob standing outside, nearly under the L in the Chicago rain, yelling “Charlie! You fucking bitch! Let’s work it out!” toward his ex-girlfriend’s condensation-filled window. I’ve visited JJ and Megan’s place in Chicago and gone places on the L many times, and this scene seems to encapsulate that quintessentially Chicago experience while at the same time paying respect to the hurt everyone has felt at the breakup of some significant relationship. JJ and I have, at intervals too frequent to enumerate, recited this line to one another, albeit with mostly humorous intentions. Still, it’s at least a second something that resonates with the film’s audience, and this constitutes a presence in viewers’ minds that most films can’t claim to generate.