Enjoyed the first two episodes of High Fidelity, the reboot that Hulu released back when Trump’s first term was dragging to a close. It’s a decade or so since I really followed TV, but even so the show proved to be exactly what I expected. Cheekbones, skin color blends, ancient t-shirt logos, new t-shirt logos. Just a typical, straight-down-the-middle, racial and pop-cultural updating of a baby-boom standby into a Millennial-styled would-be new creation. This High Fidelity has a woman talking into the camera, not a man, and she’s a true oddball audiophile because she knows a lot about, well, Fleetwood Mac. This signals another element, one that isn’t really a drawback but somehow it keeps pinging you. Consider that Fleetwood Mac isn’t square now; it’s a venerable curiosity, so caring about it indicates a nonstandard sensibility. Because time has passed, the way time passed between the Algonquin Round Table and the arrival of Stevie Nicks. When I talk about pinging, it’s things like this.
Zoe Kravitz and her cheekbones play Rob, still owner of Championship Vinyl but now a gorgeous semi-black woman instead of a nondescript white guy. As befits somebody with her face/body combo, she feels okay about dealing some chaos, and she remarks now and then on being an asshole or pulling a dick move. But the new Rob sets out on the same quest as the old Rob, a forlorn and sheepish quest: to sit down with five lost loves and thereby learn why people keep leaving her. I mean officially that’s the goal, but in practice it blurs here and there.
Old Rob cared so much about records and songs because he couldn’t nerve himself up to care about life; this cagey passivity made him unfit for love, which is why he wound up in such a mess and had to rethink. New Rob likes music, but does she like it in place of everything else, in place of living a life? Hard to tell. The book and movie featured a landmark incident: obnoxious Barry’s razzing of a customer who wants to buy “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” The incident is replayed here as something different. The customer’s offense isn’t against taste, as in wanting a lame song. It’s against sexual morality, since she’s trying to buy Off the Wall and Barry’s successor believes that Michael Jackson was a molester. The original incident highlighted the stuntedness of the outlook prevailing at Championship Vinyl. The redo suggests an outlook held by millions of people, some of whom care about music and some of whom don’t.
Also, Barry’s successor is a drag. Barry had a repellent flair, notably for verbalization, and an abiding discomfort with himself. Cerise, played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph, appears to be a center of commotion and nothing else. I mean she’s loud and that’s it, and Zoe Kravitz isn’t as resourceful and likable about holding the camera as John Cusack was in the film. Still, solid cast on the whole and the sets and lighting are knockouts (Almitra Corey, sets; Carmen Cabana, lighting). The program does face a disadvantage, in that it has to fill 300 minutes. The novel (80,000 words) and film (113 minutes) benefited from a lack of dead air; those things moved. The TV show flails now and then. But you can enjoy the show for how it looks and the chance it provides for yet another glimpse of unstoppable time and the pixilated march of the generations.
Time, thou engine. In a flashback to Rob’s playground years, the adorable little girl has on a Beastie Boys t-shirt—to show remoteness of period. To have grown up with the Beasties as a childhood fact… that experience now belongs to people who have jobs and rent apartments, people who maybe should be having some kids, people who feature in programs about the approach of early middle age. Given High Fidelity’s TV release, this has been the case for at least six years. Consider that fact and a gulf opens.
Kravitz does some of her talking to the camera while eating a bowl of cereal, maybe Trix. I remember Gen X, the early-years Gen X when you heard about slackers and disgruntlement, and the adult eating of children’s cereals was a feature. Adulthood was pointless, so collapse its standards; talk about Scooby-Doo and watch the milk change color in your bowl because of the food dye. Three decades later we have the same gag, now with Zoe Kravitz. When the pseudo-children pioneered the stunt, Kravitz was an actual child. Ping, also this reinforces a theory: the traits associated with one generation can hang about and continue with the next generations and onward.
We talk about boomer egotism, but the same center-of-the-world mentality continues with the successors. I talk about Gen X’s bedraggled childhood substitutes, but people scuffle around now like spiritually they’re wearing pajamas with feet. Everyone’s getting more full of themselves and at the same time they’re losing interest in adulthood, and so the ball rolls downhill.