University of Southern California communication professor Walter Fisher has advanced the theory that humans are narrative beings, creatures that “experience and comprehend life as a series of ongoing narratives, as conflicts, characters, beginnings, middles, and ends.” We tell each other stories about ourselves as a foundation of basic interpersonal communication. Other theories, like social penetration theory and its emphasis on self-disclosure, have Fisher’s narrative paradigm as their foundations. After all, self-disclosure is the telling of stories that reveal who we are as people based on our past experiences.
The 2000 film High Fidelity, starring John Cusack, is a study in the uses and benefits of narrative self-disclosure. Record store owner Rob Gordon (Cusack) goes through a messy breakup, which prompts him to engage in a massive round of self-evaluation and -examination. Rob breaks the fourth wall, speaking directly into the camera as he shares the stories of the five most brutal breakups from his past, including current girlfriend Laura, in an attempt to discover the cause of his difficult luck with relationships.
The very title of the movie is a pun on several different levels. Considering the large role that Rob’s record store and music culture in general plays in the film, the allusion to high fidelity stereo systems is inescapable. There’s also the concept of fidelity in relationships, one with which Rob seems somewhat unfamiliar in his earlier romances. Finally, there’s the concept of narrative fidelity, which is a test applicable to any story, whether in print or on film.
Narrative fidelity is defined as something in a story that strikes a responsive chord in the listener. Essentially, does the story ring true with the listener? Does it seem similar to a story that the listener might tell about themselves? Rob’s issues with commitment, self-absorption, and other general insecurities are considered an unfortunate, yet ever-present, peril of the human condition. Another unfortunate human tendency, however, is one in which we overlook our own culpability in stories of past emotional difficulties.
Rob and Laura’s mutual friend Liz (played by Cusack’s sister Joan) comes barreling into Rob’s store and screams at him that he’s a “fucking asshole.” In the scene that follows, Rob gives us some very good indications of what might have provoked this hostile outburst from the previously sympathetic Liz. Rob cops to offenses such as cheating on a pregnant Laura, prompting her to terminate the pregnancy. (And as an aside, if there’s ever a crime that qualifies as “high infidelity,” it’s that one…sorry.) This is the first breakup in which Rob admits that his actions may have directly pushed his girlfriend away, changing the tone of his narratives from “Why did I get dumped?” to “This is why I got dumped.”
Without Rob admitting to his prior indiscretions, the entire story’s coherence could have been sternly tested. Fisher’s ultimate sign of narrative coherence is based on whether or not characters act in a reliable manner, and Liz’s outburst seems anything but reliable after her neutral ground in earlier conversations with Rob. As the storyteller, Rob appears to understand that the viewer’s been thrown for a loop, wondering “What was that all about?” Leaving out the facts here would have undermined his credibility as a narrator, leaving major loose ends in the narrative.
The coherence of the story is important to Rob as a narrator, so much so that he goes in search of his own endings. Each breakup is its own little story, and Rob seeks out each woman, hoping to gain insight into their motivations. He was as much an observer as a participant in those stories, and for him, there are facts missing that the narrators need to fill in. In many cases, he learns new information that prompts him to reassess his version of each story. Never mind the fact that his closure is the only closure he’s interested in. When one of the exes, Penny Hardwick (played by Joelle Carter), rips Rob for his insensitive line of questioning, his only reaction is, “That’s another one I don’t have to worry about! I should’ve done this years ago!”
One of Rob’s narrators is the worldly and sophisticated Charlie Nicholson, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones. Charlie appears to sit at the root of Rob’s insecurities, as he considers her the woman that was so far out of his league that he could never believe he was with her, even when he was with her. When he gets in touch with her to meet up, she immediately seeks assurance that he’s not interested in “rehashing the past,” showing no desire to live in any sort of narrative paradigm, especially not anyone else’s. Of course, Rob shows up and asks the question, prompting Charlie to give him an assessment somewhat more honest than he would have preferred.
Pop music is a major supporting character in the film, and early on, Rob gives the viewer the impression that music may be the antagonist. He asks, “Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?” The film addresses the important role of music in people’s lives, playing with the old “soundtrack of your life” cliché. Rob’s tendency to make Top Five lists, such as Top Five Songs to Play on Monday Morning or Top Five Side-One-Track-One Songs, illustrates the common tendency to associate music (which is essentially other people’s narratives set to instrumentation) with particular events or places.
After breakups, Rob tends to refresh his environment by reorganizing his voluminous record collection. When Laura leaves him, he decides to implement his most ambitious organizational scheme of all. Never mind the alphabetical or the chronological, he decides to organize the albums in order of purchase, a form of autobiographical composition. Anyone seeking to understand the order of albums on the shelf would have to ask Rob to explain, allowing him another occasion to tell his own life story.
In the end, “High Fidelity” is the story of a man for whom the rest of the world serves as supporting characters in his own narrative. To his credit, Rob Gordon allows others’ reactions to particular scenes in his story to influence the direction in which he takes said story’s future events.
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