Feels Like a Rollercoaster’s a great song – it’s also the title of the third album by American power-pop band The Long Ryders, which came out in 2000. But its most significant role is in the 2004 film, ‘How to Lose Friends and Alienate People’. The main character, Simon Green, is a struggling songwriter who keeps getting knocked back by his record company: ‘I’ve got a bad habit,’ he tells his agent. ‘I just want my own songs to be on the radio, one time.’ But he’s persuaded to take a job at a record company. Here, he meets Sam and Tish, a couple of smug, self-satisfied people who he begins to dislike intensely. It’s revealed that Sam and Tish used to be Simon’s friends, but they stopped talking to him when he got too famous and they were left behind.
Simon is trying to pitch a song to Tish, and it goes awry. ‘I’ve got a bad habit, of thinking that my song’s great, despite everybody else saying it’s crap,’ he says. ‘I’m gonna put that right.’ And then he sings it. Here’s the crucial bit:
And I want a real love
I don’t want a perfect love,
But I want a real love
‘The problem,’ Sam says, ‘is that you’re just trying to get a real love.’ And then he leaves Simon alone at the microphone. Sam and Tish are Simon’s old friends – and if they’re not there, that means nobody is – and he is their peer. He’s singing to them. It’s one of the classic moments in movies that try to talk about popular music – the one where the protagonist learns that the thing he’s always thought was unique to him – his voice – is actually completely normal. It’s like the moment in ‘Mean Girls’ when Rizzo points out to the clique that ‘the only thing that’s different about us is that we were born in a different decade.’ (Spoiler: they don’t like that.) ‘How to Lose Friends and Alienate People’ gets at something much bigger than that, though. There’s a whole genre of films where, through conversations about music, they tell you the story of the last thirty years. It isn’t much, when you put it like that, but a lot of people have had the experience of running into an old friend after not seeing them for years, and it turns out they were just being mean to you.
That moment comes in ‘Fight Club’, in which Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) discovers, to his amazement, that his most loathed rival, Jack, is trying to get his friendship back:
Jack: You see that? I can manipulate people like toys. And you – you like putting people down… I just want you to know what it’s like to be powerless. Tyler: Oh, you get to go home tonight, all right? You get to go home and have a big bowl of ice cream and watch [Vibe]. You can roll around on your bed and listen to your music and jerk off, if that’s what you’re into. And I’ll bet you do.
Fight Club is about a person who wants to beat up the friends that make fun of him, and it’s about a movie character who does a lot of that. The narrator of The Perks of Being a Wallflower is also someone who’s obsessed with beating up his enemies, and all the people around him have been the subject of ridicule. Then there’s High Fidelity, which tells the story of a lonely guy who feels alienated from people. High Fidelity’s a film about a person who hates other people’s friends, but it’s also a film that shows a lot of people – and I’m generalising here – in their own lives, and watching their own reactions to each other. There are moments where the people in the film are just watching themselves, like an inept therapist who is listening to his client’s problems, or watching themselves get drunk on a rooftop in Chicago.
It’s no accident that this happened at the same time as Fight Club. I don’t know if it was a coincidence that a year later we would see a film called The Rules of Attraction, in which a woman and a man, in a kind of love story that’s really a story about jealousy, try to find out who is responsible for all the awful things happening to each other. (When the man makes a date to meet his ex-girlfriend, she explains: ‘When I heard she’d been seeing other people, it just seemed fair. She always said you were hard work.’) The idea that popular culture can talk about ‘my own thing’ is actually old, but sometimes it’s a reminder to people that it’s still there, like when I watched a documentary about the history of dance music in Brighton. The director is the music director for ‘The Archers’ (‘Cock on the Block’, ‘Loved to the Limit’), and he points out that the kind of music he makes often comes from ‘a very real need to keep dancing’. And in the same year, there’s also Talking Heads’ ‘This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)’, a brilliant song that opens with the line, ‘This must be the place’.
‘This Must Be the Place’ is a song about an encounter with a past – a song about seeing yourself in other people, and also seeing how other people are seeing you. (The final lines say, ‘I saw us / and I saw you / and I felt you were real / I wasn’t ready / but I felt you’.) There’s something about seeing yourself in other people, and even watching others watching themselves, that is the real thing that happens when pop culture begins to ask about ‘my own thing’. And it’s also true for people who spend a lot of time watching movies about the business of culture. Like me, for example.
Seventeen years ago, I watched a documentary called ‘The Big Picture: Life in the Camera’s Eye’, a BBC series that talked about what was happening in TV – at that time, the rise of ‘narrowcasting’ and so on. It was made by Adam Curtis, the same man who made ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’. It’s a little like ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ but longer, and it has this great moment when Curtis meets a TV critic in a restaurant. He talks about the films he likes, and then says that he does enjoy some films that don’t like themselves: films where ‘it’s all just being used, like, to make you feel this way or make you think that.’ And, he says, ‘you feel used.’ He smiles, and the critic says: ‘I suppose you know who you are? You’re like one of those cult directors.’ And Curtis says, ‘Yeah, maybe I am.’ (Curtis likes to present himself as a ‘cult director’, but I think that his ideas are worth talking about.) He also says: ‘You get very close to an idea and you want it to die, because it’s so painful to be in love with something that’s bad.’ Then the film critic says, ‘The only problem is, some of your people want it to die.’ Curtis says, ‘But it does become a sort of cult, like in America.’ The film critic says, ‘We’re Americans, and we know about those. We’re not into cults, but we’re into our own version of one.’ He smiles again, and Curtis says: ‘You mean we’re all going to be shot.’ (If you’re a fan of ‘narrowcasting’, the first thing you learn about it is that everyone who likes narrowcasting is a sociopath.) Then there’s a little scene with another critic, and then Curtis says: ‘I think we’re too close to it.’ The first film critic says, ‘No, we’re going to die before you do.’ Curtis goes on to make the film that I have been thinking about. He ends up in Berlin, sitting on the stairs of his hotel room, thinking that he might get a gun and kill himself. It’s like there’s a moment where something is made into something else, and then it’s turned into something else, and it ends up being the thing you want to keep alive, even if you’re the one doing it.
For a long time I was obsessed with ‘narrowcasting’, and I would talk about it a lot. Then I realised that there was a movie that was about the question of ‘narrowcasting’. The main character of ‘This Must Be the Place’ is a woman named Diane Court. She’s having a conversation with her friend at a bus stop and, without realising it, her friend has described her – in many ways – to herself, and then to the character. It’s interesting that we never see Court singing ‘I love New York’ – that’s the song in ‘The Big Picture’ – but, a little later in the film, she goes up to one of her concerts, and she’s sitting there – back to the bus stop – and she is looking at the way the lights are reflected in the
