A History of My Love Life, Based on the Writings of Pauline Kael
Nashville-Is there such a thing as a dream girl for relationship addicts-but a dream girl who knows how to keep her distance? With Nashville, Jeff barely noticed how much time she spent at his apartment, how many conversations she had with his mother-he was too buzzed and wobbly all the time. I’ve never before seen a guy in love in quite this way, and he still zapped around love-addled after she moved to Akron. Nashville’s decision to leave after he refused to go back to law school might seem like a classic bonehead move, until you realize that she never quite got over the Cleveland State linebacker she dated when she was in high school. Nashville is the cutest, and saddest, proof of why Jeff should have been a priest ever to reach his futon.
Last Tango in Paris—-Jeff Barnosky met Last Tango in Paris at the last show of Wilco’s 1999 Summerteeth tour; that night could become a milestone in Jeff’s dating history comparable to June 12, 1991-the night Dressed to Kill did it with him in the backseat of his Honda Civic-in his losing virginity history. They didn’t sleep together that night, or for many months after, but they might as well have, because night after night, week after week, they prodded and probed so deeply into each other’s psyches that they were mind-screwing before they saw each other naked. The relationship breakthrough had come. Love, or at least sweaty hot deeply connected lust, without the actual sex. Jeff thought he was having the most enlightened erotic experience of his life, then he saw her at a bar making out with some dot.com millionaire guy who drove an Acura RX. If Jeff knows he’s a moron, why should we pretend we don’t?
Dances With Wolves—- Jeff once broke up with Urban Cowboy because she told him that The Unbearable Lightness of Being was disgusting and vulgar. After watching him sit through him sit through an uncomfortable half-hour watching The Contest episode of Seinfeld with Dances With Wolves squirming without laughter the entire time, I felt like shouting at him to give up the ship; this one was going to be a limp dishrag in the sack.
Maybe women aren’t attracted to Jeff because he’s so goofy looking: his bare ass looks like a pimple convention.
Barbarella— Jeff having sex on the scratchy, musty futon of Barbarella is more sweaty and hot and bouncy than ever before-the guy who rarely gets laid actually managing to get a fairly cute girl to go back to his apartment. She was the only girl I could think of who thought he was sexy when he started talking about entropy in Pynchon.
Bonnie and Clyde— How do you make so many moves on women in one night with out one going for it? Structurally, Bonnie and Clyde is the story of love running away from Jeff, like the old Three’s Company where that guy who lived downstairs would constantly hit on Janet and Chrissy and always get shot down. Still, that girl sitting next to me at the bar, laughing for a little too long at Jeff’s attempts, suggests that others sometimes don’t know when to shut up and pity a pathetic display of chutzpah. Once someone gets the stink of rejection, everyone in the room knows it.
Why are Movies So Bad? Or, the Numbers
Jeff’s love life has been so rank the last couple of years that when I see him still trying to score a little romantic happiness I think that it’s just an inherited reflex. People like Jeff just want a little break from the horrific loneliness and despair, so they ask out unattainable women. They’re shot down repeatedly, yet their desire for love-for any kind of connection-is so strong that they will even ask out a lesbian.
It would be very convincing to say that there’s no hope for Jeff-that the female population has been so corrupted by awkward phone calls and strangely oblique e-mails that they can no longer give him the time of day. But when he bumped into that friend from grad school on a Sunday afternoon, there was some evidence that someone out there, someone even fairly hot, can respond to his awkward jokes and annoying way of cutting off the other person’s conversation. There may be something wrong with her, at that.
