For many, both versions of High Fidelity—the 1995 novel penned by Nick Hornby and the 2000 movie starring a single-jacket-owning John Cusack—are cult classics. They’re texts that get at the heart of what it’s like to be a person who is very into vinyl records if the only kind of person who can be very into vinyl records is a straight white man. That has been the portrait of the record-collecting nerd ever since the music-geek archetype fastened itself to pop culture. In American Splendor, it’s Harvey Pekar, played by Paul Giamatti; in Ghost World, it’s Steve Buscemi’s Seymour, and so on. On its surface, a gender-swapped reboot of High Fidelity, the new Hulu series starring the impossibly cool Zoë Kravitz, seemed to challenge that notion. Now that the 10-episode season has premiered, it’s clear that any hopeful rewriting was purely cosmetic. The record-collecting manchild trope remains.
—are cult classics. They’re texts that get at the heart of what it’s like to be a person who is very into vinyl records if the only kind of person who can be very into vinyl records is a straight white man. That has been the portrait of the record-collecting nerd ever since the music-geek archetype fastened itself to pop culture. In, it’s Steve Buscemi’s Seymour, and so on. On its surface, a gender-swapped reboot of, seemed to challenge that notion.
Women of color can, of course, own record stores and be self-involved and treat exes like characters in their story instead of autonomous beings, just like the stunted men ofpast. And if the Hulu incarnation managed to make that clear, it would’ve become the rare example of why gender-swapped reboots should exist: to highlight how people who aren’t men exist in traditionally male-dominated spaces. This remake doesn’t do that.
It should be mentioned that unlike the 2000 movie, Rob’s list-making obsession is mostly shoe-horned in, instead of becoming a narrative device that dictates plot. Here, it lacks believability, even if it’s with good reason. The incessant need to categorize taste is what men historically doto immortalize and elevate the great work of men, pushing other identities to the margins.
borrows heavily from the 2000 movie, including direct quotes in dialogue that stop just short of clichéd: “What came first, the music or the misery?” References to funktronica outfit Beta Band endure, but the infamousby Swamp Dogg. The most unattractive feature of the film was the casual misogyny , and that inches its ugly head into the Hulu version, too. If a reboot is meant to contemporize a beloved story, cutting out the name-calling and slut-shaming would’ve been an easy way in.
is about a heartbroken geek whose view of the world is so myopic and self-involved, it can only operate through lists and facts. In this gender-swapped version, like all gender-swapped reboots, a woman protagonist is meant to retell a man’s story as if it is her own instead of being given the space to tell hers.
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