The Collector

Movies such as High Fidelity (2000) explore the perils of record collecting, the way that the homosocial behavior of the obsessed collector hinders, if not actually prevents him, from enjoying the pleasurable company of a like-minded female. Around thirty years ago, when visiting the local record stores was part of my daily homosocial routine, it never occurred to me to ask why there were so few women with whom I could discuss the music I loved. Of course there were many girls around, but you didn’t talk with them about Eno, Pere Ubu, King Crimson, or the Buzzcocks, for instance. I remember falling heavily for a girl who told me she loved the Pretenders’ first album, an album that I also happened to think was tremendous (still do). It didn’t hurt matters that she was pretty, intense, and had what is colloquially referred to as “tons of personality,” but I think I fell deeply for her primarily because she loved that Pretenders record. She also happened to indulge my passion for music. One night, over a couple of Margaritas, she actually endured one of my hour-long lectures on that album’s many virtues, its precursors, and its probable historic significance. I envisioned myself a connoisseur of both rock and avant-garde rock, and after we hit it off, I thought I would introduce her to my collection, hence what serious rock music was all about—Eno, Echo and the Bunnymen, Joy Division, the Residents, some later Velvet Underground, and so on, everything important, in other words, so I invited her over to my place for a serious listen. She readily agreed. So she came over to listen to some records . . . and I thought I’d fall on the floor and die when she showed me the records she brought along with her to play for me: Pat Benatar’s In the Heat of the Night, Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s An American Dream, the band’s then current hit record, and a couple others that I can no longer remember, probably due to traumatic amnesia. I was polite to her that long evening, as I endured the playing of two or three of those awful records, but the long-term effect of the evening was that she dropped in my estimation of her, because her musical taste was so bad. Our relationship was immedicably damaged that evening, and while we saw each other often for the next year or so and had some good times together—we both loved dancing to reggae, the music then having a mild resurgence in local clubs—I knew any serious romance between us was over. What a naïve, pompous fool I was.

Looking back, I think I was very much like the character Rob, the narrator of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (1995), the novel upon which the movie released in 2000 was based. Near the end of the novel, Rob is introduced to the CD collection of his girlfriend’s friend. The narrator is confronted with “the sort of CD collection that is so poisonously awful that it should be put in a steel case and shipped off to some Third World waste dump. They’re all there: Tina Turner, Billy Joel, Kate Bush, Pink Floyd, Simply Red, The Beatles, of course, Mike Oldfield (Tubular Bells I and II), Meat Loaf . . .” (p. 279). While I’ve mellowed somewhat since then, I perfectly well understand the sort of disdain being expressed in that passage, as that sort of attitude was mine at one point in my life. So, too, was the inability to engage in any meaningful romance with a single, available female. Predictably, there was no sting of truth, as there should have been, in the memorable scene in Diner (1982), when the Daniel Stern character rebukes his wife, played by Ellen Barkin, for misfiling one of his James Brown records. Several of my friends and I went to see that film when it was released, and while I can’t speak for the rest, I was actual siding with the Daniel Stern character in that scene rather than his poor wife: how dare she treat his filing system as capricious! How dare she put the record in the wrong place!

Record collecting, like home video collecting, is all about plentitude: the more you acquire, the bigger your collection, the more masculine you are (and we all understand the Freudian phallic symbolism implicit in that remark). Besides High Fidelity and Diner, few movies have explored the psychology of the white male collector. The only other movie besides these that I can think of that understands the fetishistic psychology behind collecting is Free Enterprise (1998), which probably owes a debt to Diner in the way it accurately depicts the homosocial activities of a group of males seeking to maintain permanent adolescence. Free Enterprise is not about record collectors, but home video (laserdisc) collectors and completists. Unfortunately, the film was finished just months before the DVD boom (made now, it would probably depict the lives of high-definition home video fanatics), but in its depiction of white male nerds (one of the characters happens to be black, but he is not one of the two primary protagonists) and of the obsessiveness of the completist collector—one character had his power shut off because he couldn’t pay his electric bill, because he preferred instead to spend the last of his money on the latest laserdisc issue of Dawn of the Dead—it ranks with both Diner and High Fidelity as movies wielding the sting of truth (I know because I belong to both worlds, as many of my generation do). Free Enterprise works well in showing how its characters’ love of the movies is connected to an idealized past, but happily its protagonists are willing to let go of their self-indulgent behavior long enough to make a serious commitment to a woman who loves them. Sometimes, nerds can become men.