Lloyd Dobler is the anathema to sexual passion.
In this column over at The Frisky, Natalie Krinsky very rightly points out the problem with today’s romantic comedy: namely, that women are expected to settle but men never are. There’s an implied entitlement in movies and television shows like Knocked Up and Everybody Loves Raymond that insists that men deserve the best in female companionship despite their inability to stand-up to their Italian mothers or to get a job and stop smoking pot.
In the comments section of the column, blog reader Sassmouth mentioned the film Say Anything as another example of a film in which a nice, but loser-y fellow wins the affections of a woman far above his touch. I think it is important here to say that the issue is not that the “nice guy” hero doesn’t deserve love but the inherent desire to control women by putting hot, smart, powerful women with yutzes. As if by sticking them in a relationship with the most average, mediocre man on the block will curb the woman’s hotness (both physical and metaphysical) making her more palatable to a culture that fears both female sexuality and female power.
I do not think this desire to push women into settling for men less than their equals is anything new. Regard Pride and Prejudice in which Mrs. Bennett encourages Elizabeth to marry Mr. Collins despite the fact that the marriage would have been miserable for both parties. Mr. Collins was both a bit of a prig and rather awkward but he was not a bad man. He would not have been cruel or vicious. And yet is that enough? Why are women expected to settle for men who are merely nice? Who simply aren’t brutish? Why is this good enough?
Last summer there was a show on VH1 called The Pick-Up Artist. The premise was this: That Pick-Up Artist extraordinaire, Mystery, would take a batch of losers, geeks and slackers and turn them into ladies men via a tried and true method of picking up chicks. Many people found this offensive. However, it occurred to me watching the show that there was actually a great deal of effort and confidence required to be a pick-up artist. A man can’t just expect a woman to fall into his bed, rather he must work for it. The show followed the success of the book The Game by Neil Strauss that details the author’s experience with pick-up artists like Mystery and others. I don’t know what other pick-up artists techniques are but from what I gleaned watching the show last summer, Mystery’s technique seems to be built on the idea of seduction. Which brings me to the old romance novel stand-by, the Rake.
The Rake has been a literary figure I’ve been curious about for sometime. What is his appeal? Why does he appear so often in romances? And what is a rake anyway? It wasn’t until reading the article over at The Frisky that I understood what the essential appeal of a rake is: He is the exact opposite of Lloyd Dobler. He walks the fine line between villain and hero and is therefore a man of action. He does not pine or stalk like a carrion bird, but is a predator, a seducer; and seduction is an under-utilized dating strategy. Moreover, the Rake is never mediocre. Everything he does whether it is villainous or heroic is done with panache. The good-looks, the physical beauty of the character is often a short-hand for something that cannot be seen but which women find immensely attractive. This is not a certain something, a je ne sais quoi that can be put so easily into words. Rather, it radiates out from the characteristic of charisma or charm. It is an inarticuable quality of the man himself, the feeling that this person is unique, extraordinary in some way.
The problem with Lloyd Dobler is that he’s nice. He’s so nice, he pines. When he acts, the actions are uncomfortably sincere. The irony levels are low. As my sister Elizabeth pointed out in a beautiful rant in the car this moring, Lloyd Dobler is mediocrity itself. He’s not interesting. He’s not interested in the world, he has encapsulated himself into a realm entirely composed of musical trivia, of listening to other men’s creations while making nothing of his own. He is the ultimate critic, the ultimate teacher . . . in the pejorative sense of the term where one critiques, one teaches because one cannot do. He isn’t a bad guy, he’s just wholly and entirely average. The only redeeming quality he has is that he actually goes after the unattainable girl instead of just expecting her to notice what a wonderous human being he is like the classic Nice Guy, who believes that his friendship and companionship is like a merit system in which he earns points by doing girly stuff or what have you and in exchange the girl owes him a fuck. However, the problem with Dobbler’s pursuit of Diane Court, who ironically has never been courted before, is that the main thing he has to offer her is that he thinks and sees that she’s amazing. Nobody else has ever tried to date her before or seduce her before; she has no idea she is, in fact, amazing. Of course she’s going to go with the first guy who notices her. So many women do this and let’s face facts, the first guy who notices you (with some exceptions) is usually a douchewad. I know this because I am 30 not 15 and have seen it happen enough. There’s something very attractive about being wanted, about being desired, and when one is young and vulnerable and wants to be loved, sometimes the fact that you have nothing in common, no similar ambitions or motivations, sometimes thet fact that he loves you is enough to bind you to him even though, deep down you know that not only are you too good for him, but that you don’t love him and eventually you are going to resent him for not being your equal.
When women complain that there are no nice guys out there, they don’t really mean nice guys. Nice is not a compliment. Anyone can be nice. Ted Bundy was fucking nice. Nice just means that you have the ability to be civil, and despite 18th century views on manners, civility is not the external manifestation of inner character, it is the merely the lubrication necessary for social discourse and unless one has Asperger’s, most people can learn these rituals and responses without ever having to acquire character, personality or ethics. In fact, some of the most civil people in the world are despicable human beings (for example Hitler vs. Churchill: a vegetarian, teetotalling, non-smoking, never had any affairs Time Man-of -the-year or a champagne imbibing, cigar smoking, opium using, kicked out of office twice drunkard). The point being is that the ability to be nice in social moments is not a measure of one’s true qualities or honor.
On the other hand, being completely ineffectual socially is not an asset either. Bathing, basic hygiene, geniality, and the ability to discuss more than one subject and with various kinds of people are all characteristics of the socially functioning. Yes, I understand, Geek-boy. You love [music, film, Family Guy, sports, physics, whatever] very, very much. But your expertise on that one subject and that one subject alone is not charming. It is irritating. Especially when you get drunk and lecture the rest of the party. Nobody gives a fuck about Charles Bukowski and if they did, they don’t now. You reading that one article on evolution doesn’t make you a scientist. And by the way, your expertise on the films of Quentin Tarantino does not make you an expert on films in general. It makes you boring and your predictable taste in the crapulent output of modern American popular culture does not make you a well-rounded and culturally sophisticated human being, it makes you about average. There’s nothing wrong with liking crap. I like crap. I love crap. I love kitsch. Some of it is actually quite good, objectively speaking, but most of it is just mediocre garbage that I happen to like. But I recognize this and when other humans do not like the same crap I like, I don’t denounce them as dilettantes.
If Beauty and the Geek has taught us anything, it has taught us that there is not much difference in the rank stupidity of pop cult babes and the Rain-Man like intelligence of nerds everywhere. Ultimately, they are suffering from the same disease: limited imagination, narrow perspective and a refusal, nay an entire lack of desire to ever go outside of the norm of their particular enclave and try something different. Sophistication is not about how many people you’ve fucked or whether or not you have been to Paris. Sophistication begins in the mind, it is an act of the mind, it is an act of refining one’s own thoughts by pushing them to their limits, by forcing them against the thoughts of others, against nature, against reality, against language and discovering that what is limited is not the world, but your imagination. It is not just disillusionment, it is the disillusionment that your Truth is the only one.
This sophistication is the essence of the rake because taken to an extreme this knowledge of one’s own limitations and the limitations of the world breeds a certain cynicism. It also breeds a certain arrogance but arrogance is not necessarily a synonym of entitlement. Entitlement is whiny, predicated on nothing but the sense that you deserve [love, money, something better] whereas arrogance can mean . . . and I think in the case of the Rake or someone like Picasso , it is a manifestation of both the cynicism and the pride of the sophisticate. This kind of arrogance is the arrogance of Milton’s Satan, who while flawed at least had the cajones to challenge the Supreme Being, more than once. Good for him.
And on the subject of Genesis and its apochrypha, back to the orignal point. The fact that women are perpetually forced into liasons with mediocre men in the popular imagination as a reward for good behavior makes me think that is better to be a badly behaved female because perhaps then you will end up with a man who isn’t a wanker. I mean, Adam is the Lloyd Dobbler of Genesis. What the hell does he do? Nothing. He just floats, bending to the most powerful personality present whether that is Eve or God. It is Eve who is the visionary. It is Eve who is a Prometheus. And who does she get stuck with? Seth Rogen because he’s a good guy. Jason Segel because he’s a sweetheart. Lloyd fucking Dobbler because he’s a nice guy. Bullshit.
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