High Fidelity: A Response

By Luke Dornbush 

Editor's Note- The following is a response to my piece A Beautiful Mess: The Broken Rules in High Fidelity. If you haven't read it, go check it out. In that piece, I assert that despite the fact that the film High Fidelity breaks a number of storytelling conventions, it still works. My piece focused on the rules that it breaks, leaving open the question of why it still works. Luke is here to answer that question. Enjoy.


High Fidelity. It’s unconventional and somewhat confusing. As Jonny so eloquently pointed out in his original post, there are numerous reasons this movie shouldn’t work, at least on the surface. But let’s look a little closer for a minute.

Yes, High Fidelity breaks lots of “rules” about exposition and talking to the camera, but the exposition isn’t really exposition in the purest sense. Exposition is typically defined as heavy handedly telling the audience something they need to know, usually because you are unwilling or unable to convey the important information any other way. It’s a crutch, and as a writer who has done it myself, I feel there is no excuse for it. There is always a way to tell the story without it if you can navigate it.

What happens in High Fidelity is really more like one-sided dialogue. John Cusack’s character, Rob, employs all the rules of good dialogue when addressing the camera. Subtext is rife throughout. He’s not telling us about his “Top 5 Breakups” to tell us facts about the character’s past because the writer can’t think of a better way to convey the information; he’s telling us to show us something about the character. Every story, and even the way he tells each one, tells us about the character. The way he talks, the point of view he has in the story—they reveal the character just as if he were talking to any other character in the movie.

But the real reason I believe that High Fidelity works is because it only gives the illusion of being disjointed, when in fact it is secretly and subtly following a simple, three-act structure. At first it seems like they jump in at page ten with an inciting incident. That’s what I thought the first time I watched it. But then I watched The Matrix.

At the beginning of the Matrix, we don’t know who any of the characters are or their relationships to each other. We know two things: the guys in the suits are the bad guys (because what else do bad guys wear?) and, consequently, the girl they’re shooting at is who we need to root for. We don’t know what her goals are. We don’t know why she’s being shot at. We just know she’s running for her life, and we sympathize with her.

In High Fidelity, we’re similarly thrust into the action. We instantly identify with Rob, even in the midst of a breakup for which we have no context. He’s the dumpee; obviously she’s a bitch. Over the course of the movie we learn that he’s no angel himself (one scene in particular comes to mind), but by then we’re firmly in his camp. First impressions, good or bad, are hard to overcome and can be essential to a story, especially when a writer centers his story on a particularly unlikeable character.

From there, like any other movie, we are introduced to the characters, and the plot begins to form. You may not notice it, as events sometimes seem to just happen for no reason, but your subconscious recognizes it and is able to follow it as a story. You find yourself enjoying something that should be aggravating. You’re understanding something that should be confusing. Ironically, that confuses you.

And so Act I ends when Rob decides there might be a common thread he’s missing between all of his worst breakups and embarks on a journey to find out what that might be. It’s a clearly stated goal that will take him all of Act II to pursue. He even works against a ticking clock. It’s never stated plainly, as good movies rarely are so blatant, but every viewer senses it. It’s the window he has to possibly reconcile with Laura. Rob needs to get his shit together before he loses her for good.

We know this because Rob’s problems are skillfully revealed by unconventional means. He indirectly tells us directly. In his recounting of his past breakups (and especially as more details come out in his recent breakup), the viewer can clearly see his mistakes/character flaws that doomed those relationships from the beginning, things that strangely baffle the very man who is recounting all of it to us.

It’s like listening to your confused, twenty-one-year-old friend lament her failed relationship with a drug addicted, thirty-five-year-old guitarist who lives in his parents' basement and doesn’t talk about anything except how big his band will be someday. Ok, maybe not that obvious, but you get the point. Now we know something that the protagonist is going to take the next hour discovering.
Before continuing, I feel I should point out that the breakup story with Laura is different from the rest of the “Top 5” list because Rob has to learn from his past mistakes in order to fix things with her. The couple wasn’t doomed from the start; it was his inability to learn from his past that ultimately drove them apart. We also inherently recognize this, which is why we subconsciously start rooting for them to get back together.

But this is how the movie stays two steps ahead of the viewer. We have already embarked with Rob on his journey of self-discovery and growth before the movie tells us why we’re on the journey at all. We, the audience, are Joan Cusack, who plays Laura's best friend Liz; after the fact, we are getting important information that reveals who Rob really is and why he and Laura broke up.

As Act II continues and Rob begins to internally accept that he has no one but himself to blame for his past failed relationships (from mistakes he made in the relationships to mistakes he made in picking the girls to begin with), we are sidetracked by events in the real world. Our subconscious—the one that so smartly figured out there was a story in the first place—gets it completely wrong here. It thinks this is a romantic comedy and tries to fit it into that mold. Guy loses girl, guy realizes he made a mistake, guy wins girl’s heart in the end.

But we’re wrong. High Fidelity is a late coming-of-age drama about growing up in a world that is different than we were told it would be (a story that resonates with every generation but, I feel, with X-Y in particular). It’s a story about letting go of disappointment and taking responsibility for our actions, taking positive steps for our lives. It's about pulling ourselves out of that post-youth rut and becoming adults. This is part of the reason the story looks so disjointed (but doesn't feel that way): we’re trying to fit events into the wrong picture.

When Rob admits that Laura is one of his “Top 5 Breakups,” it’s not him realizing how much he misses her and wants her back. He isn’t realizing that his past relationships can’t measure up to what he had with her. He’s realizing that he’s the problem and accepting responsibility for his part in the breakup.

It’s his growth from adolescence to adulthood. It’s his willingness to be vulnerable with himself and admit that he is hurt. Of course he still has a long ways to go before he begins to put Laura ahead of himself (where he ends up in the last scene of the movie), but it’s a major turning point in that journey. The confusion is added to at the end of the second act, however, when the drama and rom-com appear to overlap briefly. But remember what the plot is: man grows up, not man gets girl. The true darkest moment isn’t when it looks like all is lost and he runs out of the funeral for Laura’s dad. It’s when they get back together and it appears that nothing has actually changed. He’s still stuck in arrested development, doomed to repeat the same mistakes. That is the “all is lost moment,” the “dark night of the soul.” Even though he’s got the girl and seems happy, this is the hero at his lowest.

The climax is his extremely unconventional proposal in the bar. It’s at this point that all he has learned comes to a head. Rob hits on a cute girl, but it feels different this time. He knows he can’t go back to the way things were, with “one foot out the door” all the time. He is tired of his old life and wants something more. More importantly, now he knows how to get it. His closing monologue confirms the change in him and assures us that things will be different this time around.

I believe that Jonny is absolutely correct in his analysis. The movie is almost entirely about an internal conflict and self-discovery, and that’s against the rules. But, as always, rules are meant to be skillfully broken. The movie does a great job of subtly externalizing the internal conflict throughout, even when that's not its apparent intent. So why do we like High Fidelity when our brains tell us we shouldn’t? Because it’s smarter than we are.


By Luke Dornbush