Boom.

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The most famous image from Say Anything… (indeed, one of the most famous images from modern American cinema) is that of John Cusack adorning a trench coat and a Clash t-shirt, holding a boom box aloft, his face stony and purposeful as he stands in front of a blue Chevy Malibu. The image is indelible, a tangible version of the lengths movie characters go to in the name of Love. And it’s not just image—sound plays a role, too, as “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel is more or less eternally bound to Cameron Crowe’s film. It’s been parodied in everything from South Park to Saturday Night Live to that shitty Date Movie movie. And most recently, in the trailer for The Fault in Our Stars, the image is lambasted once again as movie-style cheese, the idealistic (see: bullshit) way that romantic comedies reduce love to easy answers: “There are two ways to look at love,” Shailene Woodley says in voice-over. “One is the optimistic way, the way you see in movies where everything can be solved with a Peter Gabriel song.”

I often wonder whether the people who deride Lloyd Dobler’s attempt at winning Diane Court back have actually, you know, seen the film. Maybe they just forgot. Say Anything… is, after all, twenty-five (!) years old, and seeing as it’s Valentine’s Day, and seeing as it’s the film’s twenty-fifth anniversary, I thought I’d point a couple of things out to set these people straight.

Cameron Crowe has certainly fallen from grace in the past fourteen years, but that doesn’t mean that we should deny him kudos for a quartet of films that focused almost single-mindedly on a very difficult concept: the struggle to remain decent in an increasingly cynical world. He did this in the three films following Say Anything… with a premise he learned from his hero Billy Wilder, that premise being place an honorable person in the midst of the most cynical environment you can imagine, and watch them do battle. In Singles, the environment was the sarcastic, detached attitudes of gen Xer’s in the heart of their home base, Seattle during early 90’s grunge. In Jerry Maguire, it was the cold, corporate world of sports agents, where everything was bottom-line and no one cared about “personal relationships.” In Almost Famous, it was the world of rock just when rock was going from something pure to a commodity, and people traded women they cared about for “fifty dollars and a case of beer.”

In Say Anything…, our hero Lloyd Dobler is placed at the epicenter of the place possibly least receptive to decency and genuine emotion: high school. Everyone at Lloyd’s school does what pretty much most teenagers do. They have public fights at parties that you know they’ll forget a day later; they over-emote and write horrible love ballads about each other, because unrequited love means the most to teenagers; they drink until they can’t even stand up in a stranger’s bathroom. They also conform to social classes almost religiously. Lloyd’s best friend, Cory, makes her case for why he shouldn’t even fantasize about Diane Court—she’s out of his class, way too pretty and smart and ambitious. “We just don’t want to see you get hurt, Lloyd,” she tells him, and just before the opening credits roll we hear the words that kick off the film, “I want to get hurt!”

Of course, what Lloyd really means is that he wants to love somebody meaningfully enough that it would hurt to lose. And Diane is the right girl for him to have chosen (there are plenty of wrong ones in high school, people too young to appreciate Lloyd’s earnestness). Diane is indeed pretty and ambitious, so much so that she feels she’s missed out on high school, “held people at arm’s length, and they did the same,” she complains. Lloyd, popular if not particularly ambitious himself, is the right person to remedy that.

He takes her to a party wherein everybody seems astonished they’re together (“Lloyd Dobler, alright,” someone says to Diane as he passes her, without saying anything else). Lloyd is also appreciative of Diane to the point that he doesn’t weigh her down at what might be her first social event ever (he can intuit that much from the cocktail dress she wears to a house party). “How did you get Diane Court to go out with you?” asks an envious partygoer of Lloyd. “I called her up,” he says, matter-of-factly. In the world of high school, such directness doesn’t make any sense. But to Lloyd, social lines are arbitrary, especially in the face of genuine feelings.

A great visual cue for that sensibility bookends the film, when Lloyd’s sister Connie (played by Cusack’s real-life sister Joan) draws a red line on his stereo and tells him not to turn the volume higher than that. “How do you know where to draw the red line?” he asks, which pretty much sums up his mindset throughout the whole film, and his way of courting (get it?) Diane.

Hence the boom box scene. It’s several things at once, which is why it’s lasted for as long as it has (if it were merely an expression of love—had Diane heard Gabriel’s voice and come running out and then the credits rolled—no one would give a shit). First, it’s a callback to Lloyd’s whole red-line philosophy. For where do you draw it? When are you supposed to stop caring about someone? When they dump you? What if you still love them? What if they still love you (as Diane does)? Do you stop then? Do you just move on? You’ve taken the leap, the risk of hurt—“I want to get hurt!”—do you just quit halfway, or follow through?

But of course what it also is is a demonstration of the exact opposite of the thing these stupid parodies and dismissive references claim it to be. Because Diane doesn’t come running after Lloyd’s gesture. He’s there, he’s letting her know, but what Cameron Crowe seems to be saying is that, as Rick Blaine said in Casablanca, “the problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Diane’s life is falling apart, her dad is being hounded by the IRS, she can barely sleep and is soon relocating her entire life to England—and no love song in the world can fix that.

This is not to say that the film ultimately errs on the side of cynicism in the decency vs cynicism Battle Royale. But it does mean that the film takes a very serious, very complicated look at what it takes to be in a real relationship with someone else. Diane does come to Lloyd eventually, but only when the real substance of their relationship (in other words, not a Peter Gabriel song) is what she needs, a substance he and only he can give her, because of what they’ve built. His response when she finally comes back to him is classic: “Are you here because you need someone, or because you need me? Forget it, I don’t care.” But what’s too-often looked over is her response: “I need you.”

Exactly. Just so we’re clear.

Ted McLoof

About Ted McLoof

Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.

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