"High Fidelity" and triumph over shame

I LIKED THIS movie a lot more than I expected, seeing that it takes place mostly in a record store and I have only a slight knowledge of retro music. I found myself a little lost when store-owner Rob Gordon (John Cusack) and his buddies compose endless "top five" lists of obscure categories like "best songs containing the word ketchup," but I recognize the mentality at least. I had a certain affinity for these characters because they remind me a lot of my film-buff friends, and I suppose myself, too. There's a great line in the movie where Rob explains for us (he talks to the camera a la Ferris Bueller) the subtleties of making a great mix tape, in which you "express yourself using other people's poetry." That resonated with me, since on this site I most often reveal myself through other's poetry.

But the focus of the film is romance more than music. Rob has just been dumped by his umpteenth girlfriend, and he sets out on a mission to discover why he seems doomed to repeat the same pattern with women. He starts off giving us a list of his top-five breakups, which initially earns him our sympathy, but we soon discover he keeps losing girls because he's a complete jerk: selfish, unfaithful, immature. Rob is quite unlike the tenderheart Cusack played in Say Anything -- or the lead in most any romantic comedy, now that I think about it. But there is hope. In order to improve himself, Rob does something I don't think I've ever seen in a movie. He meets with these old girlfriends who have caused him such pain, tries to put himself in their shoes, and see himself how they saw him. This just blew me away. What would it be like if we all had the courage to talk to those who'd hurt us, and try to understand the situation from their perspective? Would our childhood tormentors apologize? Would we begin to see how many of our pains are caused in inadvertently? Would we understand how we might have been partly to blame ourselves? And would we realize that life isn't all about us in the end? "High Fidelity" earns high marks as a tale of self-discovery that avoids treacle.

On a side note, I've been reading Robert Jewett's excellent book "Saint Paul Returns to the Movies: Triumph Over Shame," and so I noticed how shame plays an important role in this film. Rob's love life suffers, at least in part, because his past romantic embarrassments still hang over him. He is shamed into believing that he doesn't deserve to be happy with a woman, that there's something about him inherently without value. Jewett tells us how Jesus' death and resurrection worked to eliminate shame, and restored value to people. Through Christ's shameful death on the cross, "where one's vulnerability and agony were exposed to public contempt," he overcomes our shame, "lifting our heaviest and most secret burden, the feeling that no one loves and respects us." (This concept, Jewett says, is foreign to our Western, individualistic society that focuses more often on how Jesus frees us from our personal guilt over sin. "This explains why traditional services often tend to be avoided by persons whose problems are deeper than sin, who feel that their lives are without promise or hope, that nobody respects them.") If this premise intrigues you, I suggest you check out Jewett's fantastic book. It's certainly helping me understand how deep the mystery of Christian faith goes.