“Practically Ancient”
Single White Poet Named Amy Seeks John Cusack and the Adult World
“Wow,” the friend breathes as Emma Roberts picks up a book by her newly minted poetry idol and prepares to read a moving, brooding passage. “It’s practically ancient.”
On the back of the dust jacket is a picture of the poet, gone-to-seed, failed-sophomore-effort wunderkind Rat Billings, played by John Cusack. The photo is a circa Say Anything… headshot. Cusack looks unbelievably young, and as familiar as a face out of one of my own old high school yearbooks. Like an old friend I’d lost track of. The spare mouth, the dark eyes, the crackle of nervous energy that seemed to emanate even from him even in a posed still image.
“Yeah. It’s from like 1989.”
As I send out invitations to my own 25th high school reunion, may I simply say “Ouch?”
Adult World is a coming-of-age indie directed by Scott Coffey and starring Emma Roberts as a painfully sincere and naïve, cloistered suburbanite college grad who knows nothing about nothing and is determined to be a Famous Poet. (Dispatch from Poetrystan: there are no famous poets, but being as big of a hack as this chick can only be a step in the right direction, an irony not lost on these actors or the scriptwriter.) She ends up running away from home and going to work at a mom-and-pop porn shop run by a very grandmotherly—my God, is that Chloris Leachman?—called, of course, “Adult World.” That is called a double-entendre. Meanwhile she starts stalking Rat Billings in a desperate bid to become his “protégé.” That is a hilarious notion to any of us who are old enough to have watched the poetry graduate degree go from niche to industry, and Cusack sums it up nicely with the rejoinder, “I haven’t heard that one, sober and with my pants on, for a long time.” It’s a word that doesn’t mean what it actually means, which is “protected.” It means lackey. At best.
The Anti-Dobler Effect
You’ve got it: Cusack is not the preternaturally young, sweet-faced Irish boy smartypants idealistic iconoclast hero this time. He’s the jaded crabapple middle-aged mentor. Specifically of the “tor-mentor” school, in which a particularly self-loathing artist past his pinnacle takes out his fear and frustration over his own burgeoning irrelevance on someone whose youth and idealism and self-confidence provokes a road-rage beyond reckoning as he sees a funhouse contortion of his own optimistic youth. That part’s very real. I know several Rat Billingses and have even had the mixed fortune to work with one or two—something I was able to do with no lasting psychic damage because I had two amazing mentors when I was a kid, and because now I am a calloused old cougar. The Rats teach you stuff, all right. Lesson one: don’t idealize or admire anyone. Especially not them, and especially not yourself. Lesson Two: see above. Lesson three: go live your own life and don’t give a Rat’s ass what your heroes and elders do or don’t think of you. In the end it’s a valid syllabus, even if their pedagogy can range from world-weary and indifferent to wantonly abusive. Rat Billings is abusive. But also—and I don’t say this lightly—the girl is begging for it. “Literally, and figuratively.”
Adult World isn’t a perfect movie. Sometimes it’s clever, sometimes trite. Sometimes Emma Roberts is spot-on and sometimes she leaves one wondering why we need a featherweight Anne Hathaway. It has some tropes that would get it excoriated if it were a poem someone submitted to Ploughshares. But it also hits a rather excruciatingly note-perfect interplay between poetry and pornography, between Baring Your Soul and Bearing it and between asking for it … and getting it.
Whatever its imperfections, this movie and John Cusack are perfect for each other. And as he has been unwittingly doing for a quarter century, he has appeared in yet another role that weirdly sums up a moment of my own life that needed summing up just right exactly then. What makes Adult World great is the web of references and metaphors and conceits that, incidentally, are also the skeleton keys to a lot of good poems. Cusack’s famously fielded a couple of stalkers, a fact embedded in every scene between him and Roberts. The ironic references to age and irrelevance and senescence (especially considering that this man is not yet fifty and only becoming more interesting as an actor) are by turns poignant, snicker-inducing, and a little brutal, beginning with the “practically ancient” quip about a poem from 1989 (the year Cusack scored his first real hit with Say Anything…). When Roberts loses it and smashes his guitar (is that a Martin?) the look on his face is priceless—part offended, part amused (even this kid’s meltdown is a cliché!), part angry, part … what, almost liberated. It’s cool even if you don’t know how much this guy loves music. That is called symbolism, and it is very out of style in poetry right now. But that is part of the poetry of that moment.
Cusack has been in a lot of movies, some I haven’t seen and some that I think are firmly in the “meh” zone. But when he gets the right project, he gets the project right. He’s done something pretty fabulous with this one, nailing the role of the self-defeating rat-bastard writer that even actual self-defeating rat-bastard writers allow to devolve into epic self-parodying cliché. I can think of several Jaded Asshat Dark and Edgy poets and novelists who could take notes from this guy on how to Fail Better. Which is to say, succeed.
In fact, now that we’re adults…
Speaking of Saying Anything…
Hey, John Cusack! My name is Amy, and I’m a poet. And I was wondering if you’d maybe go out to dinner with me sometime?