I watched The Godfather with my parents tonight, because my mother doesn’t like it. That seems nonsensical, but it’s very important to me, actually, that my mother likes The Godfather. We got into a discussion the other day where she admitted that she didn’t like it, and I set out to make a believer out of her. I made marinara sauce, like Clemenza, to win her over with spaghetti and meatballs. I convinced myself that if she were in the right mood, and I could build enough excitement, she’d enjoy it. She’d get it. She’d realize how wrong she was to write it off when she saw it in the theater 40 years ago. It didn’t work. She said it was boring. The Godfather is not boring. It demands an acute attentiveness which, if given properly, rewards you with one of the most engrossing movie experiences you can find. She didn’t get it.
Why is it so important to us that our loved ones share our interests? It’s nice to have things in common, to discuss and share, and it’s nice to have different favorite movies, like different bands and read different books to keep things interesting. But don’t we all have one or two things we value enough that it’s an outright problem if someone we respect doesn’t appreciate them? I mean, could you love someone who doesn’t love Otis Redding? Could you respect someone who doesn’t like The Godfather? Could I marry someone who doesn’t like Southern poetry? It’s so silly, but so easy to get hung up on these things. This whole ordeal with my mom just makes me think of how hard it would be to put up with a guy who didn’t like the right things, brings up my fear that I really will get attached to someone who doesn’t like Miller Williams or Robert Penn Warren. Wouldn’t that be a problem?
If your affection for High Fidelity is as intense as mine (if it isn’t, I probably have a problem with that) you know what I’m talking about. Nick Hornby says, and it feels so true, that what matters is what you like, more than what you are like. I’ve agreed and disagreed with this, back and forth over the years. The first gut reaction is “yes! of course!” but as I grew out of being as pretentious and judgmental about artistic tastes as I once was, I sort of let it go. Rob Gordon and company are pretentious and judgmental and were exactly what I wanted to be, what my asshole friends and I prided ourselves on being back in college. But that’s all bullshit. It’s such a snobbish way to walk through the world, looking down on people for owning Julio Iglesias albums. When I got more comfortable with liking things that weren’t high brow or obscure, enjoying things because they were enjoyable, not just because they were good, I decided that what matters isn’t what you like as much as why you like it. That’s where the good stuff is. Liking terrible music because you listened to it with your parents on car trips; watching crappy movies because you always watch them with the same person. The relationship someone has with the things they like is way more interesting than a list of all the right favorite things.
But that only goes so far. I still can’t get past it when someone doesn’t love what I love. What you dislike, that matters. It matters what you like when it doesn’t include The Godfather. To say that “it’s no good pretending any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party” is placing too much importance on approving of your counterpart’s interests. Let that stuff go. The troublesome stuff is this: when that which you connect to most deeply in the world is totally unaffecting to someone you care about. The art that you’re most passionate about in the world, the books, the movies, the music you love, these things define you as a person. They’re part of you. I don’t want someone who thinks I’m funny or nice or smart, I want someone who knows what I’m talking about when I talk about the last verse of “Oh My Sweet Carolina.” Sharing that with somebody – that’s the point.
I’ve run into the problem of having too much in common with a guy. It’s boring. There’s never anything to argue about, and you don’t learn anything new. Maybe we should just let go of the compulsion to impose our favorite things onto other people. So what if they don’t like what we do? What does it hurt? Surely we can find other points to relate on. But there’s something so satisfying about that moment when someone tells you they love what you do, so reassuring. And there’s something so great about falling for something that someone else loves, and passes on to you. Is it enough? Is going without it enough?
I’m not a person with a lot of answers. I told my mom to try and dream about The Godfather and we’d talk in the morning. Last night after my sister read The Great Gatsby for the first time and said she didn’t like it, I spent ten minutes telling her why I loved it and what’s so great about F. Scott Fitzgerald, and by the end she was telling me all her favorite things about it, saying that talking about it had changed it for her. I have a friend who doesn’t like High Fidelity, but I haven’t resigned the idea that I can win him over. And that’s the part that makes me feel okay about not having any answers. There’s hope in believing that you can still help to change someone’s mind, but even better than that is knowing that you still want to.
