Cusack at 40

Which John Cusack Are You?

John Cusack turned 40 yesterday.

How does this affect me? Over the last couple of days I've been thinking about it. I am offically old now. I am no longer valid, I don't carry the clout I used to. Sure, I am 38 and still have a couple of years to go but now that Cusack has gone into middle age, so have we all. I'm speaking for the Breakfast Club/John Hughes generation. Even though Cusack wasn't in any Hughes movies, he is still a big part of our collective memories of that time. The Sure Thing and One Crazy Summer, even though those are pretty lame teen movies at the time, they served their purpose. They were predictable flicks but at the time I was pretty predictable too. Cusack would go on to make classics like Say Anything, Bullets over Broadway, Grosse Point Blank, Being John Malchovich and Hi-Fidelity but I'll always remember him as being the everyman for the eighties. They're were others, like the guy from Pretty in Pink, but Cusack is the only one who endured through the 90's and into the present.

The main appeal of Cusack's characters was that they eschewed material gains for a higher calling. In The Sure Thing he gives it all up to travel cross country to be with a girl he knows is a sure thing only to realize that it's a truly empty endevour. In Say Anything he was such a breath of fresh air when everyone thought it would be a good idea to be just like Alex P. Keaton or Gordon Gecko. Here comes this guy who justs wants to live a life where he doesn't want to process, market or sell anything. A proponent of sustainablity well ahead of his time. I think their's even a scene of him recyling. Looking back at those movies, they are dated (Say Anything survives without as many scratches) but at the time they really gave me hope that once I got out of my teens things might be a little bit better.

If this world had allowed someone like Cusack to excel, things couldn't be so bad.

When Hi-Fidelity came out, I saw it in the theatre 5 times. It was my Titanic and I was the lovesick girl waiting for the ship to finally hit the iceberg. Just as she was surprised every time it happened I was surprised when he got back together with his girlfriend (especially after hitting so many icebergs along the way). At the time, my life mirrored his in many ways (sans owning the record store, I owned a recording studio). Something about the perpetual Slacker appealed to me deeply. Sure he wanted to have opinions on wine and jet lag but in the end he was happy to put his energies into what others considered worthless. Anyone who can do anything without the promise of monetary gain, I Love.

Now that I am offically invalidated, what does that mean? It means the pressure is off. No one is paying attention to me. I can go about my business as usual and if I do manage to say something to a person in their teens that's considered worthy then cool. But as for now, I will write my stories, make my films and live my life as if their is no biological clock looming in the distance. All this with the presence of mind to put as much individuality and creativity in all that I do. Pretty well the same existence Lloyd Dobbler or Rob Gordon had fashioned for themselves.