High Fidelity ~ Lost In Adaptation

this is a review show focused on comparing film adaptations of books to said books to see if

the creators carried over the original plot and themes with any degree of loyalty or accuracy.

Today we’re going to be talking about the film your mildly annoying film studies

friend keeps insisting you have to watch (but you probably haven't):

High Fidelity, and the novel of the same name.

The book, published in 1995 is the third novel by best-selling British Author Nick Hornby.

A writer who started his career as a freelance journalist and music critic

before moving onto fiction writing in the early 90s.

The film rights were procured quite quickly but the intended film went through a few

years of the dreaded development hell, passed around by different writers and

directors until a final product finally saw the light of day in the year 2000.

Interestingly both the book and the film were quite popular upon release but

it seems neither has withstood the test of time particularly well.

Despite the film’s financial success, positive critical reception, high rotten tomatoes score and

a spot on Empire magazine's "500 Greatest Movies of All Time" poll,

its following these days could be considered “cult” at best.

So I suppose a little background information is needed to make sure we’re all on the same page.

Summarised to the extreme, High Fidelity, is the story of Rob Fleming,

a 35 year old British record store owner, going through the emotional

turmoil of being left by Laura, his partner of the last few years.

The book is narrated in the first person by Rob and I was given the distinct impression that he

is a decidedly unreliable narrator, mainly because Rob is an awful person. He’s just...

Terrible, he’s an absolute wanker. He’s a deeply misogynistic,

emotionally stunted man child with a perpetual victim complex and

a 100% genuine inability to tell the difference between having a taste in music and a personality.

Now in my personal literary experience, when a protagonist is this awful it's usually indicative

of one of two things, either they’re being set up for a LOT of character development and redemption

or the author is utterly unaware of the fact that they’ve written this person

to be terrible. You can usually tell which it is by how they’re treated in the story.

As examples, Alex Delarge of A Clockwork Orange, famous for being one of the most

unapologetically evil people in fiction has the absolute crap beaten out of him throughout and

starts on the road to becoming a better person at the end (even if that was omitted

in the Stanley Kubrick film), showing the author was well aware that he was a monster.

And on the other hand we have the co star of the bane of my existence novels,

Christian Grey of Fifty Shades of, who’s deeply abusive behaviour is either not treated as such,

excused, or completely unaddressed at the end of the trilogy, proving

that EL Snowqueen icedragon James recognised none of his worst behavior as problematic.

It’s hard to say which of these scenarios applies in the case of High Fidelity.

The ending does involve SOME personal growth from Rob but it's like the barest minimum