![]() ![]() Look at that side part, that smirk he’s giving as he stares up at you, YOU, from a stairwell somewhere. (Also, I don’t care about Colin Firth.) ― Katherine Brooksįirst, Google image search “Bill Pullman” plus “While You Were Sleeping.” Gaze upon that normcore get-up, that wrinkled khaki, that flannel. If it’s wrong to want a man who hates literally everyone else but somehow finds something admirable in me, I don’t want to be right. Because the cinematic anticipation is incredible! I know Matthew Macfadyen will inevitably wobble out into the field with his shirt half-fastened and his hair splashed across his forehead all sexy like. When I rewatch this movie, six to seven times a year, I want so desperately to skip to the end to watch Keira Knightley’s aha moment, but I don’t. But, oh, what assholes we are to assume as much. He appears to be this big bad rich dude who believes Elizabeth’s piddly landowning family is beneath him. ![]() But I’m a sucker for a guy whose discerning approach to human interactions casts them as universally misunderstood by people who are unwilling to play a little social badminton. Sure, Fitzwilliam is, in early courtship with Elizabeth Bennet, a bit of a dick. Darcy is such an exquisite rom-com boyfriend that not even Matthew Macfadyen’s performance as a deranged hanger-on in my favorite show of the year, “Succession,” could sour my taste for him. It’s the hope that impelled him toward her window in the first place. It’s not the gestures themselves, not ultimately. If you’re a teenage boy, it is easy to watch “Say Anything…” and not see that this is why Diane Court falls for Lloyd Dobler. Cameron Crowe, the director, has said of Lloyd that he is a monument to the idea of “optimism as a revolutionary act.” I like that. I’m talking especially about the guys who went a little too readily for the grand gesture and wound up, I dunno, incels or something. I’m talking about the guys who thought love was something to be won, and won at that with a series of gestures. I’m talking about the guys who agonized over the transitions in their mixtapes, who spent a year pretending to like The Replacements, who wore pork pie hats or trench coats or some other accessory that in high school betokened a charmingly out-of-step sense of personal style but which did not last 15 minutes past college orientation. ![]() I cannot speak to this, but I can tell you about all the teenage boys who ruined themselves in the name of Lloyd Dobler. They say he ruined men for a whole generation of women. ![]()
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