March 30, 2020 The Nation. 35ZOË KRAVITZ IN
HIGH FIDELITY
(PHILLIP CARUSO / HULU)
I
n the first few pages of Nick Hornby’s
1995 novel High Fidelity, Rob Fleming—
the surly, music-obsessed protagonist
and owner of a London record store—
compiles a list of his five greatest heart-
breaks and mentally taunts his ex-girlfriend
Laura that she hasn’t made the cut. Though
he’s obviously pained about their recent
breakup, he insists that the women from
these prior relationships have left a greater
mark on him. She should have gotten to him
earlier, he says. “Those days are gone, and
good fucking riddance to them; un happi-
ness really meant something back then.”
Unhappiness really meant something back
then. The idea fuels Rob’s backward effort
to contact the women on his list and minethem for insights about why he’s “doomed
to be left” rather than to change any of his
behavior. The novel had some elements of
self-awareness and satire built into Rob’s
terribleness, but a 2000 film starring John
Cusack and directed by Stephen Frears
boosted Rob further into the realm of be-
loved antihero. And a weird cultural nos-
talgia that mirrors Rob’s romanticization
of the past has fixed High Fidelity as a cult
favorite that offers a portrait of ’90s angst
and so-called male complexity, despite the
fact that the protagonist was, as Vice put it in
2018, “a sociopathic womanizer, a stalker ex,
and a shitty boyfriend” who “created a hero
for a generation of sociopathic ‘nice guys.’”
Nostalgia has lured us back to previous
decades for content ideas, just in case there’s
some detail we overlooked the first time
around. So far, TV reboots have includ-ed everything from One Day at a Time to
Dynasty to Sabrina the Teenage Witch—and
perhaps it was only a matter of time before
Rob was resurrected from his pile of dusty
records and misery. Disney announced in
2018 that it was developing a series based
on the film, with producers and writers
Veronica West and Sarah Kucserka at the
helm. The update would boast a few key dif-
fer ences: This would be the millennial take,
with actress Zoë Kravitz playing a female
version of Rob operating a vinyl shop in
Brooklyn’s Crown Heights. (Coincidentally,
Kravitz’s mother, Lisa Bonet, had a role in
the film as one of Rob’s love interests, the
musician Marie De Salle.)
The series, which premiered on Hulu
on Valentine’s Day, wrestles with what it
wants to achieve via its gender flip. On
the one hand, Kravitz’s charisma givesBROKEN RECORDS
Hulu’s High Fidelity reboot
by JULYSSA LOPEZ
Julyssa Lopez is a contributing writer for The
Nation.