Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

by Chuck Klosterman

  Perhaps this sounds depressing. That is not my intention. This is all normal. There’s not a lot to say during breakfast. I mean, you just woke up, you know? Nothing has happened. If neither person had an especially weird dream and nobody burned the toast, breakfast is just the time for chewing Cocoa Puffs and/or wishing you were still asleep. But we’ve been convinced not to think like that. Silence is only supposed to happen as a manifestation of supreme actualization, where both parties are so at peace with their emotional connection that it cannot be expressed through the rudimentary tools of the lexicon; otherwise, silence is proof that the magic is gone and the relationship is over (hence the phrase “We just don’t talk anymore”). For those of us who grew up in the media age, the only good silence is the kind described by the hair metal band Extreme. “More than words is all I ever needed you to show,” explained Gary Cherone on the Pornograffiti album. “Then you wouldn’t have to say that you love me, cause I’d already know.” This is the difference between art and life: In art, not talking is never an extension of having nothing to say; not talking always means something. And now that art and life have become completely interchangeable, we’re forced to live inside the acoustic power chords of Nuno Bettencourt, even if most of us don’t necessarily know who the fuck Nuno Bettencourt is.

  When Harry Met Sally hit theaters in 1989. I didn’t see it until 1997, but it turns out I could have skipped it entirely. The movie itself isn’t bad (which is pretty amazing, since it stars Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal), and there are funny parts and sweet parts and smart dialogue, and—all things considered—it’s a well-executed example of a certain kind of entertainment.5 Yet watching this film in 1997 was like watching the 1978 one-game playoff between the Yankees and the Red Sox on ESPN Classic: Though I’ve never sat through the pitch sequence that leads to Bucky Dent’s three-run homer, I know exactly what happened. I feel like I remember it, even though I don’t. And—more important—I know what it all means. Knowing about sports means knowing that Bucky Dent is the living, breathing, metaphorical incarnation of the BoSox’s undying futility; I didn’t have to see that game to understand the fabric of its existence. I didn’t need to see When Harry Met Sally, either. Within three years of its initial release, classifying any intense friendship as “totally a Harry-Met-Sally situation” had a recognizable meaning to everyone, regardless of whether or not they’d actually seen the movie. And that meaning remains clear and remarkably consistent: It implies that two platonic acquaintances are refusing to admit that they’re deeply in love with each other. When Harry Met Sally cemented the plausibility of that notion, and it gave a lot of desperate people hope. It made it realistic to suspect your best friend may be your soul mate, and it made wanting such a scenario comfortably conventional. The problem is that the Harry-Met-Sally situation is almost always tragically unbalanced. Most of the time, the two involved parties are not really “best friends.” Inevitably, one of the people has been in love with the other from the first day they met, while the other person is either (a) wracked with guilt and pressure, or (b) completely oblivious to the espoused attraction. Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less. But When Harry Met Sally gives the powerless, unrequited lover a reason to live. When this person gets drunk and tells his friends that he’s in love with a woman who only sees him as a buddy, they will say, “You’re wrong. You’re perfect for each other. This is just like When Harry Met Sally! I’m sure she loves you—she just doesn’t realize it yet.” Nora Ephron accidentally ruined a lot of lives.

  I remember taking a course in college called “Communication and Society,” and my professor was obsessed by the belief that fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel” and “Little Red Riding Hood” were evil. She said they were part of a latent social code that hoped to suppress women and minorities. At the time, I was mildly outraged that my tuition money was supporting this kind of crap; years later, I have come to recall those pseudo-savvy lectures as what I loved about college. But I still think they were probably wasteful, and here’s why: Even if those theories are true, they’re barely significant. “The Three Little Pigs” is not the story that is fucking people up. Stories like Say Anything are fucking people up. We don’t need to worry about people unconsciously “absorbing” archaic secret messages when they’re six years old; we need to worry about all the entertaining messages people are consciously accepting when they’re twenty-six. They’re the ones that get us, because they’re the ones we try to turn into life. I mean, Christ: I wish I could believe that bozo in Coldplay when he tells me that stars are yellow. I miss that girl. I wish I was Lloyd Dobler. I don’t want anybody to step on a piece of broken glass. I want fake love. But that’s all I want, and that’s why I can’t have it.

  1. Hopefully Charlie Rose, if he’s still alive.

  2. The notable exceptions being Vertigo(where the softhearted Barbara Bel Geddes gets jammed by sexpot Kim Novak) and My So-Called Life (where poor Brian Krakow never got any play, even though Jordan Catalano couldn’t fucking read).

  3. “Sometimes” meaning “during college.”

  4. Here’s one example I tend to deploy on second dates, and it’s rewarded with an endearing guffaw at least 90 percent of the time: I ask the woman what religion she is. Inevitably, she will say something like, “Oh, I’m sort of Catholic, but I’m pretty lapsed in my participation,” or “Oh, I’m kind of Jewish, but I don’t really practice anymore.” Virtually everyone under the age of thirty will answer that question in this manner. I then respond by saying, “Yeah, it seems like everybody I meet describes themselves as ‘sort of Catholic’ or ‘sort of Jewish’ or ‘sort of Methodist.’ Do you think all religions have this problem? I mean, do you think there are twenty-five-year-old Amish people who say, ‘Well, I’m sort of Amish. I currently work as a computer programmer, but I still believe pants with metal zippers are the work of Satan.’”

  5. “A certain kind” meaning “bad.”

  I designed the perfect girlfriend once. She was a friend of a friend, and—from the moment I never met her—I decided she was the seamless combination of intellect, wit, and altruistic sincerity (she was also supposedly an English major). My love for this girl was spawned before I ever laid eyes on her; her physical appearance was merely described to me by other people, and I quite suddenly convinced myself that this woman was my soul mate. I’m not sure why I did this; maybe it just seemed like an interesting decision to make in advance. I do this sort of thing quite often (sometimes I buy records and pick which song is my favorite before I actually play them, and I find that I am right almost half the time).

  Since I had never spoken to this woman (her name was Annette) and had only an anecdotal understanding of what she looked like, my best avenue for cementing our future passion was to send her a letter, which is what I did. And since David Letterman was very popular at the time (and since I am not creative, and since I was nineteen), I sent her a comically agile Top 10 List, which I titled “The Top 10 Reasons Annette Should Fall In Love with Chuck Klosterman.” My assumption was that we would share our first kiss forty-eight to seventy-two hours after she received this missive, particularly because of the cleverness of reason number 4, which was as follows:

  4) I am almost a carnivore.

  Unfortunately, Annette wasn’t my soul mate. She also was not an English major, a fact that became abundantly clear when our mutual friend told me he talked to her on the telephone and asked her about my letter, to which she replied, “Why would I possibly want to date someone who eats other humans?” And the thing that broke my heart wasn’t that she didn’t know the definition of the word carnivore; I could live with that. What killed me was that she thought I had claimed to be “almost a cannibal,” and that didn’t work, either.

  2 Billy Sim 0:12

  I am not a benevolent God.

  I am watching myself writhe in a puddle of my own urine, and I offer no response. I have not slept or ea
ten for days. My cries go unrecognized and my loneliness is ignored. I am watching myself endure a torture worse than death, yet I decline every opportunity to end this self-imposed nightmare. Darkness…imprisoning me…all that I see, absolute horror. I cannot live, I cannot die, trapped in myself; my body is my holding cell.

  I am the master, and I am the puppet. And I am not the type of person who still plays video games.

  I realize there is a whole generation of adults born in the seventies who currently play Sega and Nintendo as much as they banged away on their Atari 5200 and their George Plimpton–endorsed Intellivision in 1982. I am not one of them. I agree with Media Virus author Douglas Rushkoff’s theory that home video game consoles were the reason kids raised in the 1980s so naturally embraced the virtual mentality—we never thought it seemed strange to be able to manually manipulate what we saw on a video screen—but I’ll never accept pixels killing other pixels as an art form (or a sport, or even a pastime). A homeless man once told me that dancing to rap music is the cultural equivalent of masturbating, and I’d sort of feel the same way about playing John Madden Football immediately after filing my income tax: It’s fun, but—somehow—vaguely pathetic.

  However, some things are just too enchanting (and just too weird) to ignore. Those were my thoughts when I first read about The Sims, arguably the most wholly postmodern piece of entertainment ever created. Much like the TV show Survivor, the Pokémon phenomenon, and Parliament Funkadelic, The Sims is a keenly constructed product that seems hopelessly absurd to anyone unfamiliar with it but completely clear to anyone who’s experienced it even once. Developed by Electronic Arts, The Sims is a video game where you do all the things you would do in real life if you weren’t playing a video game. You create a human character, and it exists. That’s it. Your character does things like read the newspaper. He takes naps, plays pinball, and empties the garbage. Your character invites friends over to his house, and they have discussions about money and sailboats. You buy oak bookcases and you get pizza from Domino’s. This is the whole game, and there is no way to win, except to keep yourself from becoming depressed. The Sims is an escapist vehicle for people who want to escape to where they already are, which is why I thought this game was made precisely for me.

  Who Am I? Or (Perhaps More Accurately) Who Else Could Be Me?

  The Sims is the only video game I have ever purchased. My goal—and probably the initial goal of most people who buy The Sims—was to create a perfect replica of the life I already have. I would build a character who looked just like me, and I would name him “Chuck Klosterman.” I would design his home exactly like my own, and I would have him do all the things I do every day. Perhaps I unconsciously assumed I would learn something about myself through this process, although I have no idea what that could possibly be. Maybe it was just the desire to watch myself live. Pundits like to claim that a game like The Sims taps into the human preoccupation with voyeurism, but it’s really the complete opposite. I don’t care about peeping into anyone else’s keyhole; I only want to see into Chuck’s.

  I designed my digital self as accurately as possible: pasty skin, thick glasses, uncommitted haircut, ill-fated trousers. Outlining my character’s personality traits was a little more complicated, because nobody (myself included) truly knows how they act. I’ve never met anyone I’d classify as self-aware: It’s been my experience that most extroverted people think they’re introverts, and many introverted people make a similarly wrong-headed juxtaposition about being extroverts. Maybe that’s why extroverts won’t shut up (because they always fear they’re not talking enough) while introverts just sit on the couch and do nothing (because they assume everybody is waiting for them to be quiet). People just have no clue about their genuine nature. I have countless friends who describe themselves as “cynical,” and they’re all wrong. True cynics would never classify themselves as such, because it would mean that they know their view of the world is unjustly negative; despite their best efforts at being grumpy, a self-described cynic is secretly optimistic about normal human nature. Individuals who are truly cynical will always insist they’re pragmatic. The same goes for anyone who claims to be “creative.” If you define your personality as creative, it only means you understand what is perceived to be creative by the world at large, so you’re really just following a rote creative template. That’s the opposite of creativity. Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.

  But ANYWAY…I eventually created a Chuck in my own image and dropped him into 6 Sim Lane, a $15,000 home on the outskirts of an underdeveloped suburb of SimCity, a relic from an earlier incarnation of this particular game. SimCity was the first “simulated reality” game to capture people’s imagination, although SimCity seemed (at least retrospectively) oddly innocuous: The object of that game was to design a vibrant community (transportation systems, hospitals, animal shelters, etc.). It was really just a game for amateur city planners, which is actually less boring than it sounds. SimCity led to SimEarth, where players could exorcise their jones to be an Old Testament God—you took a dead planet and you created a breathable atmosphere and you caused volcanoes and you tried to spawn a few dinosaurs. This was a little more psychologically akimbo, but still not perverse; SimEarth was almost like an eighth-grade science project. However, The Sims broke new ground for electronic pathos. It’s not a game about managing life (like SimCity) or even creating life (like SimEarth); it’s a game about experiencing life, and experiencing it in the most mundane fashion possible. Whenever unimaginative TV critics tried to explain the subtle, subversive genius of Seinfeld, they always went back to the hack argument that “It was about nothing.” But that sentiment was always a little wrong. Seinfeld was about nothing, but its underlying message was that nothingness still has a weight and a mass and a conflict. What seemed so new about Seinfeld was that it didn’t need a story to have a plot: Nothing was still something. The Sims forces that aesthetic even further: Nothing is everything.

  My Life As a Sim. Or (Perhaps More Accurately) My Life As My Life.

  As I had long suspected, my six-year-old niece Katie is not the former lead singer of the Talking Heads. This had been somewhat obvious for a long time, but never more so than the first time I saw a copy of The Sims, which I happened to find at her parents’ house in rural North Dakota.

  Since I had been fascinated by news stories about this game, I immediately tried to play The Sims when I noticed it was on the hard drive of my sister-in-law’s computer. For about fifteen minutes, my seminal pre-Chuck wandered about the empty residential lots of Sim Village, trying to start conversations with inanimate objects. Young Katie couldn’t help but notice my ineptitude and immediately tried to show me how the game was played (and—inadvertently—how existence works, although I doubt she would have explained it that way).

  Katie displayed amazing dexterity at The Sims, effortlessly building a home and furnishing it with a cornucopia of household goods she could never operate in reality. She then instructed me to find a job and to make friends with other Sim citizens, especially the female ones (this is somewhat predictable, as Katie profoundly enjoys asking me if I have a girlfriend). However, I immediately had dozens of questions for young Katie about my new life: If I don’t yet have a job, how could I afford this residence? Who put all that food in my fridge? Elves, perhaps? Can I trust them? Why don’t I need a car? Where did I go to college? Don’t I have any old friends I could call for moral support? This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. Well, how did I get here?

  Unlike David Byrne, these questions did not interest Katie. “You just live here,” she said. “That’s the way it is.” But where did I get all this money? “You just have money.” But where did I come from? “Nobody knows. You’re just here.” Am I one of the 55 million Americans living without health insurance? “Be quiet! You won’t get sick.” This went on for several minutes, finally ending in a stalemate when Katie realized warm cookies were suddenly available in th
e kitchen. However, something struck me about this dialogue: It was uncharacteristic for Katie to be so unwilling to tell harmless lies. If she had been playing with her Barbie Dream House and I asked her why Barbie had four pairs of shoes but only two decent outfits, Katie would have undoubtedly spent the next half hour explaining that Barbie purchased the extra shoes while shopping in Hong Kong with Britney Spears and planned to wear them to a cocktail party in Grandma’s basement. When playing with real-world toys, there’s no limit to the back story Katie will create for anything, animate or inanimate. That’s how little kids are. But somehow it’s different when life is constructed on a sixteen-inch screen; in the world of The Sims, Katie won’t color outside the lines of perception. The rules become fixed. Fabricating a Sim-human’s college experience would be no different than randomly deciding that 90210’s Brenda Walsh got a C+ in tenth-grade biology. Those facts aren’t available to anyone. Clearly, video technology cages imagination; it offers interesting information to use, but it implies that all peripheral information is irrelevant and off-limits. Computers make children advance faster, but they also make them think like computers.