Some years ago, driven to the brink of doleful and giddy insanity after copious Zimas and VHS viewings of Say Anything, my best friend and I decided it would be a good idea for the school system to offer, along with its standard curriculum in Human Growth and Development (our clumsy, fundamentalist Christian-friendly term for Sex Ed), a class geared toward our male classmates, instructing them in one subject: how to be like John Cusack.
“They’d teach them how to express their feelings, how to be sincere and loving,” I said. “You know. How to be men. Good men.”
“It wouldn’t have to be required,” my friend agreed. “It could be an elective. But when they all see how much pussy those guys are getting, they’ll all want to take it.”
Needless to say, our school board didn’t go for this idea, perhaps worrying that if it was implemented, the teen pregnancy rates in Omaha would skyrocket to rural Mississippi levels. But they were wrong, because John Cusack would always use a condom if you wanted, and never pressure you into doing anything you weren’t ready for. John Cusack was perfect, or rather, perfectly imperfect. He was obsessively romantic without being creepy, smart without being pompous, handsome, but not intimidatingly so. The kind of guy who might sit beside you in study hall, unnoticed, scribbling Smiths lyrics in ballpoint pen on the manila dividers of his Mead five-subject notebook, until one day you locked eyes and you realized that you loved him.
But then something happened. I didn’t know this then, but John Cusack’s appeal — his oversized trenchcoat, the eyes like two smears of day-old mascara, the raspy voice of an over-caffeinated cartoon fox — was never going to age well. I saw him a couple of years ago, loping down University Place in an NYPD baseball cap which topped a face that looked suspiciously like it was wearing base. And he stopped making movies, or rather, started making only the kind of movies that you make for money. And I’d fallen in love with him in the early ’90s, before we knew money mattered. That was a long time ago. Now I’m older, and I’ve started to have recurring sexual dreams about Jack Donaghy — not even Alec Baldwin, but Jack Donaghy. I no longer want someone who loves me enough to stand outside my bedroom window with a boombox in the middle of the night, but someone who loves me enough to let me watch the Real Housewives when the Yankees are on. Someone who pays the Time-Warner bill on time and doesn’t give me a well-intentioned lecture on global poverty when I feel like I need a $900 handbag.
And I guess John Cusack doesn’t want to be that sweet, well-intentioned, self-improving guy anymore, or he wouldn’t be starring in a we-are-all-doomed-paranoia-fest like this week’s 2012. Because the old John Cusack didn’t think mankind’s destruction was inevitable. The old John Cusack was the kind of guy who, when he grew up, was going to (sweetly, well-intentionedly) break through the soulless murk of the Reagan years towards something tender and real. If he was cynical, or grouchy, it was for sake of self-preservation, not because he was trying to keep up with some preening nihilist shithead like Bill Maher on late-night cable television. The old John Cusack believed in things. And we believed him.
But none of this is really John Cusack’s fault. It’s not his fault that his current existence reminds us how much our teenage selves would hate the people we’ve become. For better or for worse (and mostly for the worse) we all grow up. But there’s one thing that no matter how I try I can’t erase from my mind. One insistent, unignorable thing that seems to indicate that the old John Cusack was perhaps not all I thought he was.
John Cusack, however indirectly, is responsible for Jeremy Piven.
I can forgive him for getting old. I can forgive him for Runaway Jury. I can forgive him for Must Love Dogs. I can even forgive him for Con Air. And while I love him, just like I love all the men who sweetly broke my heart, I can’t, I just can’t, quite forgive him for that.