You Are What You Read (and Watch)

I read a lovely piece in the New York Times called "It's Not You, It's Your Books" (March 30, 2008) which I could eminently empathize with. Rachel Donadio, the author, recounted a "Pushkin" moment from a girlfriend who had just broken up with her boyfriend and was looking for some form of justification. Her answer? "He hadn't even heard of Pushkin!"

As a keen reader myself, her story resonated with me tremendously. After all, I am a person who first became attracted to one of my eventual girlfriends (we dated for a year) after she noticed that I was holding a copy of Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of the Hills at a party and mentioned that she enjoyed his books, especially The Remains of the Day. I will freely admit that if I visit the home of a friend (or any home at all), one of the things that I will surreptitiously do is quickly scan the bookshelves to see what lies therein.

As Donadio acknowledges, reading and what a person reads need not be the deal-breaker in a relationship. In fact, inveterate bookworms often get along smashingly well with counterparts for whom the daily newspaper and Reader's Digest is the limit of their literary tastes. Sara Nelson, who wrote the book memoir So Many Books, So Little Time admitted she married a man who read nothing and could not understand her love of reading. He tolerated her eccentric habit however, grew used to sleeping with the glow of a reading lamp in the background, and proved useful by building her bookshelves (he was a set designer by trade).

Indeed, the fact is that the written word is hardly the popular medium of choice in our modern generation. Book loving friends tell me that they are happy to find someone who reads at all - being picky about literary taste would probably mean a life of singlehood dreaming of Heathcliff and Mr Darcy (if you are female) and the appropriate female literary fantasy equivalent if you are male (Lolita? Elizabeth Bennett?). Still as Sloane Crosley, a publicist told Donadio, "if you're a person who loves Alice Munro and you're going out with someone whose favourite book is the Da Vinci Code, perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal".

One undoubtedly popular modern day entertainment medium, however, is the cinema. Almost everyone watches movies. In Singapore, going for a movie is about as standard a first date as there is. So while it would be difficult to assess your compatibility with a prospective date over literary tastes, finding out what movies she or he enjoys watching (or even what TV shows) can be instructive.

In fact, choosing the movie for a first date is an interesting exercise, one often fraught with difficulty. Taking a girl to the latest high octane Hollywood summer blockbuster might not send the right message if you are a guy (think Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer), worse is inviting her over for a Star Trek marathon. Insisting on a romantic comedy might be mildly off putting if you are female, especially one involving a woman desperate to get hitched and settle down (27 Dresses immediately springs to mind).

The specific movie you bring your date to can also be very illuminating. I remember taking a girl to watch My Summer of Love, a small indie movie about a young working class English girl who falls for a richer, more posh girl home for the summer from boarding school. She took my choice of a movie with a lesbian theme as a sign of a refreshing open-mindedness about homosexuality (the choice of the movie itself was completely coincidental, I had desperately wanted to watch it). We both enthused about being able to talk about specific scenes that we loved, including a beautiful shot of the two girls in the dark silhouetted by a camp fire.

I once fell completely for a girl with whom I had been exchanging long emails, more often than not about movies. She had amazing taste in movies (in my opinion) and it was refreshing to discuss Altman and Kubrick and Woody Allen with someone who was similarly enthusiastic. One eureka moments transpired when I told her I was keen to find a copy of a Kubrick war movie which was supposed to be a classic. She enthusiastically replied that it was a fantastic coincidence and she had just seen it on DVD and it was great! Turns out that I was talking about Path of Glory and she was referring to Full Metal Jacket. Our passion for film never did translate into very much else, but that was a moment where I truly felt a meeting of minds.

There are however, cases where the opposite happens. A girl I was having dinner with declared that she loved local Singaporean director Jack Neo and she would watch anything he did. I mean Jack Neo isn't bad but, surely there are better directors out there? After she decided one of her favourite movies of all time was I Not Stupid, an involuntary shudder went down my spine. It would be increasingly hard for me to date someone if what I wanted to see was Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen), Burn After Reading (Coen brothers), and My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar Wai) when what they preferred was The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Mamma Mia!, and Night in Rodanthe (just to use 2008 as an example).

Things came to a head recently when a date (whom I had just taken to see a movie) told me over dinner that she hadn't liked Wall-E. In fact she found it boring, was tempted to walk out (but didn't), found the plot completely unsubtle and pointless, and I mean, there wasn't even any dialogue in the first half an hour! I was mildly apoplectic. How can a person dislike and be totally bored by a Pixar film? This is a movie that scored close to 100% on the tomatoemeter (at Rotten Tomatoes). It was a beautiful love story to boot (shouldn't that at least appeal to some extent to a girl?). It was also powerfully human and very moving.

Is that the end then? Well, she is cute. But if I do pursue things, and they don't work out, I can always call a friend and moan - "but she didn't even like Wall-E!"