On not having seen Say Anything

Though my knowledge of Brat Pack features is fairly comprehensive, I've somehow missed what is arguably the cornerstone of the genre: that classic John Cusack vehicle, Say Anything. The DVD of this film was given to me by a friend about a year ago, along with the heartfelt promise that we'd get together to watch it one day. To date, this promise remains unfulfilled, and the DVD sits unopened on a shelf, attracting dust with its clingy shrink-wrap polymer.

A year of not watching a film is a lot like a year of the day before Christmas. There is quite a bit of restless poking of the outer packaging, some experimental shaking, maybe a bit of sniffing. There is, of course, also endless speculation on the contents. Is it a doll? A game? A pony? One might argue that, in this instance, I have more to go on than the utterly inscrutable boxed gift, but I disagree. Just as the size and shape of a present's packaging gives clues to its content without really limiting it in hypothetical scope, so too does what little I know about Say Anything (it's a love story, John Cusack is in it, at one point he stands outside a girl's window with a boom-box playing Peter Gabriel) reveal the shape of the film without necessarily limiting the myriad of possibilities contained within the teenage melodrama structure.

In the deepest recesses of my imagination, the plot of Say Anything unfolds in a Borgesian labyrinth, with countless twists, turns, blind corners, and dead ends. During my darker moments, the action takes on a tinge of noir -- there is a spare black-and-white shot of an alleyway, with the faint echo of heels on cold, rain-drenched cobblestone streets clattering somewhere beyond the frame. Tight three-quarter shot: an unlit cigarette hangs from the lip of a hatted stranger. Raising his hand to touch a match to the tip, his face becomes visible from under the shadowy brim. It is John Cusack. Cut to boom-box and Peter Gabriel.

Other times, when my humor is more conducive to comedy, the boom-box Peter Gabriel scene is followed, after three seconds of deadpan prep, by the sudden appearance of a projectile banana cream pie. There are even days (and I'm not proud to admit this) that I imagine the censors to have been entirely too lax with the PG13 rating, since they somehow greenlit that thoroughly titillating scene of the teenage lovers caught copulating in flagrante by an unexpected cable guy, who gamely unstraps his utility belt and joins in on the fun. (The climax of this scene is, of course, punctuated by the heartfelt warbling of Peter Gabriel.) To me, Say Anything is more than a film. It is a Schrodinger's cat. A vortex. A rabbit hole of infinite possibility.

I will never watch Say Anything.